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Books by Bonhoeffer
No Rusty Swords /
The Cost of Discipleship /
Letters and Papers from Prison /
Sanctorum Communio
A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings /
Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible /
Ethics
No Difference in the Fare: Dietrich
Bonhoeffer and the Problem of Racism
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Letter on
The Ultimate Questions—Death
& Guilt
By Dietrich Bonhoeffer You have asked so many important
questions on the subjects that have been occupying me lately, that
I should be happy if I could answer them all myself. But I'm
afraid the whole thing is very much in the initial stages. As
usual, I am led on more by an instinctive feeling for the
questions which are bound to crop up rather than by any
conclusions I have reached already. I will try to define my
position from the historical angle.
The Autonomy of Man
The movement beginning about the
thirteenth century (I am not going to get involved in any
arguments about the exact date) towards the autonomy of man (under
which head I place the discovery of the laws by which the world
lives and manages in science, social and political affairs, art,
ethics and religion) has in our time reached a certain completion.
Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without
recourse to God as a working hypothesis. In questions
concerning science, art, and even ethics, this has become an
understood thing which one scarcely dares to tilt at any more. But
for the last hundred years or so it has been increasingly true of
religious questions also: it is becoming evident that everything
gets along without "God," and just as well as before. As
in the scientific field, so in human affairs generally, what we
call "God" is being more and more edged out of life,
losing more and more ground.
Catholic and Protestant
historians are agreed that it is in this development that the
great defection from God, from Christ, is to be discerned, and the
more they bring in and make use of God and Christ in opposition to
this trend, the more the trend itself considers itself to be
anti-Christian. The world which has attained to a realization of
itself and of the laws which govern its existence is so sure of
itself that we become frightened. False starts and failures do not
make the world deviate from the path and development it is
following; they are accepted with fortitude and detachment as part
of the bargain, and even an event like the present war is no
exception. Christian apologetic has taken the most varying forms
of opposition to this self-assurance. Efforts are made to prove to
a world thus come of age that it cannot live without the tutelage
of "God."
Existentialism
Even though there has been
surrender on all secular problems, there still remain the
so-called ultimate questions—death, guilt—on which only
"God" can furnish an answer, and which are the reason
why God and the Church and the pastor are needed. Thus we live, to
some extent, by these ultimate questions of humanity. But what if
one day they no longer exist as such, if they too can be answered
without "God"? We have of course the secularized
off-shoots of Christian theology, the existentialist philosophers
and the psychotherapists, who demonstrate to secure, contented,
happy mankind that it is really unhappy and desperate, and merely
unwilling to realize that it is in severe straits it knows nothing
at all about, from which only they can rescue it.
Wherever there is health,
strength, security, simplicity, they spy luscious fruit to gnaw at
or to lay their pernicious eggs in. They make it their object
first of all to drive men to inward despair, and then it is all
theirs. That is secularized methodism. And whom does it touch? A
small number of intellectuals, of degenerates, of people who
regard themselves as the most important thing in the world and
hence like looking after themselves. The ordinary man who spends
his everyday life at work, and with his family, and of course with
all kinds of hobbies and other interests too, is not affected. He
has neither time nor inclination for thinking about his
intellectual despair and regarding his modest share of happiness
as a trial, a trouble or a disaster.
False Christian Apologetics
The attack by Christian
apologetic upon the adulthood of the world I consider to be in the
first place pointless, in the second ignoble, and in the third
un-Christian. Pointless, because it looks to me like an attempt to
put a grown-up man back into adolescence, i.e. to make him
dependent on things on which he is not in fact dependent any more,
thrusting him back into the midst of problems which are in fact
not problems for him any more. Ignoble, because this amounts to an
effort to exploit the weakness of man for purposes alien to him
and not freely subscribed to by him. Un-Christian, because for
Christ himself is being substituted one particular stage in the
religiousness of man, i.e. a human law. Of this more later.
But first a word or two on the
historical situation. The question is, Christ and the newly
matured world. It was the weak point of liberal theology that it
allowed the world the right to assign Christ his place in that
world: in the dispute between Christ and the world it accepted the
comparatively clement peace dictated by the world. It was its
strong point that it did not seek to put back the clock, and
genuinely accepted the battle (Troeltsch), even though this came
to an end with its overthrow.
Overthrow was succeeded by
capitulation and an attempt at a completely fresh start based on
consideration of the Bible and Reformation fundamentals of the
faith. Heim sought, along pietist and methodist lines, to convince
individual man that he was faced with the alternative "either
despair or Jesus." He gained "hearts." Althaus, carrying
forward the modern and positive line with a strong confessional
emphasis, endeavoured to wring from the world a place for Lutheran
teaching (ministry) and Lutheran worship, and otherwise left the
world to its own devices.
Tillich & Barth
Tillich set out to interpret the
evolution of the world itself--against its will--in a religious
sense, to give it its whole shape through religion. That was very
courageous of him, but the world unseated him and went on by
itself: he too sought to understand the world better than it
understood itself, but it felt entirely misunderstood, and
rejected the imputation. (Of course the world does need to be
understood better than it understands itself, but not
"religiously," as the religious socialists desired.)
Barth was the first to realize the mistake that all these efforts
(which were all unintentionally sailing in the channel of liberal
theology) were making in having as their objective the clearing of
a space for religion in the world or against the world.
He called the God of Jesus
Christ into the lists against religion, "pneuma against
sarx." That was and is his greatest service (the
second edition of his Epistle to the Romans, in spite of all its
neo-Kantian shavings). Through his later dogmatics, he enabled the
Church to effect this distinction in principle all along the line.
It was not that he subsequently, as is often claimed, failed in
ethics, for his ethical observations-so far as he has made any-are
just as significant as his dogmatic ones; it was that he gave no
concrete guidance, either in dogmatics or in ethics, on the
non-religious interpretation of theological concepts. There lies
his limitation, and because of it his theology of revelation
becomes positivist, a "positivism of revelation," as I
put it.
The Confessing Church has to a
great extent forgotten all about the Barthian approach, and lapsed
from positivism into conservative restoration. The important thing
about that Church is that it carries on the great concepts of
Christian theology, but that seems all it will do. There are,
certainly, in these concepts the elements of genuine prophetic
quality (under which head come both the claim to truth and the
mercy you mention) and of genuine worship, and to that extent the
message of the Confessing Church meets only with attention,
hearing and rejection. But they both remain unexplained and
remote, because there is no interpretation of them.
People like, for instance,
Schutz, or the Oxford Group, or the Berneucheners, who miss the
"movement" and "life," are dangerous
reactionaries, retrogressive because they go straight back behind
the approach of revelation theology and seek for
"religious" renewal. They simply do not understand the
problem at all, and what they say is entirely beside the point.
There is no future for them (though the Oxford people would have
the biggest chance if they were not so completely devoid of
biblical substance).
Bultmann & Liberalism
Bultmann would seem to have felt
Barth's limitations in some way, but he misconstrues them in the
light of liberal theology, and hence goes off into the typical
liberal reduction process (the "mythlogical" elements of
Christianity are dropped, and Christianity is reduced to its
"essence"). I am of the view that the full content,
including the mythological concepts, must be maintained. The New
Testament is not a mythological garbing of the universal truth;
this mythology (resurrection and so on) is the thing itself--but
the concepts must be interpreted in such a way as not to make
religion a precondition of faith (cf. circumcision in St. Paul).
Not until that is achieved will, in my opinion, liberal theology
be overcome (and even Barth is still dominated by it, though
negatively), and, at the same time, the question it raises be
genuinely taken up and answered--which is not the case in the
positivism of revelation maintained by the Confessing Church.
The World's Coming of Age
The world's coming of age is
then no longer an occasion for polemics and apologetics, but it is
really better understood than it understands itself, namely on the
basis of the Gospel, and in the light of Christ,
You ask whether this leaves any
room for the Church, or has it gone for good? And again, did not
Jesus himself use distress as his point of contact with men,
whether as a consequence the "methodism" I have so
frowned upon is not right after all?
June 8th1944 * * *
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updated 4 November 2007 |
