Toward a Post-Liberal Theology?: The Architecture of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christology and Ecclesiology

Part II: Christ and Church: Background and Development 1927-33

The Christology lectures of 1933 are but a small, incomplete, but rich snapshot of Bonhoeffer's robust and vibrant Christology that developed from his time under the tutelage of Harnack, Holl and Seeberg (developed in stark contrast, but with much reverence to the Christology of Harnack) on into the rest of his academic and ecclesial career. While Harnack certainly wielded much inspiration on the young Bonhoeffer at Berlin, the major influence upon his thought at this early juncture was the shift toward a "high" christological concentration initiated largely by the work of Karl Barth, whom Bonhoeffer first met in 1931 and subsequently lamented not meeting earlier. It was here, within the milieu of the project of nineteenth century theological liberalism's "turn to the subject"—a situation permanently interrupted by the second edition of Barth's Rommerbrief—that Bonhoeffer, no less than Barth before him, began to marshal his own unique riposte to the behemoth before him.

The Christology and ecclesiology of Bonhoeffer's early academic work is situated within a complex and intricate web of philosophical, historical, theological and sociological themes that makes it difficult to distill hisinitial thought, so we can hardly do it justice here. In Sanctorum Communio, Bonhoeffer is cycling many dogmatic loci through a re-formed and re-worked understanding of person, community and sociality: "'Person', 'primal state', 'sin', and 'revelation' can be fully comprehended only in reference to sociality." His stated purpose in Sanctorum Communio then, is to "understand the structure of the given reality of a church of Christ, as revealed in Christ, from the perspective of social philosophy and sociology." Claiming that all systematic loci of dogmatic theology are essentially and obdurately social and relational at their core—a claim that characterizes and spans his entire theological and ecclesial contribution—Bonhoeffer adds a new and unique voice to the chorus of early 20th century European theology. His first dissertation then can be read as a phenomenological/theological investigation into the nature and identity of the church and its Lord. Yet although Bonhoeffer develops a very profound and elaborate concept of person, community and relationality (developed in discussion not only with German Idealism but also in the context of the emerging existential/neo-orthodox theologies of Buber, Brunner, Gogarten, et all), our purpose in this survey is to examine his early Christology and ecclesiology. We may ask then, in considering the social and relational structure of all dogmatic loci, 'Who is Jesus Christ, and who and what is his church?'

Bonhoeffer answers with the rich but difficult, and as we will argue below, the ultimately problematic christological paraphrase of the Pauline "Body of Christ": "Christus als Gemeinde existierend"—"Christ existing as church-community". Christ, as the revelation of God, is the new collective humanity in response to the old Adamic collective of broken humanity and is thus the reconciliation of humanity to its primal reality (creation). Christ, as the Stellvertretung, ('vicarious representative action') is initiator of this new sociality and is (in the sense of being, constituting and circumscribing) its reality: "Adam's action is extremely egocentric…in Christ, however, humanity has been brought once and for all—this is essential to real vicarious representative action—into communion with God." As Stellvertretung, Christ exists eccentrically—that is, pro nobis. The anthropological counterpart of this reality, the church, is the concrete manifestation or bearer of this new reality.

It is an Irenaean-type of recapitulation or reversal but it goes beyond Irenaeus in its material claims. Bonhoeffer claims, according to Green, that "the person of Christ, exists in a social form: the church." Green claims that Bonhoeffer is aware of the difficulties with parsing this phrase in such a way as to allow the church to domesticate and possess its Lord: "the presence of Christ is not the essence of the church at human disposal; Christ is not a possessed attribute of his human community, frozen into a static being." Bonhoeffer nevertheless claims that, "the church is the presence of Christ in the same way that Christ is the presence of God." He goes on to qualify this: "one must not think of a second incarnation of Christ…but rather of a form of revelation that may be called 'Christ existing as church-community'".

Needless to say, this is a notoriously slippery claim and one that requires much doctrinal qualification—qualifications that are made explicit within his Christology lectures of 1933 (which we will investigate and consider below). In short form Bonhoeffer is claiming that Christ is the church but the church is not Christ insofar as the church is at once both the peccatorum communio and the sanctorum communio and is thus unable to claim of itself the status of 'revelatory'. That is, Christ and church are identified but not to the point that Christ is identified with the church without remainder. While it is not always explicit within Bonhoeffer's early work (owing, in some measure, to the nature of these writings as largely sociological and anthropological), Christ is the Lord of the community and as its Lord He is the One who calls that community into being (here Bonhoeffer has a pneumatology at work, however truncated, which we cannot herein entertain). Only by His own activity is Christ identified with the collective community. Christ exists as Gemeinde because he freely decides to do so. The relationship is then a dynamic one and not one that can be characterized as stagnant or fixed. The free Lord freely identifies Himself with the community in the concrete acts of Word and sacrament.

In his second dissertation, Act and Being, Bonhoeffer continues to develop a relational ontology but shifts his focus to mainly epistemological and anthropological concerns. The christological and ecclesiological themes present within Sanctorum Communio undergo no major formal changes but do gain material clarity within Bonhoeffer's main concern with expounding a theological ontology. Within this ontology, it is the doctrine of revelation that provides Bonhoeffer with the opportunity to capitalize and expand upon the themes within Sanctorum Communio. Here the theme of divine freedom leads into Bonhoeffer's social ontology and ecclesiology. God in Christ is not free from humanity but free for humanity. The freedom of God, His very being, is an existence for humanity. It is an existence marked and characterized by God's freedom to be bound to humanity in Christ:

In revelation it is not so much a question of the freedom of God—eternally remaining within the divine self, aseity—on the other side of revelation, as it is of God's coming out of God's own self in revelation. It is a matter of God's given Word, the covenant in which God is bound by God's own action. It is a question of the freedom of God, which finds its strongest evidence precisely in that God freely chose to be bound to historical human beings and to be placed at the disposal of human beings. God is free not from human beings but for them. Christ is the word of God's freedom. God is present, that is, not in eternal objectivity but…'haveable', graspable in the Word within the church.

Here Bonhoeffer is reacting to what he considered an abstract account of divine freedom on the part of the 'neo-orthodox' or 'dialectical' theology of his day, an account of divine freedom epitomized in the early work of Barth. This account was one-sided in the sense that in describing divine freedom the full weight of the depiction was made in reaction to the domesticated deity of Protestant liberalism.

While Bonhoeffer would agree that this was a necessary step, this picture of divine freedom did not follow its own christocentricity through to its full conclusion—that divine freedom is precisely God's binding of God's very own self to the contingent and historical reality of the world in Jesus Christ. No abstract deity here. God's identity is bound up with humanity's. God's mode of presence to the world is in Christ and Christ's mode of presence to the world is in and through his own community as himself—Christ existing as church-community: "the church is the presence of Christ in the same way that Christ is the presence of God." Indeed, we can agree with Hauerwas, who maintains that for Bonhoeffer, "that the church takes up space [in the world] is but a correlative that God in Jesus Christ occupies space in the world…. Bonhoeffer's ecclesiology is but the expression of his Christology, in which the reality of Christ determines all that is. For Bonhoeffer it is in Jesus Christ that the whole of reality is taken up." The themes of Bonhoeffer's early Christology and ecclesiology and the intricate relationship between these two dogmatic loci as developed throughout both his early academic dissertations is efficiently and simply summarized in a passage from Bonhoeffer's inaugural lecture at the University of Berlin, July 31st, 1930 entitled 'Man in Contemporary Philosophy and Theology':

It is the mystery of the community that Christ is in her and only through her reaches to men, Christ exists among us as community, as church in the hiddenness of history. The church is the hidden Christ among us. Now therefore man is never alone, but he exists only through the community, which brings him Christ, which incorporates him in itself, takes him into its life. Man in Christ is man in community; where he exists is community…. Therefore man can no longer understand himself from himself, but only from Christ, who exists as community…

Bonhoeffer's early work goes a long way in outbidding Protestant liberalism's truncated and docetic Christology and ecclesiology. However, it was not until Bonhoeffer turned his attention to Christology proper that these early themes gain the lucidity necessary to gauge Bonhoeffer's theology on the central theme of the identity of Christ and his community and to measure just how much ground he makes up in response to liberalism.

Revisiting the Doctrine of the Divine Attributes
Peter Lang, 2007
Dr. Christopher R. J. Holmes

I wanted to draw readers attention to a new and exciting book examining the doctrine of the Divine attributes by a good friend of mine, Dr. Christopher Holmes, now at Providence Seminary in Manitoba, Canada.

Chris examines the doctrine of Divine Glory as it is handled in the theological work of Karl Barth, Eberhard Jüngel, and Wolf Krötke.

"There is a renewed vigor in discussions of the perfections of God in contemporary Protestant theology. This study of three leading accounts of the matter offers a splendid analysis of key texts and topics, and should be studied not only by specialists in contemporary Christian theology but also by all who are concerned to articulate the Christian doctrine of God." (John Webster, University of Aberdeen)

Toward a Post-Liberal Theology?: The Architecture of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christology and Ecclesiology

Part I: Introduction

In the next few posts, I want to engage Dietrich Bonhoeffer on some very fundamental questions of the relationship between Christ and his church.

An important caveat must be made at the outset of this discussion: treating Bonhoeffer’s theology requires a certain kind of intellectual humility on the part of the interpreter simply because we do not have the "mature" Bonhoeffer as we have, say, the "mature Barth", and are thus limited in reaching definite and fixed conclusions regarding his theological contribution. This is not to say that something like this is also required when treating Barth's theology, especially his pneumatology—it is simply to highlight that Bonhoeffer's thought never matured to the degree that someone like Barth's did. In other words, the theological punctuation requisite in treating Bonhoeffer are ellipsis points and question marks—not periods…

I intend to demonstrate that Bonhoeffer's theological contribution is pregnant with much promise, especially regarding his christological contributions, and provides a viable and overall stable way forward "after" theological liberalism. That the so-called "postliberal school" has never mined Bonhoeffer's theology is nothing short of academic misfortune since his Christology is a rich and highly nuanced account of the identity and presence of Jesus Christ that goes a long way in outbidding liberalism. Stanley Hauerwas's recent treatment of Bonhoeffer's theology would seem to be the only exception to date. Although Hauerwas regards Bonhoeffer as formative to his own postliberal theology, Bonhoeffer remains largely ignored on this embattled theological front. His work, if properly engaged, would go a long way in nourishing a postliberal theology, especially with regards to Christological concerns. In many ways, Bonhoeffer preempts some of postliberalism's most basic themes and his work should be regarded, just as Barth's is, as precursory to this movement.

However, while Bonhoeffer's Christology is very fruitful and fertile some nagging problems nevertheless remain. There are certain perils and liabilities associated with the great Protestant liberal tradition against which Bonhoeffer is on most accounts successfully reacting (perils mainly associated with his ecclesiological contributions) that linger regardless of Bonhoeffer's best efforts to evade them. In other words, upon my reading, Bonhoeffer has indeed fallen from Schleiermacher's tree, but not as far as he has often been read to have fallen. These difficulties need to be supplemented in order to bolster Bonhoeffer's own response to theological liberalism. This thesis will be articulated via an examination of the architecture of Bonhoeffer's Christology and its relationship to his ecclesiology especially with regards to some formal and material claims articulated within his Christology lectures of 1933. I want to demonstrate that the relationship between Christ and Church as structured by Bonhoeffer throughout his short career, and evinced chiefly within the Christology lectures, makes up much dogmatic ground in response to liberalism. Yet there is a moment of dogmatic casualness and torpor within the architectonics of this relationship that leaves Bonhoeffer open to the charge that the identities of Christ and the church are fused to a degree that they are potentially confused (an overtly liberal confusion). This potential confusion is exacerbated from this point on (1933 forward).

The importance of this investigation will be borne out in via, but it should be noted that the question of the identity of Jesus Christ and the church is one with which Bonhoeffer struggled throughout his career. Andreas Pangritz can write, "the question 'Who is Jesus Christ?' forms the cantus firmus of Bonhoeffer's theological development from the beginning to the end." It is the problematique that characterizes his work and provides the dogmatic adhesive that holds his diverse writings together. Bonhoeffer's theological career can be characterized as a struggle to give adequate dogmatic description and structure to the very basic and fundamental question, 'Who is Jesus Christ?' In contrast to a recent attempt to unify Bonhoeffer's theology under the rubric of a "theology of sociality" (which to me seems to be but a reification of the dogmatic problem with which we are herein occupied, I am thinking of the work of Clifford Green) we will consider the question of the identity (Christology) and presence (ecclesiology) of Jesus Christ as the central, basic, and circumscribing issue in Bonhoeffer's theology. I don't plan to engage in theological archeology to demonstrate this—that would require a book-length treatment examining each of Bonhoeffer's writings—but will presuppose it throughout and in so doing, hope that conceptual weight will be given to it; the proof will be in the pudding.

To begin I will sketch the development of Bonhoeffer's Christology and his ecclesiology from 1927 through 1933. It is here, in his two most demanding writings (Sanctorum Communio and Act and Being ) that the groundwork for his later work was laid. This survey will prepare us for an examination of some themes from the Christology lectures of 1933 and the great dogmatic promise found there. I will then put some wider criticisms grown from very basic christological and ecclesiological concerns to Bonhoeffer regarding the formal and material issues concerning the relationship between Christ and church. It is these concerns that, as I will suggest, need supplementation, in order for Bonhoeffer's work to adequately achieve its intended goal of outstripping theological liberalism and to avoid the pitfalls into which such theology consistently falls.

The Ebstorf mappamundi

I don't post regularly, but I thought that I would share this. I've recently been reading Peter Candler Jr.'s Theology, Rhetoric, Manuduction, or Reading Scripture Together on the Path to God (quite the Hauerwasian title; it's no wonder that Stanley is the editor of the series!) and he opens his book with a short reflection on this 13th century map found in the middle of the 19th century. After reading his reflection, I thought I would share it here on my blog:

In a thirteenth-century map of the world discovered in 1830 in the Benedictine Abbey of Ebstrof, the whole of terrestrial creation is pictured, in typical medieval fashion, as a circle, with Jerusalem as its center. The entire image is, as it were, superimposed on the body of Christ, whose extremities represent the directions of the compass: the head of Christ in the east, his hands at north and south, and his feet marking the west. Looking at this map, one is forced to orient oneself not according to modern standards of objectivity, but, one might say, as a reader. After all, the map is structured as a complex organization of narratives, with what now seems like bizarre and superfluous information not found on modern maps of the world: architectual structures, animals, human beings, and text.

It quickly becomes apparent to the modern observer that to make sense of the Ebstorf mappamundi, it must be read. It cannot simply be seen and understood; its foreign idiom must somehow be taught, learned, and inhabited....In other words, it suggests a mode of reading which is less the comprehension of a tableau that the performance of a sequence of movements.

Yet it also seems to indicate that to read the world rightly is to read it in Christ, and that the world itself is rendered intelligible only by seeing it as a kind of diaphonous veil which simultaneously hides and discloses the God who creates it....All of creation, it is implied, gathers its meaningfulness from its orientation to Christ the head, the only true agent of knowledge.

What I find very stimulating from Candler's reflection is the dislocation and disruption of the modern reader and modern 'textuality'. For those of us who teach, or will teach, theology to young, budding minds, this reflection might prove very useful in the classroom. Needless to say, I'm anxious to keep reading!

Jüngel on Divine Omnipotence

"The metaphysical theory of the worldly omnipresence of a God who is above everything and nowhere corresponds much too much to the fixation of God as a supra-worldly 'above us'. The faith that the 'Father in heaven' above us was among us through the crucified Son of God and in the Holy Spirit is united with the Son not only for himself but as one absent is present with us and that as the one who 'lets himself be pushed out of the world' comes to the world--this faith grants to the theologoumenon of the omnipotence of God a meaning which reconstructs it entirely. This happens in that God's omnipresence is to be understood now on the basis of his very presence on the cross of Jesus and not without a christologically established removal of God. The concept of the omnipresence of God must pass through the eye of the needle of the properly understood concept of the death of God."

~ Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World (Eerdmans, 1983), 63.

John's Christ

"John's designation of Christ as the Logos points to the fact that the evangelist envisions him as fulfilling the role of cosmic reason, in the Greeks' and in Philo's sense as that which grants all things their intelligibility. The subsequent events of the Gospel reveal, however, that John does not seek to demonstrate this by projecting the life of Jesus onto the level of Greek wisdom (or vice versa), but rather allows the incarnate Logos to interpret himself. The Logos reveals himself as 'gracious love' (karis), and thereby as 'glory' (the 'divinely beautiful', doxa), and precisely for this reason as the 'truth' (alethias). It therefore becomes possible to arrive at an intelligibility that illuminates the pure facticity of the historical as a necessity, and at the same time an intelligibility that cannot be reduced to that which the human being demands or (for whatever reason) anticipates."

~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible (Ignatius Press, 2004), 54-5.

The following is a paraphrase of Eberhard Jüngel's God as the Mystery of the World pp. 184-225.

The necessity of thinking God together with perishability is the final turn in the disputation with the metaphysical tradition. There is a double necessity for this thought: first, an objective necessity is given through the Christological exposition of the biblical tradition and second, it is required as a consequence of the historical consciousness which has grown out of modern metaphysics. In the structure of modern metaphysics, to exist means to be perishable. Theology must raze the metaphysical God who is supra nos by positing that God’s essence is his existence (as a non-contradictory unity) such that he is understood to be subject to perishability, since he indeed exists and does so within the dimension of historical factuality so that this dimension is the undisputable location of the thinkability of God’s unity with perishability. More precisely, Christian proclamation trustfully and faithfully speaks of the unity of God with the executed Jesus of Nazareth so that it discovers God and humanity already together in Jesus Christ—God’s unity with perishability is God’s subjecting his glory in Jesus Christ to perishability for the sake of perishing humanity (kenosis). Faith acknowledges this reality and in so doing is the precondition for the thinkability of God since it preserves the identity of God’s being and existence—it takes God’s existence (which is an existence subjected to perishability) as his being. It is faith, not as a function of anxious self-security, but as a joy and trust in God—an event which eradicates the need for self-security such that the human being is not insecure but certain (since trust is the certainty which removes security) and free in its relationship to God.

The possibility of thinking God’s unity with perishability is sought within the historical situation of modern thought—this brings us back to the talk of the death of God. Either theology thinks God’s unity with perishability in such as way that God and faith belong to the past and that atheism rules the day, or it thinks in such a way that God and perishability and their relation must be re-thought. Within the structure of modernity one cannot think of perishability and God together without doing away with the metaphysically conceived deity. In its thinking of perishability, modernity has cast it in an entirely negative light, so that even the possibility of conceiving of God coming together with death was ruled out—the metaphysical God cannot tolerate perishability. On the other hand, and with some clarity, Nietzsche asserted that perishability could not tolerate God (the Pauline ‘God on the cross”)—yet in the end, Nietzsche was bound to metaphysics in that he considered perishability abstractly. Therefore, in order for theology to speak clearly about God’s unity with perishability, about a God who is in heaven in such a way that he can identify himself with the poverty of the man Jesus, it must attend to this unity with renewed precision. Perishability, in its negative aspect as a simile of the tendency toward nothingness conceals its positive in its inherent possibility, which is given ontological primacy over Aristotelian ‘reality’ so that possibility is the ontological plus of being, that is, it is capable of becoming, and not a deficiency in reality. Perishability is understood then to be the struggle between possibility and nothingness.

The language of the death of God would then imply that God is in the midst of this struggle. Based on the word of the cross, as the One without whom nothing is (including perishability), God is not the Creator removed from struggle but is rather the creative being involved in the struggle against nothingness which precipitates a hermeneutical priority to the word of the cross. God has involved himself with nothingness in the form of a struggle in which he shows nothingness its place by giving it a place within the divine life, whereby in bearing annihilation within himself without himself being annihilated, proves to be the victor over nothingness and gives to nothingness its determination as concrete negation. Yet as the one who identifies himself with the dead Jesus, as the one who suffers endlessly, God is the one who exists for others and does so by defining himself as love on the cross of Jesus. God is in and of himself in such a way that he is for humanity. This is not to be understood as an inner necessity but as an un-coerced freedom of God’s self-definition with the man Jesus so that just as love for us, God is love in and of himself. Because God is love, he counters nothingness and not vice versa. We grasp the being of God then as a Going-Out-Of-Himself into nothingness—this is his essence—and his existence as this essence is an existence marked not by standing outside of nothingness but standing into nothingness. In his going out of himself, God is the One who remains in the process of becoming, going into nothingness and yet going in such a way as always coming from himself. God’s activity ad extra which is his being as becoming is the work of God ad intra, his existence is his essence and he is thought, and only thought, in his unity with perishability.