1. Christology as Theological discipline

From Christos and logos, teaching about Christ. Who is Jesus Christ?

First half of first millennium the question assumed great importance, so several church councils. A misconception to assume the NT gives us a single clear doctrine. I will not attempt to take you through the last 2,000 years, so you can sigh in relief.

Nicea in 325, how Christ is to be understood in relation to God the Father. Arius: Christ is created and therefore secondary. “There was a time when he was not.”

Chalcedon in 451. Bonhoeffer refers to it frequently in his Christology lectures: how fully divine and fully human relates to each other. Ousia, both natures, without confusion, division, change, or separation. DB likes this a lot, because precisely with this paradox is it still possible to keep the mystery.

So what we take for granted is neither an epistemological nor theological given, but the result of centuries of thought and discussion.

2. Christology—An Overview.

Moltmann, Feil, Rasmussen etc. view his thought as decisively Christocentric. But it does not mean he does not care about other themes; rather it is the center that relates to everything else. The more fully we confess Christ as Lord, the more we will see all other issues clearly. A letter in 1935 to his nonxn brother: at present there are still some things for which an uncompromising stand is worthwhile: peace, justice, and Christ himself.

Throughout his works, his emphasis on Christology becomes increasingly important. Sanctorum Communio. He completed it at age 21. I am already four years behind. Already Christ existing as community, so he is combining ecclesiology and Christology.

1933 lectures on Christology. Hitler had just become chancellor a few months prior. So in his lectures, we can see a commentary on the social situation. He tries to rid Christology of concepts of the time, and emphasize encounter, presence, and humiliation. The presence is concealed as God took on humanhood. So not incarnation but humiliation, stumbling block, are central. The Christian community should be a stumbling block (in the face of Hitler). Christ has concreteness and relevance through the community.

In Cost of Discipleship, the last chapter speaks of discipleship as conformation to the image of Christ, incarnate, crucified, and glorified. Bethge describes each new approach as combining a more resolute Christ-centeredness with a greater openness to the world.

In Letters and papers from Prison, his theology is in his letter of April 1944 to Bethge: what is bothering me is the question who Christ is for us today.

We may conclude that despite the fact that his theology underwent development and shifting of emphasis, there is continuity, and his Christology is central.

3. Christology as bridge between Cost of Discipleship and Ethics:

Planning for the coup: this obvious tension leaves us with three alternatives:

a. He must have been mistaken in Cost of Discipleship; too fundamentalist.

b. Ethics is way too vague, not concrete enough.

c. Both Cost of Discipleship and Ethics somehow belong together, like two sides of one coin, which look different but intrinsically belong together.

The first alternative rests on a political reading in Discipleship which is seen as apolitical. He had not yet encountered the harsh reality of a political life. This does not take into account that DB was far better informed (via Hans Dohnanyi in the Department of Justice) than others. CD is filled with allusions to the political background. CD is not political naiveté and lack of realism.

Second alternative sees Ethics as dangerously one-sided, failing to take into account the prohibition of killing in CD. But his Ethics says discussing tyrannicide, attempting to develop absolute standards for good and evil, is inadequate. Correspondence with Christ takes the place of such. So reject the second alternative.

Need a systematic path for reconciling the differences. 1944 letter to Bethge says, “Today I can see the dangers of CD, but I still stand by it.”

Glen Stassen said his interpretation of the SMT as triads, with emphasis on the third part: transforming initiative. This does not restrict us from seeing renunciation, but the emphasis is on the initiative, thus opening the way for Bonhoeffer for to take the initiative of a coup. But this seems a bridge built from the outside, connecting them a posteriori. Helpful for us as a device, but does not bridge the two books from inside, as Bonhoeffer saw it.

So I propose a bridge via Christology:

DB’s understanding of love:
God is love (I John). The emphasis is on God. Contra seeing love merely as an attribute of God. The very definition of love is God. But no one knows God unless God reveals himself, which he does in Christ. Moral life consists of participation in reality, in Christ, which means in love. So love becomes a central component in DB’s ethics.

DB says the SMt as proclamation of God’s love incarnate calls the person into the love of God toward others. The origin is the love of God. There is no limit to God’s love, so therefore there is no limit to God’s love seen in humans.

So if the SMT is valid anywhere, it is valid everywhere. This perception of the incarnation as the whole of reality has implications for the concrete Christian life. If the inc is taken seriously, God’s love also takes shape in political action, fighting for security, success, self-assertion, and power (a quote from DB). So don’t need to look outside DB for the bridge.

But can argue that an ethics based on love sounds very vague and thin. But that overlooks that DB does not conceive of love as an autonomous concept, thereby leaving us to act on the basis of our instincts: “what do I feel like loving today?” DB’s Christology as the foundation and root of love is the crucial factor in linking together the two.

The following image illustrates the point and summarizes:

CD and Ethics both focus on Christ, but CD works with a microscope, and Ethics with a macroscopic perspective—the connection between Christ and reality. The Sermon on the Mount is still there, but like binoculars flipped around the other way.

Ellie says CD emphasizes an unreflective obedience, while Ethics emphasizes reflecting rather than mere intuitive ethics. Chrissy says in both books, the reflection should not be evasion. Angela asks if in the SMt, God’s will is clear. In Ethics, it is not so clear, so need time discerning. In reply to my question, Chrissy says DB says in Ethics that the Sermon on the Mount is the revelation of God’s love incarnate.

[I want to ask if this is still completely true, or whether we need a new hermeneutic still to reconcile them. That’s why he affirms the SMT but then backs off from concreteness in numerous places, and especially in the two drafts of History and the Good.]

Glen Stassen — Here is my reply to Chrissy on healing the rift between SMT and Ethics:

My response to Chrissy’s lecture on Christology as the way to bridge CD and Ethics:

Terrrific. I have proposed that we try to publish her paper on which this lecture is based along with a paper that I presented at the AAR, arguing for bridging CD and Ethics by developing his hermeneutic of renunciation for interpreting the SMT to a hermeneutic of renunciation and transforming initiatives. She has agreed. This is our plan.

I think you might enjoy a bit further dialogue.

I agree with Chrissy’s constructive Christological proposal, and I don’t fully agree with her comment that my proposal of a hermeneutic of renunciation and transforming initiatives comes completely from outside Bonhoefffer.

1. Bonhoeffer’s dialectic of no and yes:

• Bonhoeffer’s dialectic of no and yes (216, 218), negation and affirmation (216), renunciation and affirmation (216), death to self and new life in Jesus Christ (215), is highly significant, in light of the problem we identified in his hermeneutics of renunciation in interpreting the Sermon on the Mount. It is like the crucifixion and resurrection: both belong together. His earlier interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount in Cost of Discipleship was dominated by only the first half of the dialectic, the theme of renunciation.
• But in the face of Hitler, we need more than an ethic of renunciation and self-denial; we also need some strong affirmation of the power of life, life in Christ, guiding us in taking initiatives and confronting the evil of the powers and authorities. He is now saying that renunciation and initiative are united in Christ’s death and resurrection, and must be kept together. Separating them “leads to those well-known theories of the autonomous domains of life which are entirely at variance with the Sermon on the Mount” (217). Here the Sermon on the Mount is explicitly affirmed, no longer with a dominant hermeneutic of renunciation, but a hermeneutic of renunciation and empowerment or initiative.
• In one obvious sense my proposal adds something from outside Bonhoeffer: He was not able to develop the transforming initiative hermeneutic fully because he did not know my work, but his renunciation plus affirmation move in Ethics clearly points in that direction. In that sense it is internal to his thought; it is a development of what he was reaching for.

2. The Incarnation unites the Sermon on the Mount and the Secular:

• I am also struck by his recurring emphasis on the incarnation as uniting the Sermon on the Mount and the secular: “In Jesus Christ God and humanity became one, and therefore through Him in the actions of the Christians, ‘secular’ and ‘Christian’ become one also. . . . Jesus Christ is the human and is God in one. . . . The human is accepted in the incarnation of Christ, who was loved, condemned and reconciled in Christ; and God is God become human” (217-18). I have been pointing out how he keeps pointing to the validity of the Sermon on the Mount for obedience in our living in the real world in Ethics. So the Sermon on the Mount itself is a crucial part of the bridge.

3. Developing what he could not complete:

• But he was not able to work out his new pointer to a renunciation plus affirmation hermeneutic in his lifetime. In Ethics, he often affirms the SMT for living, but does not carry it forward into its concrete meaning. Unfinished. I think this may be a clue why he wrote two drafts of History and the Good. The first draft very strongly affirmed the SMT, but he had not yet seen how to interpret it concretely, so it seemed too close to situationism, so he was dissatisfied. I develop what he was pointing to.

4. Concreteness in hermeneutics:

I argue that a strength of his hermeneutic in CD is its concreteness. Within his own method, we need a hermeneutic that interprets the SMT concretely. We dare not reduce the SMt only to love.

5. The concrete shape of love in the real world of the struggle for justice:

Chrissy’s Christological proposal makes love the bridge. I have been emphasizing Christologically incarnational love as eintreten, entering into the center of life, entering into the reality of life in this world. So I strongly agree. I asked Chrissy whether the shape of the love she is proposing needs to be spelled out with some concreteness, and whether the SMT gives much of that concrete content. She agreed. I think that is crucial. Otherwise an ethic of love, without the content spelled out concretely, can degenerate to a thin principle, or a romantic attitude, or a general affirmation that demands little change in us, and thus to amorphous situationism. Most damaging for Bonhoeffer, it can become an inward attitude split off from action for justice, a religious inclination limited to an inward religious realm, not incarnate in the real world of the struggle for justice. See Sunday’s paper on Nigeria. And Paulus’s dissertation on Indonesia.