Studies in Christian Ethics

This paper elucidates Bonhoeffer's understanding of Christian ethics as a `way'. The concept is prominent in his unfinished exegesis of Psalm 119 and shapes his Ethics, written during the same time period. This reading of Bonhoeffer's ethics yields the claim that he gave a much more central role to biblical exegesis in his ethical framework than is typically granted. It concludes that much of the criticism of his concept of the mandates reveals not the weakness of the concept, but a misunderstanding of both his conception of Christian ethics as a way, and the importance of theological exegesis in his thought.

This article offers a new interpretation of Bonhoeffer's Christian peace ethic, a more penetrating description of what is usually called his `pacifism'. This peace ethic does not rest on a principle of non-violence — Bonhoeffer rejects an ethic of principles — but is rooted in his distinctive reading of Scripture, especially the Sermon on the Mount, and his understanding of Christ, discipleship, the gospel and the church. Consequently he does not abandon his peace ethic to participate in the anti-Hitler conspiracy and attempted tyrannicide. Theological analysis and historical information both support this conclusion.

The author suggests that a synchronic reading of Bonhoeffer's major works yields a typology of the two main images around which Bonhoeffer's political ethics orbit: disciple and citizen. Concentrating on the latter, the author shows the centrality of the question of power for Bonhoeffer's political ethics, and how it relates to responsibility and vocation. He argues that Bonhoeffer's ethics follows a christological grammar which constitutes its specific realism and provides its focus on institutions and good works. The essay concludes that the call to citizenship, the vocation of co-operative, representative and vicarious action, forms the central idea of Bonhoeffer's political ethics, which is still highly relevant for political ethics today.

The paper explicates Bonhoeffer's dense statement, made in a 1932 lecture, that `Reality is the sacrament of [the ethical] command'. It begins with a summary of William T. Cavanaugh's rich description of the Eucharist as that act which makes the Church Christ's body, thereby constituting the true res publica. A comparison is drawn with Bonhoeffer's account of the sacramental foundation of the Church's public proclamation of God's ethical command. Bonhoeffer differs from Cavanaugh, I suggest, not only in his conviction that the Church speaks God's command penultimately and with humility, but in regarding the state as one of the means by which God acts within the penultimate to preserve creation.

The Sermon on the Mount guided Bonhoeffer's ethics in his decisive early opposition to Hitler. His interpretation was guided by a hermeneutic of renunciation. But the Sermon is strangely missing in his Ethics. The context had shifted; he needed to confront a massive concentration of power — crucial in our context as well. We need to see that the structure of the Sermon is not dyadic antitheses of renunciation, but triadic transforming initiatives of confrontation — significantly more helpful in confronting power, and in recovering its original meaning. We need to heal the historic split between the Sermon and Christian ethics.

How can we explain Bonhoeffer's clear-sightedness in leading against National Socialism from the beginning of the Third Reich, by contrast with experienced theologians? Around 1930 he experienced his personal turning through the Bible, `especially the Sermon on the Mount'. He replaced the dominating position of the nation in God's historical order, and the social-Darwinist struggle for the survival of the fittest nation, with the task of preventing wars through an international order of peace, including international law. He saw the mission of the church on a new, transnational political horizon as one people of God that has a mission of peace in the world through the gospel.

The essay explains why, for Christians, responsible acting and living means responding to Christ and neighbour, and not to a `responsible self'. The history of the concept, `responsibility', is traced from its origin in Roman juridical language, by way of its being theologised in medieval times, up to the peculiar moral slant it acquired in modernity. The author challenges the mainstream understanding of `responsibility as accountability' by demonstrating that it rests on a theological mistake which ultimately invites moral self-justification. This is demonstrated by critically contrasting H. R. Niebuhr's `responsible self' with Bonhoeffer's account of' responsible action'.