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AUTHOR: ROBERT D. CORNWALL, WORD&WAY
BONHOEFFER’S RELIGIONLESS CHRISTIANITY IN ITS CHRISTOLOGICAL CONTEXT. By Peter Hooton. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic (Rowman & Littlefield), 2022. 211 Pages.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer lives on as a martyr. His death came in April 1945 at the hands of the Nazis as World War II was nearing its close. He was only thirty-nine at the time of his death by hanging. His story has been told by several biographers, and his works have been made available for all to read in English translation. Despite his relative youth, he left behind a massive amount of material, both published and unpublished. As a result, Bonhoeffer has proven to be one of the most influential theologians of the past century and a half. This is true even though his theological understandings never reached a point of completion. Perhaps it’s that incompleteness that’s lent itself to the diversity of interpretations of work over the years, as well as its use by people from across the religious and even political spectrums. For example, Conservative evangelicals, some of whom are Christian Nationalists, have appealed to his efforts to resist the Nazis as fodder for their acts of resistance, especially when it comes to attempts to outlaw/discourage abortion. At the other end of the theological spectrum, in the 1960s the “Death of God” theologians found his prison letters and essays that hinted at a world without God attractive. Then there are the pacifists who have made use of his reflections on nonviolence. Some have simply tried to turn him into a conservative American evangelical (ala Eric Metaxas).
Robert D. Cornwall
Over the years my theology and practice have been deeply influenced by Bonhoeffer’s writings. I began reading his works (Cost of Discipleship) in college and continued to read them through seminary (I took Lewis Smedes’s “Ethics of Bonhoeffer” course) and beyond. I’ve read most of the biographies and several more specialized studies. I purchased the full set of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works and keep them close at hand so I can dip into them when needed, especially in sermon preparation (the scripture index in the index volume is very helpful!). I’ve always welcomed studies of his life and works that illuminate rather than obfuscate. That is true of two recent biographies by Ferdinand Schlingensiepen and Charles Marsh, which are especially good. Added to these studies is Peter Hooton’s Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity in Its Christological Context. Hooton’s book is a specialized monograph, that focuses on one dimension of Bonhoeffer’s theological explorations. While it’s written for a scholarly audience, I found it to be very accessible.
As for the author of this book, Peter Hooton is involved in the area of public theology at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture on the Canberra campus of Charles Sturt University. Before this, he was a career diplomat working in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the South Pacific. He holds a Ph.D. from Charles Sturt University and is part of the university’s “Public and Contextual Theology Research Centre.”
Hooton’s book appears to be based on his Ph.D. dissertation at CSU. In it, he focuses on Bonhoeffer’s musings about religionless Christianity. This view of Christianity is especially present in Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, as well as his Ethics. These works, all of which are to some degree incomplete, appeared at the end of his life. They suggest themes and possibilities of further exploration should he have survived the war. It was especially in his letters to his friend Eberhard Bethge, that an imprisoned Bonhoeffer delved into what the possibility of a religionless Christianity. Though when he wrote of a religionless Christianity, he wasn’t embracing atheism. Rather, he was envisioning what a non-institutionalized Christianity might look like. He was not, of course, alone in this, for Karl Barth was writing about Christianity apart from religion, which Barth believed was a human venture. For Bonhoeffer, this religionless Christianity would speak to a world come of age, that is a world that in a post-war world would have lost its innocence and naivete. Bonhoeffer’s vision of such a Christianity come of age, as the book’s title suggests, was deeply rooted in Bonhoeffer’s Christocentric vision.
Hooton points out that Bonhoeffer’s critique of religion was linked to Barth’s. His older contemporary suggested that religion is a human act of seeking God, which is a futile effort as God is wholly other. However, God is encountered as an act of Grace as God reaches out to humanity. Early in Bonhoeffer’s theological career, he placed greater weight on the church as the means of encountering God. We see this in works such as Sanctorum Communio, his initial doctoral dissertation. However, by the 1940s, he was contemplating what theology might look like in this new world order outside the realm of the church. Like Barth, Bonhoeffer never suggested that anyone should separate themselves from the church. However, he began to believe that the church isn’t the cure for what ails the world. While he resonated with Barth’s critique of religion, Bonhoeffer didn’t completely embrace Barth’s view. Bonhoeffer called Barth’s views a “positivism of revelation.” Nevertheless, he agreed with the larger critique of religion, and that critique was Christological in nature.
As I’ve noted Bonhoeffer’s vision was deeply Christological. For Bonhoeffer, God encounters us in Christ. While he didn’t reject his Lutheran theological foundations, he tended not to focus on the Trinity. Rather, in his view, the God who is for us will be encountered in Christ. Thus, his primary question concerned who Jesus is for us today. That leads to a question of who we are in relation to others. Interestingly he finds an anchor for his worldly Christianity in his reading of the Old Testament, which became increasingly this-world in orientation. As Hooton notes, Bonhoeffer’s theology was becoming progressively more inclusive as time passed. This more inclusive vision is first seen in his posthumously published Ethics. In this work, we see a movement in his thinking a move away from the powerful God of religion to a God of weakness who is revealed in Christ on the cross.
According to Hooton, as Bonhoeffer moves further into this nonreligious vision that is centered in Christ, he also begins to envision a nonreligious interpretation of the Bible. Bonhoeffer doesn’t abandon traditional biblical/theological terms like cross, sin, and grace, but he begins to look for other terms that are more expressive of the concerns of this new non-religious age. It’s not so much the words themselves as it is the way these concepts are understood. One of the concepts that he seeks to re-envision is repentance, which he speaks of in terms of ultimate honesty. For Bonhoeffer, “ultimate honesty” is ultimately a change of perspective about life and God, such that we join Jesus in being for others.
From Sin to Saint
This is From Sin to Saint, a podcast from Patheos. In each season, we will look at the true stories of redemption of saintly figures from all faiths. Our goal is to to understand the passions that drove them and the challenges they overcame on the journey.
By Marcia Pally January 8, 2021
Monument to the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hamburg, Germany (mauritius images GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo)
Reading the work of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth often feels like intellectual sparring. The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, best known in the United States for his participation in the plot to assassinate Hitler, had a very different authorial voice; even at its most unflinchingly prophetic, his work rarely feels as confrontational. Wolf Krötke, a close reader of both theologians, is able to hone in on the brilliant essentials of their work and to prod the reader to reexamine her thoughts about the relationship between us and God in light of their claims—to ask again and again: Is this what I believe?
Krötke, a pastor in Communist East Germany, shares a foundational intention with his subjects, who were also pastors: to speak intelligently and honestly to the way both scholars and non-scholars think about God. Krötke’s description of his own reliance on Barth and Bonhoeffer to build a “theological resistance” when political resistance was largely futile elegantly echoes his investigations into their troubled efforts to do the same during the rise of fascism. Beginning in 1934, with the Barmen Declaration’s theological argument against the totalizing state, Barth, like Bonhoeffer, came to the conclusion that violent political resistance was sometimes necessary. For his own part, Krötke is unsure about the church’s “appropriation of the violent instruments of our sinful era. War, even a so-called just war…offers no general paradigm for Christian resistance to inhumanity, racism, and genocide.”
Krötke lays out the grand structure of Barth’s thought, from his early work on Paul in Epistle to the Romans (1919) through the thirteen volumes of Church Dogmatics (1932–1967). “Barth liked to say,” Krötke notes, “that the church and theology have the task ‘to begin anew at the beginning’ ‘every hour.’” This is certainly true of Barth’s work: you can’t grasp any point without “beginning anew” by retracing it to its premises.
In Krötke’s account, the main girders of Barth’s thought are these: God is, from the beginning, even before creation, “the God who encounters us in Jesus Christ, and is understood in terms of the history of God’s grace with humanity.” This encounter and its manifestations among us are the “history of a partnership in which the God who is friendly to humans comes among us and makes us capable of being his free partners and of leading lives that deserve to be called truly human.” Finally, “because our fundamental orientation is relationship to God, we realize our freedom most fully by corresponding to the call of God.”
Krötke cites critics who think Barth’s view affords too little space and agency to humanity. Yet the encounter with a God who elected to grace us with friendship remains Barth’s starting point. All roads begin there. Readers must decide for themselves whether this sets God in the thick of human living, as Barth believed, or whether, as his critics say, Barth’s account of our encounter with God is too uniform—too dependent on German idealist notions of Spirit working through history, and tone-deaf to the particulars of any real person’s relationship to God. Is it a “take it or leave it” doctrine as Bonhoeffer described it? Or does it allow one to feel embraced in partnership with God?
Having established Barth’s fundamental theological outlook, Krötke goes on to explain Barth’s ideas about the nature of sin, the relationship between Christianity and other faiths (including atheism and the covenant with Israel), the importance of our flawed efforts at reconciliation (with God and other people), the role of pastoral care in enabling encounter with God (and the role of exegesis in understanding it), and, most importantly, the nature of the divine-human “partnership” granted by grace—what Barth called “the sum of the Gospel.”
Krötke begins his section on Bonhoeffer by noting that he, too, anchored his work in the encounter between the human person and God. “Faith is God’s gift,” Krötke explains, “whereas religion is always a relationship to God shaped by humans.” Bonhoeffer’s realism can help us see the manifold relationships among people, God, faith, and religious institutions. In this he differs from Barth, who held that all people are “fated” to have religion. This idea of “Fatedness,” Bonhoeffer believed, denies the freedom through which people come to God. In Krötke’s fine summation, “Humans as distinguished from their religion are God’s beloved creatures whose freedom for encountering God contains far more possibilities than any particular form of religious behavior.”
Bonhoeffer held to the Augustinian idea that, in the encounter with God, we discover new possibilities of experience we could not otherwise have imagined. And who is this God? Not a deus ex machina who saves us in time of need, and not only the weak and crucified Jesus, but the God discarded from modern life: “God is for the world only by stepping back from it and in this way giving it time and opportunity to be itself.” Bonhoeffer wrote of the “madness” of the invisible God, yet “God’s mystery sets humans free to allow God to come to them.” God is encountered in prayer and meditation on Scripture, and Krötke offers an eloquent chapter-length analysis of Bonhoeffer’s moving Prayerbook of the Bible: Introduction to the Psalms. The potency of this God, close by when we can do nothing, became more important as the efforts to stop Hitler failed and Bonhoeffer, condemned to prison, could do nothing more. “Sharing” in this God’s suffering in a godless world is a source of guidance and consolation. It is how we identify “ourselves generously and selflessly with the whole community and the suffering of our fellow human beings.”
Krötke’s discussion of these ideas prods the reader into a dialogue with Bonhoeffer on the role of divine and human suffering, God’s mystery and invisibility, and Jesus’s visibility (“Bonhoeffer’s God is the God who becomes nothing other than human”). While the German Christians who followed Hitler believed God manifested himself in German history, Bonhoeffer held that God manifests himself only in and through Jesus Christ. Yet Krötke also remarks on Bonhoeffer’s “openness to other religions,” which “like his understanding of religionlessness, arises from his faith in God in Christ.” Our many religions and varieties of faith are part of human living, where God meets us.
Krötke’s penultimate chapter on Bonhoeffer explores his political work, the “first concentrated effort in the German theological world…to frame the question of state order in terms of Christology.” Bonhoeffer held that the Incarnation and Resurrection do not destroy the world but rather affirm it. Thus, Christ’s Kingdom “is the foundation of the [worldly] state too, which wards off the power of death, preserves the ‘order of the community, marriage, family, and nation [Volk]’ against the isolated individual, and restrains the thirst of selfishness.” In Bonhoeffer’s view, as in Luther’s, there is no right to revolution. Krötke explains the nature of the divine-human “partnership” granted by grace—what Barth called “the sum of the Gospel.”
But this doesn’t mean the state has carte blanche; on the contrary, the state is obligated to further the other orders of society—church, family, the economic sphere, “culture, scholarship, and art.” And the church must seek to limit state power, which, in its use of sanctions and force, distinguishes itself from Christ’s kingdom of love.
As the Third Reich maintained a minimum of social order, Bonhoeffer hesitated to demand that the church identify it as an aberration that “comes forth as ‘the beast from the abyss’” in denial of Christ. But Bonhoeffer did believe that individual Christians could find that Nazism had abandoned the obligation to work with—and be limited by—other orders of society, placing itself above them as a kind of an idol. In his 1933 essay “The Church and the Jewish Question,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “the state is to create ‘law and order’ for all its ‘subjects.’ The state therefore illegitimately constricts its office when it refuses order and justice to a particular group of people—in other words, the Jews…. The church must stand up without exception for all ‘victims of any societal order’ and first and foremost the Jews.”
Because of the German state’s refusal of justice to the Jews, Bonhoeffer found himself in “an extraordinary situation”…
Rehearing the Good News for the Poor
How can a rich church like mine rediscover the power of the gospel?
When Karl Barth finally finished his formal education in the first decade of the 20th century, he, like many other rookie theologians, had trouble finding an academic post (some things never change). Unsurprisingly, Barth was in the upper echelon of the Western European liberal theological community, yet still struggled to find a teaching gig. Although he was Swiss, Barth was trained in German Protestant liberalism and was positioned to be the next big thing in the scholastic movement. That is, until he graduated.
As Barth backed away from high philosophies and high theorizing, he let the Word loose, changing him and his congregation forever.
Upon completing his training, Barth took his academic achievements into a job that was available: he became a pastor at a rural Reformed church in the village of Safenwil, in Switzerland. He began the regular pastoral duties of preaching and teaching in this small, simple congregation. He philosophized and theologized with grandiose word pictures and complicated strands of thought each Sunday only to watch his congregation’s eyes glaze over. All of the theology that seemed to work in the academic world of Germany seemed to fall flat in rural Switzerland. He could not connect the word of God to the villagers. What was he doing wrong?
It was only in Barth’s preaching through the book of Romans that he began to discover just how far he had been led astray while in school. Barth became somewhat famous for disagreeing with most of his academic mentors back in Germany as he began to watch the simplicity and power of the gospel take hold of his congregation through Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. As Barth backed away from high philosophies and high theorizing, he let the Word loose, changing him and his congregation forever.
About 15-20 years later, as Barth moved on and became a professor, he also turned into an academic idol for a young Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had just accepted a Sloan Fellowship to study theology at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. In New York, Bonhoeffer would encounter a similar struggle as Barth in American pastors. Much like Barth, they couldn’t seem to get the power of the gospel on the ground to their congregations. Bonhoeffer became bitterly disappointed in the churches in New York for their theological gymnastics that ended far outside of gospel of Jesus. “In New York,” Bonhoeffer famously said, “they preach about virtually everything except … the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
As highlighted in Charles Marsh’s excellent new biography on the man, it wasn’t until Bonhoeffer joined Abyssinian Baptist Church in the ghetto of Harlem that he would say he “heard the gospel preached” for the first time. All through the large, well-known churches of New York City, there was little good news being proclaimed. From Bonhoeffer’s view, it was in the “Negro churches” of the ghettos and the poor rural landscapes in the great American South that the gospel was alive and well. He was transfixed by the preaching in the black churches during the struggle for civil rights and often wrote about the “ecstatic joy ‘in the soul of the Negro.'” Bonhoeffer found the joy of the gospel of Jesus, but only in what he called, “the church of the outcasts in America.”
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