To begin to understand the Christology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology must be defined and Dietrich Bonhoeffer must be known. In his book The Christology of the New Testament, Oscar Cullman notes that biblical inquiries about Christology, “…do not simply place Jesus in a general human category, but attempt rather to explain his uniqueness.” It is not simply a pragmatic defining of the different roles Jesus functioned within, i.e. prophet, healer, Rabbi. Those are but miniscule pieces of a very large answer. Both the Christologies of Jesus and of Dietrich Bonhoeffer deal with what makes the Christ unique, transcendent, and the unifying force of being. What does Christ mean to existence? The man who asked this question most courageously in the twentieth century, did so not only with his pen, but also with his life.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a brilliant German theologian who earned his doctorates degree at the age of 21. After a vibrant yet short career of shaking the foundations of the academic theological world, he was executed for his part in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. While in prison, he penned a series of letters to his friend Eberhard Bethge in which he began to question the role of Christian faith in a “religionless” world. Bonhoeffer predicted the coming of post-modernism and recognized that the Church would need to meet that movement and express the love of Christ to it. These prison letters were compiled by Bethge and released as a theological work which, along with Bonhoeffer’s other writings, went on to become some of the most influential contributions to modern theology. This essay will examine several different pieces of Bonhoeffer’s writings and will demonstrate and analyze the different components which made up the Christology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
The person of Christ is central to the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His thinking is Christo-centric and thus it can be said that Bonhoeffer’s Christology is a reflection of Bonhoeffer’s overall theology. In fact, he viewed Christology as the center of all disciplines and all learning, period. In his work Christ the Center, he states, “Christology as the study of Christ is a peculiar discipline because it is concerned with Christ who is himself the word or Logos, from which we also derive the term for study. So that Christology is really Logo-logy, the study of study, the word of the Word of God.” For Bonhoeffer, Christ is the unified field theory which Einstein so confounded his brain upon. Not only is Christ the center of Bonhoeffer’s theology, He is the center of all things and the very source of knowledge. He goes on, “Thus Christology is self-evidently the science, because it is concerned with the Logos… With its claim to be the discipline par excellence and centre of its own space, Christology remains unique. It has no proof by which it can demonstrate transcendence of its subject.” Essentially, he understands Christology to be distinctive in that it is the study of the self-existent source by which all other subjects of inquiry exist and are sustained. There is no standard by which the Logos may be measured. There is no control experiment which could be done to test the claims of Christology. It is an eternal presupposition. He continues, “Only a discipline which understands itself in the sphere of the Church is able to grasp the fact that Christology is the centre of all disciplines. It is the unknown and hidden centre of the university of learning.” Here is the foundation of Bonhoeffer’s Christology; it is a unique field in that it is superior to all other fields of study, because it is the study of knowledge itself. Additionally, it is a field which may not ever be fully exhausted by models of human logic, there are no methods by which humankind could fully define the Christ, He exists as a supreme and everlasting presumption.
That Christ is ultimately unknowable in a rational sense is the second part of the foundation of Bonhoeffer’s Christology. Indeed, he asserts that the Christ usurps and overthrows human reason by His very nature. His existence does not fit into any framework of human logic and effectively negates its usefulness for ultimate answers. He refers to Christ as the “Counter-Logos”. It is counter to human logos, or the system of scientific inquiry and resulting cosmology that mankind has developed over the millennia. Bonhoeffer states, “Classification is no longer a possibility, because the existence of this Logos spells the end of the human logos. Only the question, ‘Who are you?’, will do… This is the question with which Christology is concerned.” He explains how this question of “who” is for the purpose of humanity’s transcendence. By questioning that which cannot be defined and contained within our boxes of rational comprehension, the walls of these said boxes are broken down and we are forced to develop a new way of thinking and being, a transcendent way. Bonhoeffer contrasts this question with the understandably human question of “How are you possible?” He refers to this as a “godless question” and the “serpent’s question”. The human logos which Christ overturns is one which would have all things in existence fit into its narrow cosmological mold. It brings these things into its mold by asking of it, “How are you possible?” Christ the Logos responds to this question, “I Am.” Simply by being he negates the serpent’s question and causes humanity to transcend and grow closer unto their creator. Considering these two integral ideas, Bonhoeffer’s Christology is built upon the understanding that Christ confounds humanity’s ability to know him by intellect alone, and that His being is in the center of all theology, knowledge, and existence itself. It unites it all together and by Him it is sustained. From this, the inspiring structure of Bonhoeffer’s understanding of Christ may be built.
The first pillar with which to build is the notion that Christ is present. For Bonhoeffer, Jesus is present because He is the “Crucified and risen one”. His presence is not an abstract historical residue, it is literally the risen Jesus of Nazareth, who walked and performed miracles millennia ago in Palestine. In Christ the Center he states, “Jesus is the Christ present as the Crucified and risen one. That is the first Christological statement. His presence can be understood in space and time, here and now. It belongs to the definition of the person.” This presence is experienced in the Church as a community of faith, and it assumes that He is the risen one because only one who has risen can be felt here and now. He rejects the notions of some modern theology that the presence of Jesus is felt as a force of history, and indirect power resulting from the actions of the past. For Bonhoeffer, the presence is definitely that of the historical Jesus Christ of Nazareth. He continues, “Even as the risen one, Jesus Christ remains the man Jesus in time and space. Because Jesus Christ is man, he is present in time and space; because Jesus Christ is God, he is eternally present. The presence of Christ requires the statement, ‘Jesus is fully man’; but it also requires the other statement, ‘Jesus is fully God’.” The presence of Christ is not only the presence of the man Jesus who lived in Palestine, but it is also the presence of God in that man. For Bonhoeffer, the two are one and this where Christology begins, at the presence of this unified God-Man. “The two factors cannot be isolated, because they are not separable. God in timeless eternity is not God; Jesus limited by time is not Jesus.” So it must be understood that Bonhoeffer’s Christology is the study of the continuing presence of Jesus of Nazareth as a unified being with the creator God, fully man and fully divine.
Bonhoeffer’s Christology is ecclesiastical. For him, Christ is the church and the church is Christ. What can be said of Christ should also be applied to the Church and vice versa. In Ethics, Bonhoeffer explains, “The Church is nothing but a section of humanity in which Christ has really taken form. What we have here is utterly and completely the form of Jesus Christ and not some other form side by side with him. The Church is the man in Christ, incarnate, sentenced and awakened to new life”. He understands the Church to be something far different from what the church means in human society at large. It is not youth services, bake sales, Christian music concerts, or quaint brick buildings. It is not the Pope, the Sovereign of England, or the Southern Baptist Convention. The Church is the presence of Christ on Earth. She is not associated with any kind of religious institution, but she is for the whole of mankind and everything that the human race finds itself involved in. He goes on, “What matters in the Church is not a religion but the form of Christ, and its taking form amidst a band of men. If we allow ourselves to lose sight of this, even for an instant, we inevitably relapse into that programme-planning for the ethical and religious shaping of the world…” The presence of Christ is not necessarily some amorphous and mystical idea which one must believe in or be punished, but is to be found in the men and women on Earth who follow Christ as a lifestyle. For Bonhoeffer, Christianity was not becoming religionless but had always been that way. The numerous religious institutions which had existed under the name of Jesus Christ were nothing but an attempt to answer the serpent’s question of “How?” To answer the question “Who?” God became human in order that humanity might grow into its own rightful identity. Man does not become God, rather God became a man. He explains, “In Christ there was re-created the form of man before God. It was not an outcome of the place or the time… but quite simply of the life of mankind as such, that mankind at this point recognized its image and its hope. What befell Christ had befallen mankind. It is a mystery, for which there is no explanation, that only a part of mankind recognize the form of their redeemer.” So, it can be seen that for Bonhoeffer, Christ reveals the nature of His being by incarnating in human flesh and then taking form in the Earth through his Church, thus resulting in the human race growing into its proper identity. Through this small band of religionless saints, Christ maintains a presence on this planet and reveals his uniqueness and supremacy, resulting in a transcendent process for humanity.
Building upon the understanding of Christ’s presence in this world as the Church, Bonhoeffer has much to say about the effect this unity must have on those who are having their identity revealed in Him. It is an integral part of his Christology that Christ has a profound impact on those who follow Him. In his work, Jesus Christ and the Essence of Christianity, Bonhoeffer explains, “He did not go to the cross to ornament and embellish our life. If we wish to have him, then he demands the right to say something decisive about our entire life.” Here it can be seen that Bonhoeffer’s Christology is both a macro and an individualistic perspective. Christ truly is the all encompassing alpha and omega, concerned with the whole of history while also impacting the day to day lives of His followers. Bonhoeffer sees His impact as being one which issues an ultimatum to the potential follower, “We do not understand him if we arrange for him only a small compartment in our spiritual life. Rather, we understand our spiritual life only if we then orientate it to him alone or give him a flat, ‘No.’” Here again, the concept of Christ’s influence being one which develops the individual’s true identity is explained. The potential saint must either reject him completely or allow him to reveal the true nature of their spiritual lives. What sort of nature does Christ reveal to his saints? For Bonhoeffer, Christ reveals a spiritual life which is heavily characterized by suffering. Just as Jesus suffered while he walked in Palestine as a man, so should his Church suffer as his bodily presence in the world. Bonhoeffer explains this well in his famous work The Cost of Discipleship, “Although Christ has fulfilled all the vicarious suffering necessary for our redemption, his suffering on Earth is not finished yet. He has, in his grace, left a residue of suffering for his church to fulfill in the interval before his second coming.” It is by the grace of Christ that the saints are to suffer. It is a part of the transcendent process which being a part of the body of Christ engenders. He goes on, “The form of Christ incarnate makes the church into the Body of Christ. All the sorrows of mankind fall upon that form, and only through that form can they be borne. The Earthly form of Christ is the form that died on the cross. The image of God is the image of Christ crucified. It is to this image that the life of the disciples must be conformed: in other words, to his death. The Christian life is a life of crucifixion.” So, to be a partaker in the image of Christ, one must not leave any part of their self untouched by his presence, it is an “all or nothing” agreement. Additionally, one can expect to have the presence of Christ compel them to suffer that they may be conformed to his image. The suffering of the Church is the suffering of Christ for all of mankind. What does this suffering look like in a practical sense? Bonhoeffer understands that the Church is functioning as the body of Christ when it suffers with those who are exploited by the Earthly powers that be, just as he was oppressed and executed by the Roman powers.
The question then becomes, “Why is Christ?” what is the purpose of all this incarnation and suffering throughout the ages. Is it simply so some high-minded simians may unite with the universal force? That is not a reason. The reason for Bonhoeffer is love. Christ loves humanity and the world. He does not love the purified world to come after some fiery eschatological fulfillment of the Revelation. He does not love the humans perfected and fully united with their creator, he loves, “…the real world. What we find abominable in man’s opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, the real man, the real world, this is for God the ground for unfathomable love, and it is with this that He unites Himself utterly.” Christ is the unifying force behind all and his prime motivation is love for the world and its inhabitants. The engine of the teleology of time and space is the love of God. He continues, “God secures his love against any suggestion that it is not genuine or that it is doubtful or uncertain, for He Himself enters into the life of man as man and takes upon Himself and carries in the flesh the nature, the character, and the guilt and suffering of man. Out of love for man God becomes man.” This carries profound implications for Christ’s body. The motivation of the Church is to be one with the motivation of Christ. The Church is to love the real world and imperfect man. The institutional church often models itself as a social club or an elite order, but this is contrary to the picture of love which Bonhoeffer expounds. The body of Christ suffers with the real men and women in this world who suffer. The Church must suffer the oppression of corporations and dictators along with those of the proletariat. The Church must identify and unite with those whose homes and families are destroyed by rampant militarism and neo-colonialism. These are the real men and women for whom Christ suffers, living in the imperfect world which Christ loves completely and without blemish.
In his Christology, Bonhoeffer was not attempting to formulate a new system of doctrine or start a new movement. He saw that Christ was sufficient. Rather, he was trying to redirect the attention of the saints back to Christ, away from human attempts at order or perfection. In his speech ‘The Church is Dead”, Bonhoeffer stated, “In all that we say and do we are concerned with nothing but Christ and his honor among people. Let no one think that we are concerned with our own cause, with a particular view of the world, a definite theology or even with the honor of the church. We are concerned with Christ and nothing else. Let Christ be Christ.” This is interesting because the writings have gone on to inspire several social and political movements all over the world. He is hailed as a prophet and founding father of the post-modern church, liberation theology, and civil rights movements. This was not a part of Bonhoeffer’s Christology. Christ alone was all that was needed for the work of Christ to be accomplished. However, that did not mean that the saints were to be found holed up in some silent monastery, wasting away the days in trancelike prayer, the body of Christ was to be found everywhere. In Christ the Center he states, “The proletarian does not say, ‘Jesus is God’. But when he says, ‘Jesus is a good man’, he is saying more than the bourgeois says when he repeats, ‘Jesus is God’. God is for him something belonging to the Church. But, Jesus can be present on the factory floor as the socialist; at a political meeting, as an idealist; in the worker’s world, as a good man.” Christ does not belong to any particular movement, but His presence is to be found anywhere a person perceives Him. As was explored above, Christ loves men and women in all their imperfections. He literally meets them where they are at draws them unto him, irrespective of any human philosophy or dictum. In this same passage, Bonhoeffer also explores how the institutional church can hinder the witness of Christ by allying itself with a particular movement or ideology. He goes on, “…it is easy to depict Christ as allied with the Church of the bourgeois society. Then the worker sees no reason any more to give Jesus a qualified place or status. The Church is one with the stupefied and oppressive capitalist system. But at this very point the working class may distinguish between Jesus and his Church; he is not the guilty party. Jesus, yes; Church, no!” Jesus must not be pegged down by any institutional system of doctrine. These are chains which keeps Him from flowing freely in the world, ministering His presence where He will. He is sufficient for His own work.
Bonhoeffer’s Christology is universal. He sees Christ as a uniting force for all of humanity. He justifies this position by analyzing the way in which Christ entered into history, as a tramp and a vagabond. He states, “He enters it [creation] in such a way as to hide himself in it in weakness and not to be recognized as God-Man. He does not enter in kingly robes of a morphe theou (Greek, ‘form of God’). His claim, which he as God-Man raises in this form, must provoke contradiction and hostility. He goes incognito, as a beggar among beggars, as an outcast among outcasts, as despairing among the despairing, as dying among the dying.” By entering this way, Christ enters on the ground floor of human social status and identifies Himself with the lowest of the low. Bonhoeffer further elaborates on how this relates to a universal ministry in Christ, “He became Man even as we are men. In his humanity and his lowliness we recognize our own form. He has become like a man, so that men should be like him. And in the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God. Henceforth, any attack even on the least of men is an attack on Christ, who took the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all that bears a human form.” The work of Christ is the central even of history, it is the fulcrum of time and space, and it hinges upon God becoming a Man so that all might be restored unto him. This is the grand picture of Bonhoeffer’s Christology. Motivated by an unfathomable love, Christ is working to bring the entire human race unto him, and this work is not capable of being defeated by any worldly doctrine or ideology. He continues, “Through fellowship and communion with the incarnate Lord, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time we are delivered from that individualism which is the consequence of sin, and retrieve our solidarity with the whole human race.” The ministry of Christ should destroy the walls and partitions that believers have set up in their minds and hearts. Those things which are found to be repulsive by the human mind are to be conquered by the love of Christ and brought into communion. There should not be prejudices based on race, nationality, politics, or any other trivial worldly thing found within the body of Christ. In Christ, the Church has solidarity with the whole human race.
The last major part of the Christology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is the removal of the abstract and ineffective from the thinking about Jesus. He was interested in a Christology which could be put to use, one which caused the Church to engage the world Christ came to save. He, “…eschews that abstract Christology so characteristic of church efforts to deaden the impact of Jesus’ word by pushing him behind protective layers of dogmatic wordiness, clearly enunciated legalisms, and triumphalist slogans.” It was not the role of the Church to establish a clear and distinct doctrine, like so much legalese, but to be the living Christ in this world. Jesus did not come to love high-minded ideas and well parsed dogma; he came to love people in all their imperfections. That is the role of the Church in Bonhoeffer’s Christology, as the Church and Christ are one. He writes in Ethics, “Christ does not teach an abstract ethic that must be carried out, cost what it may. Christ was not essentially a teacher, a lawgiver, but a human being, a real human being like us. Accordingly, Christ does not want us to be first of all pupils, representatives and advocates of a particular doctrine, but human beings, real human beings before God.” The Church is not sitting under Jesus Christ as a pupil sat under Socrates, it is not here to articulate the most logically consistent theology, It is here to do what Jesus did, to continue his ministry. The Church is here to love and heal and minister the love of God to all people and all of creation. He continues, “Christ did not, like an ethicist, love a theory about the good; he loved real people. Christ was not interested, like a philosopher, in what is “generally valid,” but in that which serves real concrete human beings.” This is the greatest strength of Bonhoeffer’s Christology and Christianity in general, it is not trying to win the game of which philosophy is the most consistent. It is simply the act of loving and caring for all people everywhere. This is what toppled the Roman Empire and this is what will topple Babylon.
The Christology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an attempt to wrest the association of Christ away from the institutional church and give it back to Christ himself. He saw that the social constructs of the old world were falling apart and passing away, he did not want to see the presence of Christ in the world pass away from the same fate. In a time of upheaval, when people are questioning their way of life and social morays, it is easy to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Bonhoeffer was pointing out the baby in the tub before the water was tossed. Building on this, he showed that Christ is present in His Church on the Earth, the actual and risen Jesus Christ of Nazareth, fully God and fully man. Not the institutional church, but the group of saints united by their absolute allegiance to Jesus Christ as God and savior. Through these saints, who are inspired by the life and presence of Jesus Christ to live their lives differently from the values of the world around them, who are inspired to suffer along with the downtrodden and oppressed, Jesus Christ ministers to all of humanity and to the whole world throughout all history. Through these ministrations, he is bringing humankind through a transcendent process that will result in relationship and communion with God the Father in Christ. Jesus Christ through His church is questioned and misunderstood in every generation. His passion play is acted out again and again in every generation and Christ is crucified again and again through the suffering of His church. The purpose of this grand cosmic drama is the unfathomable love of God through Christ. God is in love with humanity and seeks our redemption and transcendence; this is the engine of time and space, the drive behind the teleology of human history. His church is not be the presence of Christ by being the best philosophers or the best intellectual theologians, but by doing what Christ did. The Church is to love mankind and this world with all of its faults and imperfections, in this way it can minister the unfathomable love of the Creator. Jesus Christ is not interested in any particular social movement or doctrinal argument, he is interested in bringing as many into the fold as will come, and loving them perfectly. This effort of Christ’s is a universal one. By incarnating in the flesh of a man, and not some kingly or wealthy man but a vagabond, God restored the dignity of the entire human race and made his plan of love a universal one. There are no walls of prejudice or hatred in the true Church of Jesus, the love of God destroys them all. This is not an abstract idea meant to fill thick books of theology, this is a concrete love meant to be acted out in the real world which is treasured by Christ and His Church. This is a presence which inspires the Church to engage the world around them. This is who Jesus Christ is. This is the Christology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Sam Bolton - November 10th, 2012
Sources:
- Cullmann, Oscar. The Christology of the New Testament. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1959
- Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, and Eberhard Bethge. Christ the Center. 1st ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
- Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Ethics. New York: Macmillan, 1955.
- Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Geffrey B. Kelly, and F. Burton Nelson. "The Essence of Christianity." In A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1990.
- Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship. New York: Macmillan, 1959.
- Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Geffrey B. Kelly, and F. Burton Nelson. "The Church is Dead." In A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1990.
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