Living Freely before God

Chapter 6 outlines the main features of Bonhoeffer’s Christian Humanist ethics. Bonhoeffer’s ethical realism and rejection of moralistic legalism is based on ethics defined as participation in Christ whose incarnation and person structure reality as a whole. The chapter begins by showing that the personal and eschatological structure of this Christological realism exonerates Bonhoeffer from the charge of collapsing reality into Christ. The next section delineates the goal of Bonhoeffer’s ethics as Christformation with its essential aspects of renewal into the divine image through the work of the Holy Spirit, through ecclesial communion, through Christian action in the world, and by means of the sedimentation of Christian virtues in cultural traditions. Next, the chapter takes up from the previous one the hermeneutic element of discernment in describing ethics with Bonhoeffer as realistic responsible action. Realistic responsible action denotes the call to action in response to concrete circumstances within a creation oriented toward Christ. Such realistic action includes the risk of freedom along with the assumption of guilt. Realistic responsible action explains the meaning of this famous and often misunderstood concept of guilt bearing in Bonhoeffer rooted in his sacramental, participatory ontology. The chapter ends with a summative description of Bonhoeffer’s Humanist ethics as living freely before God.

Participation and the Person in Pauline Theology: A Response to Susan Eastman’s Paul and the Person

Paul and the Person by Susan Eastman both models a form of boundary-crossing Pauline scholarship and proposes a ‘contemporary expression’ of Paul’s language of participation in Christ. In conversation with ancient and contemporary theories of the self, Eastman argues that, for Paul, the person is constituted in relationship, whether to sin or to Christ. This thesis is both significant and suggestive, but it does raise questions about the continuity of the person in Pauline theology.

THE COMPARISON OF JOHN CALVIN AND KARL BARTH ON THE DOCTRINE OF UNION WITH CHRIST

This article will continue to explore the influences of Calvin and Barth's different ontology on their distinct doctrine of union with Christ. After presenting Calvin's doctrine of union with Christ and Barth's teaching of participation in Christ, I will bring together the work of the previous study through comparison and evaluation. Although both Calvin and Barth adopt a Christocentric approach and similarly have a distinction between believers' objective and subjective union with Christ, their distinct ontological presuppositions, within their own philosophical and cultural contexts, drive Calvin to a theology of union with "being" and Barth to that of union with "doing". In that sense, Barth, in line with his actualistic ontology, does not only depart from Calvin in his doctrine of election as he claims, but also in his doctrine of participation in Christ or union with Christ, although he retains the Calvinist terminology.