I just recently purchased George Hunsinger’s book, a book I’d read before (via library copy), Disruptive Grace: Studies in the theology of Karl Barth. In his chapter on the Barmen declaration he gets into some of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writings; in particular he engages with six theses Bonhoeffer offered on observations he made about Christianity in America and its lack of ‘Reformation’ and/or Confessional thinking—i.e. his essay: Protestantism without Reformation. In this post we will engage with Bonhoeffer’s sixth thesis as Hunsinger quotes it directly from Dietrich.

Before we get directly into the quote I wanted to preface things this way: I have grown up my whole life in the North American evangelical church. My background is Conservative Baptist (my dad being a retired CBA pastor and church planter), and then later (out of high school) I got into the Calvary Chapel movement (Costa Mesa, CA) for awhile. All of this to note that my upbringing was pretty normal evangelical fare, and attendant to that, what Bonhoeffer observed as an “outsider,” is more than spot on, more than fitting in regard to my own experience growing up in this American religion and tradition. Because of my exposure to Karl Barth, Thomas Torrance, and in reality, the broader and catholic tradition of the church, my eyes have been “opened,” so to speak to the realities that Bonhoeffer so presciently noticed upon his visits and stays in the United States.

With my own background noted, let’s hear directly from Bonhoeffer, and then I will offer some further reflections. Bonhoeffer writes:

American theology and the American church as a whole have never been able to understand the meaning of “criticism” by the Word of God and all that signifies. Right to the last they do not understand that God’s “criticism” touches every religion, the Christianity of the churches and the sanctification of Christians, and that God has founded his church beyond religion and beyond ethics. A symptom of this is the general adherence to natural theology. . . . But because of this, the person and work of Jesus Christ, must for theology, sink into the background and in the long run remain misunderstood, because it is not recognized as the sole ground of radical judgment and radical forgiveness.[1]

To be clear, Bonhoeffer’s reference was made in regard, not to Fundamentalist Christianity (which he thought of as an idiosyncratic aberration), but to what we might consider mainline Christianity of the sort we might find in the Niebuhr brothers and/or at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Nevertheless, insofar as Fundamentalist Christianity imbibes the same ‘spirit’ of this type of American religion, which I think it does in many ways, then his critique and observation equally applies across the board.

When Bonhoeffer refers to ‘natural theology’ we might think of any theological paradigm that lends credence to theological thinking that is overly concerned with the “self;” so any type of Christianity that is given to overly pietistic sensibilities, or theologies that rely on analogizing God’s being with human being (i.e. analogia entis); or more to the point (of Bonhoeffer’s observations): any type of theology that is funded by ‘turn to the subject’ thinking that we might most typically associate with Schleiermacher and “Liberal theology.”

I think Bonhoeffer’s critique is even more fitting than it was when he made these observations in the early 20^th century. Indeed, we have grown up, as it were, as mainliners and evangelicals in such a way that the seeds that he was critiquing, back then, have had the chance to blossom and go to seed to the ruin of so many Christians across the board. We say we adhere to the Word of God, but I would contend that we have, instead, captured God’s Word in such a way that it reflects the projections of our own wants and desires; whether that be to maintain our cultural warrior identities, political identities, stations in society, or what have you. The Word of God, in all of its disruptive reality in Jesus Christ, has really lost its ability to contradict us, and put us in our place coram Deo (before God).

Indeed, we are all culturally located and conditioned; but that doesn’t mean God’s Word isn’t powerful enough to break in on “our cultures” and disorient them to the point that his heavenly Kingdom has the capacity to restructure things from his vantage point. I don’t believe as evangelical and mainline churches that we have really given God’s Word the place it should have in the body lives of our churches. And it never will have its rightful place if we don’t repent and cry out in mercy to him; if we don’t realize how dialogical the whole Christian relationship to God in Jesus Christ is.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Protestantism without Reformation,” in No Rusty Swords, ed. Edwin H. Robertson (London: Fontana Library, 1970), 88-113 cited by George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2000), 71-2.