Theological Journal – February 5 What Dietrich Bonhoeffer (DB) Would Say to the North American Church (1)

Today I begin an eight-part series on what Bonhoeffer would say to the North American Church adapted from my book by that title (available from Amazon btw). It will continue the rest of this week and after the usual Moltmann and Torrance posts beginning next week will continue through it.

   1.  DB’s view of Jesus, and of human beings made in his image, means, “Yes, Cain, we are our siblings keepers.” Corollary: “Lean on me” (Bill Withers)

Cain asks God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen.4:9). According to Bonhoeffer God’s answer is an unequivocal and emphatic “Yes!” And in Jesus Christ God has made this crystal clear.

Molecules Not Billiard Balls

In his first dissertation, Sanctorum Communio (Communion of Saints), Bonhoeffer established a theological baseline that grounds all his subsequent work. “Indeed, its central ideas and basic conceptual structure are so fundamental for his Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison that we have to regard it as formative for his whole theology (Green, Human Sociality:1695). And that baseline is: “God does not desire a history of individual human beings, but the history of the human community. Nor does God want a community which absorbs the individual into itself, but it community of human beings. In God's sight community and individual are present in the same moment and rest upon one another” (Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, 52). 

In other words, Christianly considered, “me” and “we” are mutually related and dependent on one another. This is how God made us because this is how God in Jesus Christ is. In the face of the basic intuition of the West that the individual is primary and intrinsic humanity, Christian theology claims that in Jesus Christ we learn that God has chosen to be with and for humanity forever. Because that is who God is, his nature as love. And in and through Jesus Christ we have been created in God’s image. 

Made to live with and for each other and God, human beings are more like molecules than the typical Western view of ourselves as billiard balls. The latter views sees us as independent, self-made, complete, and self-sufficient in and of ourselves. 

We roll around the table hitting other balls and the rails. These “contacts” redirect our movements and may be beneficial or harmful to us, but in no way add or detract from what we are. Through it all we remain independent, self-made, and self-sufficient.

Christian faith, however, sees human beings as molecule-like, constituted by relationships between various different atoms, their quantity, and the chemical and electrical forces that bind them together.

We are who we are in relationship to God and to one another. It is not too much to say that we are our relationships. We discover our self, our individuality, our spiritual gifts, in this matrix of relationships. Ubuntu philosophy (African) is much closer to this molecule model than our billiard ball model. In it a newborn baby is not a person. People are born without selfhood, growing into it through their relationships and experiences over time. The ‘self’/‘other’ distinction so important to us far less clear in Ubuntu thought. “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am” is the way Kenyan-born philosopher John Mbiti puts it (http://orbitermag.com/articles/descartes-was-wrong/).

And because Jesus Christ is the God who is with us and for us, the center of all reality and all our relationships with one another, DB describes him in this book as “Christ-existing-as-community.” Frank Viola sums it up nicely: “It is in the matrix of Christ as community that we become true human beings. We are joined together in the forgiveness of sins. We are gathered together by the love of God for us and through us in Christ. We are part of Christ together as community under His lordship” (Viola, 2011).

Molecules, not billiard balls!

Bill Withers sings “Lean on me.”  DB says “yes, do! You are you in relation to Jesus and everyone else in him. You are there for each other. Your mantra must be “lean on me.”

Stellvertreter/Stellvertretung

This German word is difficult to translate into English. Since DB makes a big deal of it as a description of Jesus, this is no small matter. Older translations of his work translated it a “deputy/deputyship.” More recent translations render it as “placesharer,” or “vicarious representative.” One scholar claims, 

“In Bonhoeffer’s writings (this word) has a deeper theological connotation— not only of representing others in a distant place where they are not present, but also of stepping into their shoes, entering empathetically into their place, and acting on their behalf with love . . . It connotes being-with-each-other and being-for-each-other, entering into the other’s reality and even into the other’s guilt” (Stassen, A Thicker Jesus:3594-3602).

This “being-with”/“being-for” and the “entering into” are both important to the word’s meaning for DB. But much too cumbersome to squeeze into a translation. Better to use the German Stellvertreter/Stellvertretung and let it bring to mind all these aspects.

Jesus the Stellvertreter. He is God’s heart made flesh for love of us. Jesus made himself unlimitedly liable in our place and unconditionally available for us in God’s stead. That’s what it looks like for God to become human. The gospel accounts of Jesus’ life paint an unforgettable portrait of Jesus the Stellvertreter and his work of Stellvertretung for all humanity. And in him, his church shares his life as Stellvertreter in the world.

The Man for Others and the Church for Others

This is why DB will call Jesus the “Man for Others” and his people the “Church for Others” in his last reflections in Letters and Papers from Prison. In Sanctorum Communio he writes

“vicarious action, is the life-principle of the new mankind. I know, certainly, that I am in a state of solidarity with the other man's guilt, but my dealings with him take place on the basis of the life-principle of vicarious action. Since now Christ bears within him the new life-principle of his church, he is at the same time established as the Lord of the church, that is, his relation to it is that with a 'community' and that of a 'ruler’” (Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio: 1758-1762).

A molecule-like Jesus, intrinsically and inextricably connected to his creatures, similarly molecule-like and connected to him and one another, has gifted us with his “life-principle” of Stellvertretung. That is now our identity and vocation, our raison d’etre. DB reflects Luther here: “For human beings do not live for themselves in this, their mortal body, to operate in it, but for all people on earth; indeed, they live only for others and not for themselves” (The Freedom of a Christian [1520], LW 31:364, trans. altered). Jesus bears our brokenness in his humanity and heals it through his life of love and loyalty to his Father. By his cross that brokenness is judged and redeemed. And in his resurrection his “life-principle” as Stellvertreter becomes ours as well and we recover the humanness God created us for. See below on the “Christological Pattern” for more on this).

In this “participation in the being of Jesus” we find DB’s answer to “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?”

“The experience that a transformation of all human life is given in the fact that ‘Jesus is there only for others.’ His ‘being there for others’ is the experience of transcendence. It is only this ‘being there for others,’ maintained till death, that is the ground of his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. Faith is participation in this being of Jesus (incarnation, cross, resurrection) (DBWE 8: 14313).

It is clear from this that for DB Jesus’ “being there for others” is not a mere humanism, social work, or political activism. Not at all. It is an “experience of transcendence.” That is, it is the very presence of God in our midst. This God, in, with, through, and as this man, in this way, is who Christ is for DB.

DB’s wonderful poem from prison “Christians and Pagans” (DBWE 8:13103) makes his understanding clear as well as its implications for the church.

“Men go to God when they are sore bestead,
Pray to him for succour, for his peace, for bread,
For mercy for them sick, sinning, or dead;
All men do so, Christian and unbelieving.

“Men go to God when he is sore bestead,
Find him poor and scorned, without shelter or bread,
Whelmed under weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead;
Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving.

“God goes to every man when sore bestead,
Feeds body and spirit with his bread;
For Christians, pagan alike he hangs dead,
And both alike forgiving.”

A normal human impulse is to turn to “God” when in trouble or need (stanza 1). We all do it. Some “men,” however, “Christians,” find God among the last and least, “under the trash” as U2 sings it, and stand by him in his suffering (stanza 2). But God, God comes to all of us, feeding and forgiving us, dying (stanza 3).

The first word Bonhoeffer would say to the church in North America is that we have been created and redeemed in and by Jesus Christ to be our siblings’ keepers.