Abstract
John W. De Gruchy’s latest work, Bonhoeffer’s Questions: A Life-Changing Conversation interweaves De Gruchy’s fifty years as a Bonhoeffer scholar in South Africa alongside three questions running through Bonhoeffer’s works and three subsequent questions that then emerge. It is a surprisingly personal work, as De Gruchy starts in a semi-autobiographical mode. He begins this work ‘by telling how I became involved in Bonhoeffer studies as a result of a question Eberhard Bethge posed when I was a student and how this led to an ongoing dialogue with Bonhoeffer in relation to the South Africa context’ (p. 2). Indeed, the first third of the work focuses primarily on De Gruchy’s own journey into conversation with Bonhoeffer while also providing a biographical sketch of Bonhoeffer, one that purports to lay the foundation for the engagement with the text in the second two thirds of the work.
Aside from the semi-autobiographical tone of the work, three questions drive the overall shape of the book—‘Who is Christ actually, for us, today?’, ‘What does it mean to be fully human?’, and finally ‘Who am I?’ While each of these questions appears throughout the works of Bonhoeffer, De Gruchy tends to centre them within the scope of Letters and Papers from Prison. In so doing, he then opens these questions up for additional inquiry into Bonhoeffer’s usage in our contemporary period.
The middle section of the work focuses on ‘the three questions’ which are critical issues within Bonhoeffer scholarship. Those familiar with Bonhoeffer and the vast array of literature interpreting his works will not find this third particularly enlightening. That is not to say that the scholarship contained within this section is of poor quality or unnecessary. For those just coming to Bonhoeffer, it is valuable to explain and work through the place of Christology and how the concept of ‘vicarious-representative-action’ undergirds so much of Bonhoeffer’s life and theology. The chapter on Christian humanism is, perhaps, the most intriguing concept in this section, as it is not as widely written upon as Bonhoeffer’s Christology is. De Gruchy traces Bonhoeffer’s proclivity toward humanism back to his ‘early formation within the Bonhoeffer household and the formal education he received’ (p. 77). As a result, the young Bonhoeffer, steeped in the cultural trappings of an upper-class German family, developed a deep and abiding love that eventually took on Christian overtones: ‘Just as Bonhoeffer became a Christian without stopping being a theologian, he became a Christian without relinquishing his humanism’ (p. 79). Once again, this finds footing within the realm of Christology. Only in Christ do we know what it means to be fully human, an ‘incarnational humanism’. The Christian is not forbidden from participation in the secular world. Rather, she does so from the position of Christ as her centre.
This provides a succinct segue into the final third of the work, ‘Our Questions’, which serves as an investigation into the lingering questions surrounding how Bonhoeffer is used in the contemporary world. Bonhoeffer’s influence has continuously grown over the last fifty years, as his works have been translated into English and engagement with Bonhoeffer has stretched further south and east and into more nuanced fields of study such as liberation, black, and feminist theologies.
The first question, ‘Who is God; How do we know; and Do we need “Him”?’ references the perennial question, ‘what does Bonhoeffer mean when he speaks of religionless Christianity?’ Once again, Bonhoeffer argues that we can only know God through Christ. This moves into a second question, ‘What is a Christian, and where is the Church?’ In this chapter, De Gruchy addresses the question of the hidden Christian—an important discussion that leads into the political implications of Christianity within a multicultural world, which constitute the final chapters in this section. De Gruchy asks ‘How do faith and politics mix?’, but this chapter is not presented as a work of political theology. Rather, he frames his answer in terms of a ‘public theology as defined by Duncan Forrester, a Scottish theologian who was deeply influenced by experience of doing theology in South Africa’ (p. 139). This discussion is uneven as De Gruchy seems to go back and forth over which type of theology he is investigating.
At some points, it is very clear that the public witness he writes about is a Bonhoeffer-as-public-theologian. And yet, as the discussion moves into a study of Luther’s Two Kingdoms, he moves back into a quasi-political theology. While this may be a case of semantics, there are distinct implications in addressing one over the other. Public theology casts a wider net of possible forms of engagement within society. Political theology, however, directly relates the interactions with the government of a political body. Additionally, De Gruchy centres Bonhoeffer’s time in the Abwehr both as a deliberate act of political resistance to Hitler and as a result of his compassion towards the oppression faced by the Jewish people (among others) under National Socialist rule. Both of these may be overstatements, albeit not uncommon ones. In regard to his involvement with the July 20 assassination plot, Sabine Dramm’s excellent biography on the subject, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Resistance (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2009), suggests that Bonhoeffer’s role has been aggrandized. Furthermore, the recent works of Michael DeJonge argue that Bonhoeffer’s initial goals in joining the church struggle were less likely related to compassion and more situated in ecclesial matters regarding Nazi control of the state and the failing character of the state. Again, these are points of speculation on both sides of the debate but are important nuances to hold in tension when discussing the final years of Bonhoeffer’s life.
In the end, De Gruchy brings this work back to the South African context, drawing Bonhoeffer alongside Nelson Mandela. He questions whether either would ‘seize the wheel’ again and participate in violent resistance as a last resort. While I am unconvinced that Bonhoeffer’s role in the Abwehr is attributable to ‘seizing the wheel’, the comparison between the two is an interesting one that could be drawn out further as we look at how to engage with Bonhoeffer across cultural and religious barriers. Opening up continued discussion on this subject is, perhaps, the most successful part of the work itself and one I find particularly relevant in my own context. At the beginning of the work De Gruchy warned that we cannot justify using Bonhoeffer for any and every context. Instead, we must ‘establish a prima facie reason to engage Bonhoeffer, discerning some correspondence between his context and our own, his theological concerns and ours’ (p. 12). De Gruchy’s methodology of interweaving Bonhoeffer’s theology alongside the history of the struggle against Apartheid does that. It forces us to ask how and if Bonhoeffer can be appealed to within a given context, regardless of how different that context may be. While the majority of the work focuses on unpacking the questions that have intrigued Bonhoeffer scholarship for decades, it is this question that suggests a potential opportunity for new forms of exploration within the discipline and appeals to the need for continued study of Bonhoeffer and his theology.