The Christian Life

This chapter explores Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the Christian life in its public witness to God’s worldly presence. For Bonhoeffer, the Christian life unfolds as God’s word draws human beings into the story of Christ and as human beings in turn respond through practices of prayer and doing justice for others. The first section of this chapter explores the grammar of the Christian life as witnessing to the word of God. The second outlines Bonhoeffer’s distinction between the ethics of formation and of conformation, which sets apart Bonhoeffer’s approach to the Christian life from some other Protestant approaches. Third, there follows an account of the Christological grammar of the Christian life as life ‘in Christ’. The final section reflects upon the significance of Bonhoeffer’s doctrine of the mandates for understanding the publicity of the Christian life and its relevance for public theology today.

Religion and Secularity

What did Bonhoeffer mean by the term ‘religion’ when writing about a ‘nonreligious form of interpretation’ of biblical concepts? How should we understand this term and its interpretation today? Has the world of the twenty-first century really become ‘religionless’? More broadly, how does Bonhoeffer’s interpretation relate to more recent accounts of secularity and our secular age? This chapter argues that Bonhoeffer’s theological analysis in his own time, in which he deployed this concept of ‘religionlessness’, resonates with a more recent analysis of secularity offered by Charles Taylor. Specifically, this chapter claims that Bonhoeffer and Taylor identify some similar causes of secularization, and also share a critique of ‘religious individualism’. Drawing Bonhoeffer into dialogue with Taylor, then, can help to clarify his understanding of secularity.

God

In the field of theology proper, God’s graciousness is Bonhoeffer’s preoccupying theological concern. Who and what we see when we ‘see the God of the Bible’ is, Bonhoeffer contends, simply God for us. Formally, Bonhoeffer’s theological inquiry is marked by a relentless christological concentration practiced as the discipleship of thought to the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Materially, its central concern is to explicate the reality of divine promeity as the quintessence of the God of the Christian Gospel: God is for us. By taking divine promeity as his primary theme Bonhoeffer makes divine freedom and transcendence important subsidiary concerns, as concepts analytic in the idea of promeity. In Bonhoeffer’s hands, these concepts receive apt, self-consciously evangelical elucidation.

Eschatology

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s eschatology has received far less scholarly attention than many other aspects of his theology, and in fact has occasionally been relegated to near-insignificance for any proper understanding of his work. It is certainly the case that the theological function of eschatology changed for him during the course of his life. However, far from being simply an addendum to his writings, eschatology was deeply embedded within Bonhoeffer’s theological development. Eschatological themes made their first appearance in his academic work in a seminar paper from 1926, formed a crucial element of his catechetical instruction in early-1930s Berlin, and later provided him with a crucial hermeneutical perspective from which to view both his own final imprisonment, and the future directions of authentic ecclesial proclamation. Perhaps most strikingly, eschatology—that insistence that we must interpret our present (penultimate) circumstances from the lens of ultimate reality—was the irreplaceable foundation to Bonhoeffer’s wartime theological ethics, and to his insistence on the socio-political character of Christian discipleship.

Ecclesiology

This chapter examines Bonhoeffer’s account of the church and advocates that throughout Bonhoeffer’s corpus there remains a desire to explicate the reality of the church in terms of its structural being with and for the other. This structure exists both internally in terms of its members’ relation to each other, and externally as the church relates as a corporate body to the world. The chapter considers Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiological method; the visibility of the church; vicarious representation; the church as the body of Christ; the agency of the Holy Spirit; preaching, the sacraments, and the offices of the church; and the question of the church in a religionless age.

Bonhoeffer in North America

Dietrich Bonhoeffer studied at Union Theological Seminary in 1930/1. He had decided to go to Union because it specialized in social ministry, and by this time he had misgivings about his theory-laden Habilitation thesis. He was also interested in Union because it was in New York, a site of cultural adventure. While he thought he was open to being challenged and taught by Union faculty, he quickly concluded that Union did not teach ‘real theology’. Bonhoeffer’s mostly negative experience at Union was redeemed by his friendships with Union classmates, his participation in church and community courses, his study of American pragmatism, his introduction to black Social Gospel preaching and worship at Abyssinian Church, and his shift toward Christian pacifism, the latter notwithstanding his complaint that Union reduced Christianity to Social Gospel pacifism.

Christology

Christology stands at the centre of Bonhoeffer’s theology because God has revealed Godself in Jesus Christ and made himself approachable, though not manageable, for human beings. For Christians today, the encounter with Christ takes place in the church-community. It is Christ as the mediator between God and humankind that places Christians at a distance from the world, allowing them to engage with it critically. To live as a Christian means to follow Christ, yet today this is qualified differently than in the times of the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth.

Bonhoeffer and Feminist Theologies

Given Bonhoeffer’s sexist and patriarchal views, feminist theologians have not readily turned to Bonhoeffer as a resource for their constructive thinking. Three Bonhoeffer scholars—Rachel Muers, Lisa Dahill, and Karen Guth—offer feminist analyses that not only draw attention to the incompleteness and inadequacy of traditional readings of Bonhoeffer’s theology, but also demonstrate the productive potential for sustained engagement with his work. In doing so, they offer a twofold challenge: first, traditional Bonhoeffer scholarship is pressed to address his sexism and critically attend to issues hitherto ignored in his work; second, feminist theologies are pressed to consider Bonhoeffer as a rich theological resource for addressing a number of shared concerns. These three thinkers offer methods for mutually beneficial engagement that are overlapping yet distinct enough to provide a textured and sure foundation for this largely untapped area of Bonhoeffer studies.

Sin and Salvation

Bonhoeffer’s varied corpus dictates that his reflections on sin and salvation are diverse in register and range between expositing his theological inheritance and a more deliberative reworking of key themes. The towering element of that inheritance is, naturally, Luther and the doctrine of justification. A resolute focus on the person of Christ that runs throughout all his writings leads Bonhoeffer to reframe the notion of justification as the reality of being incorporated into the life of one who creates a ‘new humanity’. In the words of Hofmann, whom Bonhoeffer quotes: ‘To understand his person and history properly is to understand our reconciliation properly’ (cf. DBWE 1: 142). This emphasis opens Bonhoeffer to theological resources beyond his proximate tradition, while also providing ways to draw together the various ‘moments’ of classical soteriology, to critique problematic turns in Protestant thought, and to show the comprehensive relevance of the dialectic of sin and salvation for all Christian thinking.

The Reality of Christian Ethics

Reality is a central idea in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. Ethics must deal with real human problems and choices. Bonhoeffer learned this as a participant in the German resistance to Hitler, but he believed the lesson applies to all conditions of modern life. People seek concrete direction for their choices and find abstract ethics irrelevant. The contrast between concrete reality and abstraction found in the philosophy of Hegel thus provided an important resource for Bonhoeffer’s theological understanding of Jesus Christ as the reality of God in human experience. Because we cannot separate God from the world or understand either apart from Christ, responsible action is always a venture undertaken on behalf of others, and it involves a risk of guilt. Despite the uncertainty that accompanies all responsible action, the four ‘divine mandates’ of church, family, culture, and government provide contexts in which it is possible to hear the concrete commandment of God.