Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Breakthrough

I began to read Bonhoeffer when I was in high school: first The Cost of Discipleship and then his Ethics. The former distinguished itself by Bonhoeffer's notion of "cheap grace"; the latter, by the agon with which he attempted to come to terms with Kant and other thinkers. But the one book of Bonhoeffer's that made the deepest impression on me and that I have returned to repeatedly over the years was the posthumously published edition of his Letters and Papers From Prison. For it was Bonhoeffer's reflections in the shadow of the gallows on "man come of age" and the "non-religious interpretation of biblical concepts"--ideas that are largely passed over in silence by the recent evangelical embrace of Bonhoeffer as a 20th century Christian warrior-saint--that spoke to me most forcefully of the contemporary possibility of "religious" affirmation.

Bonhoeffer articulated an apparent paradox: to be truly religious in a world "come of age," men and women must embrace secularity. I say this is an apparent paradox because it is artificially created by the confusion that the notion of sui generis religion inevitably generates. The only way to begin to emerge from this confusion is to train oneself to recognize the constructed nature of religion-as-such.

In a letter to Eberhard Bethge dated 21 July 1944, Bonhoeffer argued that "...it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God..." (LPP, 369-370).

With the final sentence quoted, Bonhoeffer affirmed his theism--as he had every right to do. It is an expression of his personal world-view and to have omitted that from his remarks would have distorted his position. He went on to express his specifically Christian interpretation of theism, which I have omitted because, in a sense, it is irrelevant in this context--though Bonhoeffer himself clearly did not think so. But, in fact, it is: for one need not be a Christian in order to be a theist. Moreover, one need not be "religious" in any traditionally cognizable sense in order to be a theist--and this is the true burden of Bonhoeffer's remarks.

The confusion of faith with adherence to a set of institutionally propagated assertions about metaphysics or history (or the alleged conjunction of the two) is a product of the Christian church's attempt to (1) articulate and (2) enforce a communally unifying ideology (i.e., orthodoxy). As a consequence, Church councils (beginning in the 4th century at the insistence of the Emperor Constantine) entered the business of promulgating creeds. But faith is not a specifically Christian or even theistic attribute of human psychology. All human beings repose faith or confidence in a variety of objects: God, self, the State, other individuals, tools, etc. Faith is trust and, as anyone who has placed faith in another human being knows, that faith may be placed happily or unhappily--the determination of the appropriate adjective will ultimately depend upon subsequent events.

To repose faith (in this ordinary sense of the word) is perfectly natural: it is, effectively, a sine qua non of daily life as a human being. The transformation of such faith into a specifically "religious" activity requires a number of additional steps of attribution and interpretation. Bonhoeffer's breakthrough was to recognize that such steps (or many of them) may create more problems than they solve--especially in a world where positive science and critical historical inquiry have rendered many credal assertions "beyond belief."

In a long letter to Bethge dated 16-18 July 1944, Bonhoeffer had argued that religiosity interfered with a direct connection to God--one that can be established only when, for the sake of intellectual honesty, the "God hypothesis" has been abandoned. It is an odd position for a theist to take, but Bonhoeffer's confidence in the reality of God depended upon personal experience rather than intellectual proofs. He appeared to hold that, by participating in suffering, one encounters Christ. By the same token, one may encounter the Buddha, Muhammad, Husayn ibn 'Ali, al-Hallaj, the many martyrs of Christianity and Judaism, or any number of significant figures in a wide variety of religious traditions.

In this respect, his thinking represents an advance over that of Ernst Troeltsh, whose advocacy of critical history in Biblical studies made Bonhoeffer's thought not only possible but also inevitable. Troeltsch, however, was never quite able to wean himself from a notion of sui generis religion. In archetypal terms, Troeltsch played Moses to Bonhoeffer's Joshua: he was able to see the Promised Land from afar, but was denied entry.