Bonhoeffer's Human Jesus & Ethics Against the Tyrannies of Whiteness
Lecture notes & some questions for a theology of liberation
Hello again friends,
The day after the election I was in the strange position of giving a brief lecture on some passages from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s magnum opus Ethics for a class I’m taking at Harvard Divinity School. As a prepare some forthcoming posts, I thought this might be appropriate to share and interesting to at least some of you.
Bonhoeffer’s Ethics is disappointingly relevant right now. While we are obviously not fully in the depths of Nazism, Bonhoeffer gives us a direct window into one theologian’s attempt to work through the ethics stakes for Christian members of a nation turning toward virulent nationalism. Like most Lutherans, Bonhoeffer was trained to believe that obeying “secular authority” was an essential element of the ethical Christian life. And yet it was clear from the events of history unfolding around him that such obedience could no longer be squared with the responsibilities of someone reconciled and conformed to the person of Jesus Christ.
The passages I presented on trace the build up to Bonhoeffer’s big claims later in the book. He is developing the theological foundation he thinks is necessary and justified for resisting a government, and, specifically, rejecting the ideology and politics of a fascist nationalist political movement oriented around antisemitic white supremacy rooted in some particularly German lineages. To do this work, he needs to go to bat with a lot of the German philosophical and theological tradition that came before him. So while he isn’t always saying it explicitly, many of his passages are more or less direct contradictions of major thinkers from his culture. Top among these are Immanuel Kant, Frederick Nietzsche, more subtly Soren Kierkegaard, and Luther particularly as he was being used by German churches who did not join the Confessing Church’s rejection of Nazism on bases of a privatized religion and unquestioned allowance to governing authorities. So a lot of what I had to say was tracing how Bonhoeffer’s writing was riffing with those earlier thinkers and either rejecting (Kant) or redirecting (Nietzsche) their ideas through his central idea: God who became human in history in Jesus Christ.
I find this beautiful theology. For me, there are many resources here. And yet, the questions I left the class with as we moved into a discussion was: if Bonhoeffer is trying to develop a theology that works through the theological error of fascism, and if fascism is one historical manifestation of the theological error of whiteness, then does he succeed? Does he get us where we need to go for a theology of liberation? I’ll say a bit more on that, and point to the work a scholar who has given me great guidance through this text and these questions, down at the end.
Last note. I wrote this between the hours of 7:30pm and 2:00am the night of Tuesday, November 5. You can probably tell.
Also, if you’re new here: welcome friend! Strange times we meet one another in. If you’re still trying to figure out what this newsletter is about, this is a good place to start.
GOD: BIG IF TRUE
“The reality of God is not just another idea.” (54)1
God claims, in whatever direction, are the ultimate “big if true.”
If God exists and exists with so much omnipotent, omniscient sovereignty that God “can neither be mistaken in his foreknowledge nor hindered in his predestination” as Luther says, well, first of all, you probably don’t have free will and you’re going to hell unless God personally does something about it, but what’s more you live beneath a social order God ordained and in which you must serve your station. [Luther]
If God exists and exists as the transcendental judge and lawgiver inaccessible behind the numinous haze through which only winks of sublimity offer sensations, then we should get on with the work of sense and sensibility to articulate a universal set of rational moral laws and get on with our duty. [Kant]
If God exists and exists as the absolute who makes impossible promises and poses impossible, even abhorrent tests to those who would aspire to be God’s faithful few, then truly it will require exceptional individuals willing to set ethical obligations aside and make the leap into the absurd. [Kierkegaard]
If God, however, does not exist, if rather God has been killed in the materialist rush of modernity, a rush at once so frenetic, so self-assured, and so banal that we did not even notice we slayed the Great Divine, then this too is big if true. The idols will come crashing down, demanding we leave behind the shadows flickering in the cave, that we return ourselves to the earth and grasp it with both fists, and take hold of ourselves amidst the abyssal terror of a myth-drained world where we must either collapse in despair or laugh, weep, and dance our way toward the creation of something new each day the sun rises. [Nietzsche]
But perhaps, if after all these things have been tried and found wanting, and you wake up one morning in the ruins of a nation nursing the wounds of defeat, wrecked by debt, seething in resentments, obsessed with scapegoats, inventing an eschatological national and phenotype-al destiny for itself, deifying the worst of its leaders and latched onto totalizing logics so vehemently that they have pursued them into the abhorrent absurdities of a final solution, perhaps in such times the question must be posed differently.
Perhaps, as James Baldwin put it, we must begin again.
THE CHRISTOLOGICAL PRISM
“Christian faith perceives this in the fact that the reality of God has revealed itself and witnessed to itself in the middle of the real world. In Jesus Christ the reality of God has entered into the reality of this world. The place where the questions about the reality of God and about the reality of the world are answered at the same time is characterized solely by the name: Jesus Christ….In Christ we are invited to participate in the reality of God and the reality of the world at the same time, the one not without the other. The reality of God is disclosed only as it places me completely into the reality of the world. But I find the reality of the world always already borne, accepted, and reconciled in the reality of God. That is the mystery of the revelation of God in the human being Jesus Christ. The Christian ethic asks, then, how this reality of God and of the world that is given in Christ becomes real in our world.” (54-55)
So you walk into this desolated valley, the realm of death, the place they call Snake’s Death, and find there the ugliest man – the one who killed God.2
Now what if that man, the least of these, he who was most despised among men, he who moved even Zarathustra’s heart to pity, was in fact the very site, the very broken body, the very human in which God entered creation and declared an unabashed YES?
What if it is there, in the imminent vulnerability of a guilty and despised man that every old dichotomizing definition of God and the human is put to death so that a new creation can be born? What if, in becoming human, it is God who made the leap into the absurd on our behalf? What if instead of asking us to rob the life of an innocent, God became the guilty whose life was freely given?3 And what if in that incarnation, death, and resurrection the idol of death named God did indeed die so that humans could live, no longer trying to be gods, but able simply to live as fully human?4
What if instead of needing to overcome the human as she is, we were embraced: “borne, accepted, and reconciled.” What if in looking at the ugliest man in the world you were already looking at the mystery of the revelation of God who reveals the truth of God that brings crashing down all the religious idols and dogmatic propositions on which our failed attempts at faith, and the good, and the beautiful were based? And what if in that man we found the truth of the human, not as a bridge that must be overcome but as a river into which we can wade, here from this very bank and in this very moment at which we encounter her?5 Truly here we have been returned fully to the earth and in affirming her flesh we have found God all over again.
UNIVERSALITY, PARTICULARLY, & SITUATIONAL DYNAMISM
“The form of Christ is one and the same at all times and in all places. The church of Christ is also One throughout all generations. Still, Christ is not a principle according to which the whole world must be formed.” (98)
We are in the river, friends. A river into which none are coerced, but into which all are invited to submerge and be cleansed. All are welcome to wade into these waters, and in some sense, all are always already embraced by the waters; in some sense, it seems, the river is always already flowing through us all.
And yet are we not now encountering the perennial problems? Can a river water all shores without washing them away? Is it possible to hold a universal without totalizing with it, without making it hegemonic? Must something transcendent be immutable or can it be tender enough to mold to our touch? So we have here the problem of the relation between the divine and the human. But we also have, articulated within or alongside that problem, perhaps not fully in view, the challenge of relations between human and human across lines of difference. So we are also pressed to ask what is required if communion is to be formed without simultaneously imposing dominium?
BEYOND ABSTRACTION : INTO REALITY
“Christ does not proclaim a system of that which would be good today, here, and at all times. 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. 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. Christ was not concerned about whether ‘the maxim of an action’ could become ‘a principle of universal law,’ but whether my action now helps my neighbor to be a human being before God. God did not become an idea, a principle, a program, a universally valid belief, or a law; God became human. That means that the form of Christ, though it certainly is and remains one and the same, intends to take form in real human beings, and thus in quite different ways. Christ does not abolish human reality in favor of an idea that demands to be realized against all that is real. Christ empowers reality, affirming it as the real human being and thus the ground of all human reality. Formation according to the form of Christ includes, therefore, two things: that the form of Christ remains one and the same, not as a general idea but as the one who Christ uniquely is, the God who became human, was crucified, and is risen; and that precisely because of the form of Christ the form of the real human being is preserved, so that the real human being receives the form of Christ.” (98-99)
In Jesus Christ God has appeared – neither as immutable judge [Luther], nor transcendent law [Kant], nor demander of the absurd [Kierkegaard], nor as the deceased teacher of a slave morality of good and evil [Nietzsche] – but as a human being.
Here are God’s desires for us articulated through the humanity of Jesus:
To become real human beings.
To become real human beings before God.
To grapple with whether our actions in this moment help our neighbor to be a human being before God.
It is precisely because God becomes human in a particular human being named Jesus that we are affirmed in our own particular human becoming under the sign of our own names. Thus the universal is always only expressible, not through a maxim, but through the particularity of our bodies in history, facing our neighbor, wrestling with what it means to non-exclusively affirm human life.
To impose a universal everywhere always in the same way is to destroy what is real.6 And what is real is precisely what God embraced in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Universal maxims thus require the abolition of that which God affirms while reifying orders God would abolish – such maxims spell the death of life instead of the death of death. Christian ethics, through the human life of Jesus through whom we see clearly both God and humanity, is a yes to life in every particularity through which it expresses itself in each of our human lives.
DOING ETHICS IN THIS PARTICULAR HISTORICAL REALITY
“Thereby we are turned away from an abstract ethic and toward a concrete ethic. We can and should speak not about what the good is, can be, or should be for each and every time, but about how Christ may take form among us today and here. The attempt to say what is good once and for all always has failed from within. Either the statements became so formal and general that they no longer had any significance with regard to content or one got caught in the enterprise of taking up and elaborating all conceivable contents in order to say beforehand for every conceivable case what is good.” (99)
We are placed objectively by our history into a particular context of experience, responsibility, and decision, from which we cannot withdraw without ending up in abstraction.” (100)
Ethics as formation, then, is the venture of speaking about the form of Christ taking form in our world neither abstractly nor casuistically, neither programmatically nor pure reflectively. Here we must risk making concrete judgements and decisions.” (101)
On that day when we wake up to a world gone mad, when the despisers of humanity have willed their way to power, what then shall we do?
To participate in Christian ethics is to take a risk. It is risky because our action cannot be deduced from an abstract formula. Our response must emerge from the more difficult terrain of our own human particularities and the complex matrix of relational particularities in which we are enmeshed, recognizing that both of these are held and reconfigured within the God made human.
As we make these risks, Bonhoeffer tells us, we act from and toward the God made human in Jesus, and in that process we find ourselves becoming formed into the image and likeness of God revealed in the human being named Jesus.
Christian ethics thus arises when we sit across from the tear stained faces of the other, wholly present to the violent absurdities of our times, and risk an action that affirms our own humanity and the humanity of the other in the human Christ.
A Question to Consider:
Bonhoeffer has led us into history. His but also ours, since the two are always joined. Bonhoeffer shows that the historical concrete he has in mind is his contemporary Germany. In my own words, therefore, the history of Bonhoeffer’s time is (a) the story of Fascism (b) as an expression of whiteness (c) predicated particularly in violent contradiction to a particular other: the Jew.
To pose my question, I want to bring Bonhoeffer’s riff – “God become human in Jesus” — next to another line from his contemporary Howard Thurman. Just a few years after Bonhoeffer was trying to secretly write Ethics in Nazi Germany, Thurman was reflecting on the meaning of Jesus for another historical manifestation of whiteness: Jim Crow segregation and white supremacist terrorism in the United States. So in his famous book Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman proposed a similar but crucially different formula: “We begin with the simple historical fact that Jesus was a Jew.”
So if the theological error of fascism is rooted in the theological era of race – which is tangled up in the problematics we noted earlier, that of the divine/human relation, the human/human relation or the problem of difference, and the universal/particular relation – my question is:
Can Bonhoeffer’s attempt to theologically overcome the ethically calamities of his time be successful on the grounds of his riff “the God become human?” Or does this problem require a deeper articulation of the very particular site of Jesus’ humanity: that of a poor, colonized Jew?
Final Thoughts
If you’re interested in continuing to explore that question, in addition to HIGHLY recommending Thurman’s book, I’d point you to the work of Willie Jennings in The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race and J. Kameron Carter’s book Race: A Theological Account. Both of these scholars identify the pre-1492 racialization of Jews in European Christendom and the theological problem of supersessionism (where the Church supersedes the role of Israel as God’s elect and chosen people/race) as the intellectual roots of the modern concepts of race. Bonhoeffer hasn’t fully uncovered that problem. So while there is so much worth working with and taking forward from him, we still need to go beyond his thought in the ways Thurman, Jennings, and Carter are showing us if we want to move toward liberation.
In recent years, J. Kameron Carter has taken on the same passages from Ethics that I look at above. His arguments are always dense, but if you want to hear an absolutely brilliant thinker work through these questions, check out his lectures in the two videos below.
Page numbers are from the critical addition of Ethics, Volume 6 of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works’s series
See Thus Spoke Zarathustra (TSZ), Part IV: “The Ugliest Man.”
The leap into the absurd and taking the life of an innocent are both references to Kierkegaard, the former being one of his famous saying, the later alluding to his interpretation of the story of Abraham’s almost sacrifice of Isaac.
Reference to Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols and some ideas in TSZ.
In Zarathustra’s opening speech, he says “man is a bridge” with the passing over being the work of becoming an overman (though there are complicated ways in which plunging into the abyss may be the way across the bridge, but that’s beyond the scope here).
These references to maxims and universal ethics is pointing to Kant’s categorical imperative, which Bonhoeffer believes fails in the complexifying light of God becoming human and the responsibilities that arise from concrete reality and relationships.