Category Archives: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Suicide as Self-Deicide, A Theological Thought

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Barth in his continuing development of a Christian Ethic, in this section, has been discussing self-power versus real power, which is God’s. In this development he has arrived at a discussion on suicide. He is taking self-power, in abstraction from God’s power, to entail a pseudo-power (self-power), and reducing it to its logical conclusion; which ironically, is at the heights of illogicality. He refers to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s thinking on this, even as Barth goes on to paraphrase Bonhoeffer’s position.[1]

To the best of my knowledge, the Ethik of D. Bonhoeffer (1949, 111–116) gives us the most cautious statement so far written on this matter. We cannot expect every man at every moment to know from his own experience the meaning of real affliction and assault, “when we are in the greatest distress and do not know which way to turn.” A man assailed and afflicted is hid from all others and sometimes even from himself. He is alone with God, and tortured by the terrible question whether God is really with him and for him, or whether he must regard himself as an atheist, i.e., a man who God has rejected and abandoned. Many theologians and theological moralists do not in practice know properly what affliction is because exegetically, dogmatically and even pastorally they know only too well in theory. In all cases, however, suicide is consciously or unconsciously this final assault and affliction. Even the most confirmed theological moralist ought to see this, and therefore to remember that perhaps he does not finally now what takes place between God and the suicide, nor therefore what is the decision which drives him to this dubious act. Is he really a self-murderer? A readiness to recognise that he may not have been a self-murderer at all is required of all who know what it is to be assailed and afflicted, even if only in theory.[2]

So, a twist. Indeed, suicide represents a complexity. In order to actually go through with a suicide a person must be at such a point of travail, by whatever antecedent and present circumstances, that it seems like the only choice left; the one last choice to take control in the midst of the utter chaos, pain, tribulation of whatever the moment is presenting the person with, and end it all (at least on the side where the visibly and physically seen predominates). I have been at these points myself; whether that be in the years long spiritual battle I had with anxiety, depression, dark nights of the soul; or whether that be at the tail end of my incurable/terminal cancer treatment (being so worn down, in so much pain, that it was starting to seem like “ending it all” might be the way out).

Conversely, as Barth paraphrases and riffs Bonhoeffer, even though it starts to become understandable why someone might feel the ultimate desperation of ending it all, even so, this remains a matter of self-power. It is an appeal to the body of death we inhabit to muster all of its resources and conjure up a solution to the desperation; particularly in the absence of that, in regard to the pastors, the doctors, the psychologists, psychiatrists, so on and so forth. Our frames are but dust, and God in Christ knows that, even experientially; and at heights we cannot begin to imagine. And yet, there are seasons of life when God seems utterly absent, as if he has left us alone to travail the path without the Light of His Lamp for us. And again, like Job, it is at this point that we have come to despair of existence itself. Job’s resolve, even in the face of “curse God and die,” was “though You slay me, yet shall I praise You.” This is the resource, beyond our bodies of death, that God in Christ alone provides for us. It is as we come to realize that we are genuinely participatio Christi, that we are constantly being given over to Christ’s death for us, that the mortal members of our bodies might exemplify Christ’s body in us, that we can have the Jobian resolve. Even so, it is as if we are merely hanging on at that point. The enemy of our souls keeps pushing us to refer to the resource and reserve of our bodies of death, which, as we have noted, concludes in suicide. It is only when we have bought the lie of Deicide, that suicide seems to be the final solution for our personal and individual existences. When we have self-deified, and concluded that the body of death we inhabit, these dusty apparatuses, in the face of tribulation and despair, that the only way forward is self-deicide (as if our body of death is ultimately the only real deity left to turn to).

[1] It isn’t often that you get a Barth paraphrase on Bonhoeffer.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4 §55 [404] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 77.

Finding Ourselves in Scripture’s Reality: With Reference to Dietrich

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John Webster is commenting on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s understanding of our relation to Scripture. It’s not as if we give scripture its ground through imbuing it with our exegetical prowess; no, it’s that our ground is given footing as we find ourselves related to God in Christ through the Scripture’s story. This fits with the point that Webster is driving at, over-all, throughout his little book, that Scripture should be seen as an aspect of soteriology—sanctification in particular. And that Scripture is a part of God’s triune communicative act, ‘for us’; caught up in His Self-revelation itself. In other words, for Webster, as for Bonhoeffer (per Webster), Scripture shouldn’t be framed as a component of our epistemological foundation (wherein we put Scripture in its place, in effect), but Scripture is a mode of God’s gracious speech that acts upon us by the Spirit. And it is through this divine speech, that is grace, that we find ourselves—outside ourselves—in Christ, and thus in the Story of Scripture. This should have the effect of placing us under Scripture (which Luther would call ministerial) versus over Scripture (magisterial)—to simplify. Here’s the quote (a little introduction by Webster, and then a full quote by Bonhoeffer [also, notice the idea of vicariousness that Bonhoeffer appeals to as well]):

More than anything else, it is listening or attention which is most important to Bonhoeffer, precisely because the self is not grounded in its own disposing of itself in the world, but grounded in the Word of Christ. Reading the Bible, as Bonhoeffer puts it in Life Together, is a matter of finding ourselves extra nos in the biblical history:

We are uprooted from our own existence and are taken back to the holy history of God on earth. There God has dealt with us, with our needs and our sins, by means of the divine wrath and grace. What is important is not that God is a spectator and participant in our life today, but that we are attentive listeners and participants in God’s action in the sacred story, the story of Christ on earth. God is with us today only as long as we are there.

Our salvation is ‘from outside ourselves’ (extra nos). I find salvation, not in my own life story, but only in the story of Jesus Christ . . . What we call our life, our troubles, and our guilt is by no means the whole of reality; our life, our need, our guilt, and our deliverance are there in the Scriptures.[1]

[1] John Webster, Holy Scripture, 83 citing Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 62.

*A post originally written in 2011.

On Reading Scripture as a Foreigner

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Reading Holy Scripture is an exceedingly dialogical event. That is to say, reading Scripture takes place in the relationship that co-inheres between the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ for us; it is a con-versational happenstance that reposes in the context of God’s eternal and triune life. This entails that as the Christian reads the Bible they are engaging in an organic and inter-personal contact with the very author of said readings. As Jesus said: He would not leave us as orphans, but send us the Holy Spirit; the Comforter, the come-along-sider who will bring us into all truth; who will magnify the words of Jesus, as those are encountered afresh anew in the canonical spectacles of Holy Writ—in the prosopon (face) of Jesus Christ.

What I am intending to impress in this writing is the fact that reading Holy Scripture involves an exercise that comes from outside of us; that unilaterally encounters and confronts us; that brings us into the Heavenly fellowship of the Son of the Father by the Holy Spirit. It is an event, reading and living Scripture that is, that really only works as we read it within a confessional and relational frame wherein, we are given new life, from the vicarious life of God for us in Jesus Christ. This kicks against reading Scripture as an atomistic, scientific, moribund textbook that only the scholars, the intelligentsia can access. A genuinely Christian reading of Holy Scripture takes the Christian reader from the far country of this world, and places them into the home country of the new creation; and it is within this new creation that the adopted child of God comes to see this world for what it is—and more importantly, to see who in fact God is as disclosed and attested to in Scripture.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers the following insights as a way to think about the aforementioned further:

We are uprooted from our own existence and are taken back to the holy history of God on earth. There God has dealt with us, with our needs and our sins, by means of the divine wrath and grace. What is important is not that God is a spectator and participant in our life today, but that we are attentive listeners and participants in God’s action in the sacred story, the story of Christ on earth. God is with us today only as long as we are there.[1]

Our salvation is ‘from outside ourselves’ (extra nos). I find salvation, not in my life story, but only in the story of Jesus Christ . . . What we call our life, our troubles, and our guilt is by no means the whole of reality; our life, our need, our guilt, and our deliverance are there in the Scriptures.[2]

And more, on the necessary strangeness vis-à-vis this world relative to the new reality of the new creation encountered in the fertile and fresh landscape of the Bible:

Does this perspective somehow make it understandable to you that I do not want to give up the Bible as this strange Word of God at any point, that I intend with all my powers to ask what God wants to say to us here? Any other place outside the Bible has become too uncertain for me. I fear that I will only encounter some divine double of myself there. Does this somehow help you to understand why I am prepared for a sacrificium intellectus—just in these matters, and only in these matters, with respect to the one, true God? And who does not bring to some passages his sacrifice of the intellect, in the confession that he does not yet understand this or that passage in Scripture, but is certain that even they will be revealed one day as God’s own Word! I would rather make that confession than try to say according to my own opinion: this is divine, that is human.[3]

For Bonhoeffer, because of the location that the reading of Holy Scripture places him within, in the parousia (presence) of God, there comes a point, within this strange landscape, where regular human intellection loses all sense of gravity. But this is the miracle of the whole thing: Scripture isn’t predicated by the history of its own embeddedness within history; Scripture is predicated as the Holy and ordained place of God’s presence in the sense that its res (reality) is grounded in the free and gracious pre-destination of God to be for all of humanity in Jesus Christ, and all that entails (inclusive of the whole sweep of heilsgeschichte ‘redemptive-history’ as deposited in Holy Scripture). It is within this ‘strange Word of God’ that Bonhoeffer finds rest and relief in the new heavens and earth, as those graciously intrude upon the parameters set by this current world system. For Bonhoeffer, and I would suggest that we follow his lead, there is something about the Bible that transcends a facile and flat reading that might allow it to be subject to the whims and wits that a purported pure critical reading that the book of an abstract nature supposedly has the capacity to illumine (think higher critical readings of Scripture). These things are so, for Bonhoeffer, because the Bible’s antecedent reality is ultimately of an otherworldly reality; namely the triune life of God elect for the world in the humanity of Jesus Christ. That is to say, that Holy Scripture has an ontology; and it isn’t us.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, cited by John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2003), 83.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 85.

The Apocalypse of Resurrected Life: Both Death and Life in Heavenly Vision

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Karl Barth wrote: “What took place on the cross of Golgotha is the last word of an old history and the first word of a new.”[1] Keeping in theme with this apocalyptic motif, Samuel Adams writes the following, with reference to Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

In his Ethics, Bonhoeffer progresses from the disciple’s conformation to the crucified one to the disciple’s conformation to the risen one:

To be conformed to the risen one—that means to be a new human being before God. We live in the midst of death; we are righteous in the midst of sin; we are new in the midst of the old. Our mystery remains hidden from the world. We live because Christ lives, and in Christ alone. “Christ is my life.” As long as the glory of Christ is hidden, so the glory of the new life is “hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:2).[2]

The Apostle Paul writes: “always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So then death is working in us, but life in you” (II Cor. 4:10-12). And Martin Luther’s famous adage: simul justus et peccator (‘simultaneously justified and sinner’). These themes are all of apiece, whether we are thinking from Paul, Luther, Barth, Bonhoeffer, or whomever focuses on the New Testament’s teaching in regard to the Christian’s new life in Christ. The old has indeed passed away into the oblivion of Christ’s death for us; and the new has come in the resurrection, ascension, and High Priestly session of Christ’s life for us as the Mediator.

This theme is fundamental to the Christian’s daily life. We already live in an actualized and concrete mode of the Kingdom of Heaven, it’s just that it requires the faith of Christ in order for the Christian to see it. But it is this dialectic of living in-between, as the new has already surpassed and supplanted the old, that the Christian needs to live from. As we live in this apocalyptic dialectic, we will be able to better interpret the trials and tribulations of our daily, and seemingly mundane lives. We will come to see the ‘death of Christ’ as a living fragrance, as the frame of our tribulations, just as the ‘resurrection life of Christ’ is the operative power that gives us this vision in the first place. As we recognize that our daily travail has already first been an instance of God’s love for us in His enfleshed life for us in the eternal Son, it is here where we will gain the proper perspective for living lives in and from the power of the resurrection; and as such, the world will see the works of the Father in us, rather than the works of the flesh that only lead to destruction.

The Christian existence is one that comes to find meaning in the meaning of creation itself, ‘in Christ.’ If we seek for meaning a part from this meaning, then we are of all people to be pitied. We have the hope, the power, and the life of the resurrection as the ground of our lives. And it is because of this that we can experience the ‘death of Christ,’ in the death of our own apparent travail, as that is given vision through the ascended heights of our new life in the resurrection life of the Son of Man for us. This is the wisdom of God: that is, that He comes to where we are, in our squalor that is embedded in these dusty frames, and in this, at that location, He falls as a seed, dies, and then blossoms anew afresh for us, bringing light out of the darkness, through raising these mortal bodies unto the immortal body of His own resurrected life—‘first comes the mortal, first comes the earthy, then comes the immortal, then comes the heavenly.’ It is from this heavenly body, the glorified body of Jesus Christ that in this in-between we live and move and have our being, including tasting the remnants of death that Christ has already put to death in His death for us.

[1] Cited by Samuel Adams.

[2] Samuel V. Adams, The Reality of God and Historical Method: Apocalyptic Theology in Conversation with N. T. Wright (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2015), loc. 3296, 3302.

Bonhoeffer’s Experience with the American Liberals: My Experience with the American Evangelicals

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Theological virtuoso Dietrich Bonhoeffer, after already earning two PhDs in theology (by his mid-twenties), came abroad to diversify his theological portfolio. He landed on the shores of New York, and in the halls of Union Theological Seminary. He had been trained in the liberal theological tradition, where it was founded, in Germany by its greatest minds; its most premier, just as he was entering studies, was Adolf von Harnack. But after writing his PhD dissertation, Communio Sanctorum, and then his post-doctoral Habilitation, Act and Being, even while being critical of aspects of Karl Barth’s theology, in the main, Bonhoeffer took the Christocentric, and orthodox turn with Barth. This had all happened just prior to him ending up at Union. He had the real deal liberal theological training behind him (just as Barth did), and could sniff out a phony version of it better than anyone else. Even so, as noted, he had abandoned the premises of liberal theology through appropriating Barth’s broad contours, and made that significant turn. When he entered Union Theological Seminary he was anticipating finding more of the same in regard to liberal theology, but he had come to learn how to apply theology at the social (street) level; and Union had a stellar reputation for this. But what he found, and was shocked by, was just how far-gone Union was. He realized that they were peddling an imposter’s version of liberal theology; to the point that they had completely gutted it of anything doctrinally or historically interesting. In the end he didn’t even think that what Union was offering was Christianity at all. This is interesting, and parallel to my own impression of American evangelicalism today. But before I share some of my impressions, let us hear further on Bonhoeffer at Union, and how Gary Dorrien frames things for us: 

He said it bluntly to his friend Helmut Rößler in December 1930. American liberal Protestantism, Bonhoeffer wrote, was ‘infinitely depressing’ to him, ‘smiling in desperation’ without realizing it was desperate: 

The almost frivolous attitude here is unprecedented, and my hope of finding Heb. 12:1 fulfilled has been bitterly disappointed. Moreover, theology in Germany seems infinitely provincial to them here; they just don’t understand it; they grin when you mention Luther     (DBWE 10: 261). 

A week later, writing to German church superintendent Max Dietsel, Bonhoeffer allowed that American seminarians were certainly friendly; they even expected professors to be friendly. But conversations with American students and professors ‘almost never yielded anything of substance,’ because Americans were averse to substance and truth: 

There is no theology here. Although I am basically taking classes and lectures in dogmatics and philosophy of religion, the impression is overwhelmingly negative. They talk a blue streak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence of any criteria. The students—on the average twenty-five to thirty years old—are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are not familiar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, are amused at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.        (DBWE 10: 265-6) 

Bonhoeffer struggled to convey how bad it was. He had groused about shallow students at Berlin, too, but he assured Diestel that this was much worse. Americans ‘dreadfully sentimentalized’ religion, they spouted their opinions with ‘an almost naïve know-it-all attitude,’ and any reference to Luther evoked insolent laughter. They were proud to be superficial, counting it as sophistication. With a glimmer of something important, Bonhoeffer said that most of the theologians and clergy at Union accepted James’ notion of a finite God: ‘They find it to be profound and modern and do not sense at all the impertinent frivolousness in all such talk.’ Local church services were much the same: 

The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events. As long as I’ve been here, I have heard only one sermon in which you could hear something like a genuine proclamation, and that was delivered by a Negro (indeed, in general I’m increasingly discovering greater religious power and originality in Negroes)      (DBWE 10: 266) 

That was another important glimmer; Bonhoeffer caught that gospel truths were existential to Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and his African American congregation at Abyssinian Church. Overall, however, the case for despair was overwhelming. Bonhoeffer puzzled over how the usual fare in American churches could be called Christianity. The Federal Council of Churches, he reported, was equally frivolous: ‘People talked about everything, except about theology. Only rarely did anyone venture any comments really getting to the point, and if they did, the discussion quickly moved on to the daily agenda’ (DBWE 10: 266-67). 

There are interesting parallels, I think, between Bonhoeffer’s impression of American liberalism, and how American evangelicalism has come to operate today. I can only imagine Bonhoeffer running across a Progressive church today, or your typical American evangelical church, and walk away with the same impressions he did when he was exposed to the “Christianity” at Union Theological Seminary. For me personally, this is my impression of American evangelicalism in the main. I think of Christianity Today styled evangelicalism, and when I juxtapose that with so-called Progressive American Christianity, I don’t see much difference. Maybe their doctrinal statements would differ, but their praxis reduces to the same; what Christian Smith and others have identified as a moralistic therapeutic deism. There is no real sense of the Christian, and thus concrete God of Jesus Christ present in most of American evangelicalism these days (whether that be on the progressive or mainstream evangelical continuum). What we are exposed to are other purely pragmatic or flattened versions of the social gospel, with no reference to a God outside of the horizontal domain; or we get a pie-in-the-sky notion of God, who is there to help us feel good about ourselves, and present us with experiences that are supposed to elevate us to our best lives and self-actualized selves now. 

 

An Ontological-Relational Framing of the Bondage of the Will: The Vicarious Humanity of Christ as Antidote

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I am not a classical Calvinist; by now most of you know what I mean when I say that. I am not a classical Arminian; indeed, I’m not Arminian at all. I am Athanasian Reformed (aka Evangelical Calvinist). I affirm something like total depravity; I prefer to call that homo incurvatus in se, like Martin Luther did. Either way, I believe all of humanity, at the fall, was plunged into a rupture with the triune God, such that humanity lost all capacity to be for or with God in any way. In other words, as some refer to this more popularly, in regard to salvific matters, I am a proponent of ‘total inability.’ This means that I reject the (‘Pelagian’) notion that humanity retains an abstract (from God) freewill that would allow humans, apart from a radical in-breaking of God’s Grace in Christ, to be for God and not fundamentally against Him. I maintain that all of humanity, along with Adam and Eve in the garden, fell into a ruptured relationship with the triune God, such that postlapsarian humanity inhabits a status that keeps them incurved upon themselves, motivated by a saucer of competing affections that never allows them to see God as anyone but themselves. One manifestation of this, among others, is that such humans will construct rationalist citadels of anthropological heft wherein their reason, incurved upon itself as it were, becomes the standard for all that is real (think cogito ergo sum, or tabula rasa). 

In light of that you might think that I must, then, rely on some notion, in an ordo salutis (order of salvation), of God’s ‘regenerating grace’ (ie grace as a quality) entering into the ‘elects’’ heart in order for that particular person to come to have capacity to finally see[k] God for who He really is in Christ. But I don’t endorse the model of substance metaphysics that funds that sort of theory of anthrosalvation. Instead, as you also know of me by now, I think from the largely After Barth tradition. Within this tradition we have figures such as Thomas Torrance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer et al. For Barth and Torrance, in particular, they are both in-formed by Athanasian categories, in particular, and Patristic, in general; among other (modern) influences. Even so, they operate from a complex when it comes to the particular issue of thinking about the so-called Bondage of the Will; they both affirm it, but from within an ontological/filial frame. For them the issue of rupture between God and humanity isn’t primarily juridical, instead it’s a relational matter. For them, in the fall, humanity’s being has lost its human being in the sense that it has been spliced out of God’s image (imago Dei) in Christ (cf. Col. 1.15). Because of this plunge into ‘sub-humanity,’ humans no longer have the capacity to be free for God; since God alone is genuinely free. You see, for the tradition I think from (which is the biblical one), human being only has being and orientation, insofar as it is in right relationship with the triune God. Outwith this relationship the ‘abstract human’ has no capacity to operate with any notion of primal freedom; of the sort that God alone possesses. In order for that seemingly impossible possibility to become a possibility, for my tradition (which is the biblical one), it requires that God does something for us; viz. that He ‘disrupts’ the state of affairs an abstract humanity finds itself in, and from this act, humanity comes to have an objective ground to be towards God once again. Albeit, in the resurrection of Christ, this ground is now greater than the soil the first Adam provided for; in the resurrection of Christ humanity now has the fertile soil it requires to grow towards God from in and through the second and greater Adam’s vicarious humanity for the world.  

Jens Zimmerman offers insight on how the aforementioned lineaments operate in the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: 

These differences notwithstanding, Bonhoeffer still shares with Heidegger the basic hermeneutic axiom that human knowledge consists in the interpretation of a reality in which one already moves, lives, and has one’s being. For Bonhoeffer as a Christian theologian, this reality is of course determined by Christ alone. Knowledge of one’s participation in this Christ-reality comes only by God’s grace as one is drawn into communion with the Trinity. Bonhoeffer’s solution to the mind-world dichotomy is thus very similar to Heidegger’s, albeit based on a specifically Christian ontology. Already in Act and Being, he develops the fundamentally hermeneutic concept that faith is not cognitive assent to doctrine, but ‘a mode of being’ (DBWE 2: 118). Believing in God is not merely a mental act but involves being drawn into a reality that is ‘prior to the act of faith’ (DBWE 2: 117). This ‘being-in-Christ’ is characterized by an intentionality directed purely to Christ (a fides directa or actus directus), so that the self is transformed by this reality. For Bonhoeffer ‘everything hinges on faith’s knowing itself not as somehow conditioning or even creating this being, but precisely as conditioned and created by it’ (DBWE 2: 118). Human reflection on this reality is a necessary, secondary interpretation of this existential reality. This kind of secondary reflection is called theology, ‘which is not existential knowledge’, but rather an interpretation of the church’s experience of God as crystallized and sedimented in tradition over time through preaching, creeds, and dogma. In this way, theology acts as the ‘preserving and ordering memory [Gedächtnis]’ of the living, ‘spoken word of Christ in the church’ (DBW 2: 131, …). Preaching draws on this memory of Christ’s presence and also shapes it at the same time. 

Participating in this Christ-reality does not constitute some Hinterland or parallel universe allowing the Christian to escape from the world. Bonhoeffer states: 

Like all of creation, the world has been created through Christ and has its existence only in Christ (John 1:10; Col. 1:16). To speak of the world without speaking of Christ is pure abstraction. The world stands in relationship to Christ whether the world knows it or not. (DBWE 6: 68) 

Bonhoeffer is well known for his insistence that the Christian’s participation in the Christ-reality does not negate the world but rather founds proper human responsibility for the world. On account of God’s becoming human, God and humanity, and therefore God and world, must be thought together. Bonhoeffer avers that ‘where the worldly establishes itself as an autonomous sector, this denies the fact of the world’s being accepted in Christ, the grounding of the reality of the world in revelational reality, and thereby the validity of the gospel for the whole world’ (DBWE 6: 60). For Bonhoeffer, the incarnation itself—God’s transcendent truth entering into human history and temporality—sets the hermeneutical pattern for Christian knowledge, wherein the sacred is known only in the profane, the revelational in the rational, and the supernatural only in the natural (DBWE 6: 59). [1] 

Maybe this is your first encounter with this sort of salvific conniving, but hopefully not your last. This is why as Athanasian Reformed types we say there is an historia salutis rather than an ordo salutis. The focus on salvation in this frame is on the pre-history (ad intra) and history (ad extra) of God’s life for us in Jesus Christ. We see His life as the Via by which all of humanity comes to have an objective ground as the pre-condition from whence they come to have the Spirit generated capacity to say Yes to God; that is from Christ’s Yes and Amened life for them in the resurrection humanity that ascended and is now seated at the Right Hand of the Father. This might raise some ‘causal’ questions for the Aristotelian-minded among us, that is in regard to how this avoids ‘universalism’ implications, and we have response for that. I have already addressed that more than once elsewhere here on the blog, and in our books. But to be sure, as an Evangelical Calvinist, I affirm humanity’s need for newly-created ground that we might come to genuinely think God from prior to our acknowledgement of God. As has been pressed throughout this post: I maintain, along with the biblical tradition I think from, that it is only in and from the elect and primordial humanity of Jesus Christ that humanity is raised up with His archetypal humanity, and it is from here, from this sacred space of liminal humanity for all, that sub-humanity can rise from the ashes of its desolate life and breathe from the lungs of Christ’s Yes for them coram Deo. 

____________________________________________

[1] Jens Zimmerman, “Bonhoeffer and Contemporary Philosophy,” in Michael Mawson and Philip G. Ziegler eds., The Oxford Handbook of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 439-40. 

 

Bonhoeffer’s ‘Conditional Pacifism’ and His ‘Tyrannicidal’ Plans for Adolf Hitler

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Clifford Green has written a very persuasive essay, like I don’t see how its thesis can be defeated, with reference to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his ‘conditional pacifism.’ Green underscores that while this pacificism, after a time of theological maturation, served as an ethos for Bonhoeffer; that it would be better to call Bonhoeffer’s mood as a ‘theological peace ethic.’ Certain pacifists, like in the Anabaptist tradition, seem to want to recoup Bonhoeffer for their own sort of fundamental pacifism, but this simply does not cohere with Bonhoeffer’s concrete situated ethic vis-à-vis what he calls ‘vicarious representative action.’ Green writes:

In a revealing autobiographical letter sent from his Finkenwalde seminary in 1936, Bonhoeffer wrote that he had recently experienced ‘a great liberation’ cuased by ‘the Bible, especially the Sermon on the Mount’. As a result, he was devoted to renewal of the church and the pastorate, and ‘Christian pacifism’ was now ‘something utterly self-evident’ (DBWE 14: 134). Statements like this, and his book Discipleship, have led some to argue that Bonhoeffer was a pacifist who was committed to a consistent nonviolence, one who did not participate in, nor approve of, any plot to kill Hitler and overthrow his regime. Others have reasoned that, since Bonhoeffer was involved in the conspiracy to overthrow the Nazi regime, and did indeed approve the effort to kill Hitler, he must have abandoned his pacifism for just war thinking or something like Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism. Neither approach interprets Bonhoeffer on his own terms or identifies the distinctive components of his peace ethic. Instead I propose that Bonhoeffer’s peace ethic is based on its theological components, not on a commitment to nonviolence, and that he does not abandon these fundamental convictions to work in the conspiracy which was planning the coup d’état.1

Green, right from the get-go (of his essay) problematizes the typical facile readings of Bonhoeffer. And this is it how it should be. Bonhoeffer wasn’t a tradition of thought, instead he was a dynamic person, who in turn represents a complex; just as his sitz im leben was highly complex. This is how he ought to be read. He shouldn’t be co-opted by the Anabaptist ‘peace trad’; conversely, he shouldn’t be hijacked by ‘just war theorists.’ The reality was that he was motivated, in a general mood, by the ‘peacefulness of the Gospel reality,’ while at the same time driven by that same Gospel message to be for the other (so his so-called ‘vicarious representative action’). It was this latter reality that led him into his work with the conspiracy to commit tyrannicide on Hitler and company.

Green’s essay in toto is excellent; you’ll have to read it for yourself. Until then let me close this by sharing a long passage (in fact the total conclusion for Green’s essay) which summarizes all that Green had heretofore provided argument for. Even in this summarization he offers some of his best evidence in regard to Bonhoeffer’s complex position with regard to his ‘peace ethic’; indeed, Green quotes some of Bonhoeffer’s best friends and compatriots in the ‘Confessing’ movement.

How best to summarize Bonhoeffer’s overall position, in his specific historical context, on peace and war, on resistance and tyrannicide? It would be a serious misunderstanding to read Bonhoeffer’s statement that ‘you can’t give a final answer to the question of whether a Christian can participate in war’, or the statement that he had not ‘made up his mind about participating in a war under different circumstances’, and then conclude that he stood in a neutral, uncommitted place, above the fray. It was not as if the choice about war and violence was always an open question for Bonhoeffer, which could be decided one way or the other. Rather, his default position is against war, and for peace, for nonviolence against violence, for the church condemning all war as sinful rather than justifying it. In other words, his peace ethic led his contemporaries who knew him personally to call him some sort of pacifist.

Karl Barth, later discussing in the Church Dogmatics when tyrannicide would be justified, wrote that Bonhoeffer belonged to the Christian circles who gave a definite positive answer in regard to Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer, he said, ‘was really a pacifist on the basis of his understanding of the gospel. But the fact remained that he did not give a negative answer to the question’ (Barth, 1961: 449).

Eberhard Bethge wrote that ‘after meeting Lasserre the question of … the biblical injunction of peace and of the concrete steps to be taken against warlike impulses never left him again’. But he was a ‘conditional pacifist’, who never became a thoroughgoing, unconditional pacifist, a grundsätzlich Pazifist (Bethge, 2000: 153, 127).

Similarly, Franz Hildebrandt, a lifelong pacifist and Bonhoeffer’s close friend, is a unique witness. When the news of his friend’s death also informed him that Bonhoeffer was involved in the conspiracy, he was surprised (Green, 2005: 46). But when later asked in an interview about Bonhoeffer’s pacifism he replied: ‘It was never a pacifism unqualified and held-to in principle’ (Kelly interview, cited in Green, 2015: 208).

Herbert Jehle—the physicist who attended Bonhoeffer’s lectures in Berlin, visited him frequently in London from Cambridge, and also visited him in Finkenwalde—said, ‘I became a pacifist exclusively through Dietrich’. In an interview he consistently spoke of Bonhoeffer as a pacifist without qualification (Rasmussen, 2005: 119). But when his widow was asked about Jehle’s attitude to Bonhoeffer in the conspiracy, she answered for him vigorously and without hesitation: ‘Oh, he had to do it!’ (Green, 2005: 46). In other words, Jehle, too, agreed with Bonhoeffer that, in Nazism and Hitler, Bonhoeffer and the coup planners faced an ultimate, last-resort situation.

Willem Visser ‘t Hooft, who became General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, reported that in 1939 Bonhoeffer discussed with him whether he should register as a conscientious objector in the impending war. To the question of how it came about that he became actively involved in the 20 July 1944 plot, Visser ‘t Hooft answered: ‘The very conviction which had made him a man of peace, led him into active resistance’ (Zimmerman & Smith, 1966: 194).

These contemporary witnesses all refer to Bonhoeffer’s ‘pacifism’. Bethge and Hildebrandt are quick to qualify it. So ‘conditional pacifism’ is probably as good a short phrase as any to summarize Bonhoeffer’s position. But unfortunately ‘pacifism’ does not point to the pervasive Christian foundation of his position as does the construct ‘theological peace ethic’. His peace ethic’. His peace ethic cannot be understood apart from its Christological, scriptural, ecclesial, and doctrinal dimensions. Nor can his attitude to the coup d’état conspiracy and tyrannicide be understood apart from his theological ethic of free responsibility in which it is embedded. Therefore we must combine the two phrases and say that Bonhoeffer’s Christian peace ethic was a conditional pacifism.2

For those who want to continue to maintain that Bonhoeffer can be read into the unconditional pacifist tradition, say of Anabaptist pedigree, you must work through and beyond Green’s argument; I don’t see how that is possible. It is better to simply accept that Bonhoeffer does not fit the nice and neat categories that some of us would like to romanticize him into. As I noted he is a complex man in a complex time; but who isn’t?

As I recall, even someone as evangelical as Norman Geisler came up with a category he called selectivism when it came to his preferred ethic. As much as the geeks will not countenance the idea of placing Geisler into a discussion about Bonhoeffer, and I don’t really like it either (maybe I’m a geek), I’d say Bonhoeffer’s ‘conditional pacifism’ fits pretty well with this sort of ‘selectivism.’ That notwithstanding, Bonhoeffer had a much deeper theological development behind his ‘conditionalism,’ which we can see in his so-called ‘vicarious representative action’; I’m a huge fan of this thinking. It recognizes that concrete personhood for the Christian is only found as that is grounded in Jesus Christ’s humanity. And it is out of this humanity, as the Christian participates through union with Christ, that they find their identity first from Christ’s humanity and then in the other [person]. This helps explain Bonhoeffer’s commitment to the conspiracy of tyrannicide (ie taking Hitler and his whole crew out). Bonhoeffer said with reference to Hitler, as reported by his friend Bell, “The murderer had to be stopped.” Bonhoeffer’s ethic for the other led him to concrete action in the face of total evil; this was motivated by his love for the other, as that first came from Christ.

_________________________________

1 Clifford Green, “Bonhoeffer’s Christian Peace Ethic, Conditional Pacifism, And Resistance,” in Michael Mawson and Philip G. Ziegler eds., The Oxford Handbook of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 345. 

2 Ibid., 359-60.

Eschatology and Political Action for the Christian: With Reference to Bonhoeffer

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Eschatology frames the Christian life, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: ‘The Church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end’ (DBWE 3: 21). This has significant implications for the Christian’s engagement with the broader culture; in this instance I want to emphasize how this ought to impact the Christian’s relationship to the politik, insofar that the Christian bears witness to the political in their theological existence as Christians in, but not of this world system. Mark Lindsay offers a nice entrée into Bonhoeffer’s thinking on eschatology, particularly as that is in contact with the Nazi context, he and so many other Germans et al. were thrust into under the mantle of Hitler’s Antichrist reign. Lindsay writes:

The lectures he delivered against this background—lectures that would form the basis of his most famous book, Discipleship—explore precisely this participatory engagement with Christ in the world. Crucially, there is an inescapable eschatological dimension to the life of engaged discipleship. Towards the end of the book, and with Nazism firmly in his sights, Bonhoeffer speaks of the threat that the world poses to the Church. Having already argued for a rightful ‘living-space’ (Lebensraum) (DBWE 4: 232-4, 236) of the Church in the world, Bonhoeffer goes on to say that

the older this world grows, and the more sharply the struggle (der Kampf) between Christ and Antichrist grows, the more thorough also the world’s efforts to rid itself of the Christians. To the first Christians the world still granted a space . . . A world that has become entirely anti-Christian, however, can no longer grant Christians even this private sphere . . . Christians [are now forced] to deny their Lord in exchange for every piece of bread they want to eat. In the end, Christians are left with no other choices but to escape from the world or go to prison (DBWE 4: 247).

This, he says, is a world in which the end (das Ende) is near (DBWE 4: 247).[1]

The concern I have is that many Christians are not able to discern who the Antichrist is today, and who isn’t. That the Babylonian Captivity of the Church in the culture has become an instance of Stockholm syndrome, such that the churches in the broader world have come to love their captors rather than be captivated by the Eschatos of all things, Jesus Christ. One concrete instance we are seeing of this in the West, currently, is the state of Canada. This state, in the name of safety and welfare for the ‘greater good’ (look into the history and see where that rhetoric has been deployed before) has now begun building walls around churches; whether that be with physical fencing, or hundreds of police, or health and welfare troopers deployed by the state. In other places in Canada, the Montreal Police Department, in their enforcement of COVID lockdowns, are literally calling certain media, media attempting to record the state’s activities, ‘Jew media.’ These are all modern-day instances of Antichrist behavior of the sort that has the potential to blossom into things Bonhoeffer himself experienced as he thought out his eschatology vis-à-vis the Church’s existence in the world.

[1] Mark Lindsay, “Eschatology,” in Michael Mawson and Philip G. Ziegler eds., The Oxford Handbook of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 261.

Human Freedom vis-à-vis God: With Reference to the Theanthropology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” 36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. –John 8:32, 36

15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”  18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. 23 And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. –Romans 8:15, 18-25

15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by[f] him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. –Colossians 1:15-20

I wish I had the time and space to do a proper exegesis of the above passages, but for now they will simply have to hover in the background; I’ll leave it to the reader to discern how they might relate to the rest of what I write in this post.

Freewill has been a matter of deep consternation in the history of the church; not to mention in the history of the Philosophy departments on the university campuses. Whether it be the infamous Augustine/Pelagius binary (the historical particularities notwithstanding); Luther/Erasmus; Calvin/Pighius; Dort/Remonstrants; so on and so forth. While this locus has occupied the minds of many, and still does, I want to argue that it is not a genuinely biblical theological point of doctrinal consideration. In order to aid my argument, I will appeal to a reading of Bonhoeffer’s anthropology (or Theanthropology) which will point up how a genuine doctrine of human freedom vis-à-vis human agency actually functions theologically in the biblical text. Following, I will reflect further on Bonhoeffer’s anthropology, per the report of his reader, and also make a note on how theological ideation, in general, is what’s at stake in these discussions more than is getting personal biographies of past theologians completely right (even though this has its own relative significance). Here is Rachel Muers on Bonhoeffer and freedom:

Freedom is one of the key terms Bonhoeffer uses to specify what it means to be human. In discussing Genesis 1:26 he specifically locates the image of God in human freedom: ‘To say that in humankind God creates the image of God on earth means that humankind is like the Creator in that it is free’ (DBWE 3: 62). At several points—and in terms that we shall discuss later because of the problems they raise for contemporary theological anthropology—he contrasts freedom with necessity as the distinctive mark of human life over against non-human animal life (see DBWE 6: 196).

In the context I have outlined, however, in which the human person is given his or her ‘boundary’ by the other, and this very boundary is what makes the person, just what does human freedom actually mean? Clearly it cannot mean the freedom of unlimited self-assertion or self-creation. In fat, for Bonhoeffer, the attempt to exercise that kind of freedom, to be ‘like God’, to live without limits, is at the heart of sinful existence (DBWE 3: 116). Moreover, and linked to this, in Bonhoeffer’s account freedom is not a built-in human capacity at all. There is nothing about me, taken in isolation, that makes me free: not my rationality, not my will, not even my ‘thrownness’ into the world.

For Bonhoeffer, the freedom proper to humanity is freedom in relationship, both to God and to the neighbour in community. As creaturely freedom, it is received before it is possessed or exerted; it is ‘freedom for’ or ‘freedom in relation to’ another, rather than ‘freedom to’ do something. Insofar as it is ‘freedom from’ anything, it is freedom from the endless circle of the ‘heart turned in on itself’—Luther’s cor curvuum in se (see DBWE 2: 46)—the attempt to secure one’s own existence and meaning, perhaps the prisoner’s ‘lonely question’, to which the sinful human being, excluded from community, is condemned. Again, Creation and Fall makes it clear that this freedom—precisely as freedom-in-relation, freedom-towards-the-other and freedom-for-God—is creaturely freedom and not only redeemed freedom. It is the freedom for which humanity is made, but this is not a freedom to which people ‘reading from the middle’ have access apart from redemption in Christ.

The Imago Dei—i.e. that in humanity which reflects God—is thus given in the relationship of humanity to God that begins as a relationship of God to humanity, the free act of the creator. A key point to note here, of course, is that God’s own freedom, seen in creation and redemption, is freedom-for and freedom-in relation. Humanity images God in receiving freedom-for-God and freedom-for-the-other; and as God calls humanity into relationship and humanity responds, God’s own way of being free is present within creation. In a telling and undeveloped aside, Bonhoeffer suggests that this is the meaning of the patristic texts on the ‘indwelling of the Trinity in Adam’ (DBWE 3: 64): God’s own ‘freedom-in-relation’, God’s triune being, is imaged in human life not just because the human being in some way resembles God, but because human life receives and reflects the freedom that God has.[1]

I submit the above to you as the biblical way to think human freedom vis-à-vis God’s freedom. The problem typical discussions have, in regard to freewill, is that they ALWAYS go beyond Scripture and its reality in Christ; and instead they start having a philosophical discussion that has no ‘point of contact’ with the ‘Scriptural witness.’ Philosophical discussions about human agency and freewill, by definition, think humanity in an abstract manner; or we might want to say in a ‘purely profane’ manner. In other words, to think human freewill in abstraction from humanity’s groundedness in God’s image for humanity in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, is not to think from God’s Self-revelation to humanity about humanity, but to think humanity from an independent humanity (from God’s for us) and then, post-factum project that onto a discussion about Godness. This mode, or hermeneutic, is to attempt to speak for God, instead of to think of God Deus dixit, after ‘God has spoken’ Himself for us in His Word for us (pro nobis), in Jesus Christ.

An Aside on Historical Biography and the Popular

I just watched an interview with Dr. Ali Bonner via vlog done by host, Warren McGrew. Bonner recently released her book The Myth of Pelagianism. It was an informative interview, and the history discussed is important and very interesting. But I am afraid that McGrew, and those of like-mind, become too enamored with the biographical history itself rather than the theological ideation under consideration. Whether or not Pelagius, for example, would affirm what has come to be known as Pelagianism, and he probably would, is beside the point. The issue is whether or not what this doctrine, which has come to be known as Pelagianism, if it actually has correspondence to something like what we just discussed with reference to Bonhoeffer’s understanding of human freedom. McGrew, Leighton Flowers&company do not seem to grasp this, and continue to suppose that simply because Pelagius’ thinking might have been considered the ‘orthodox’ teaching at one point, that this does not mean it should have been per the Scriptural realities. Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda. There must be greater depth, a broader perspective deployed if these folks want to avoid the errors of the Socinians et al. Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Rachel Muers, “Anthropology,” in Michael Mawson and Philip G. Ziegler eds., The Oxford Handbook of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 202-03.

A Theology of Crisis: How a Doctrine of Creatio Ex Nihilo Ought to Lead to Christ Concentration in Theological Reflection

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“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” –Genesis 1:1

Thomas Torrance makes much of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, as he should! The very freedom of God is at play in this doctrine, such that God remains free from the contingencies of this world, just as He is its Creator; but only first as He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As a result, knowledge of God remains contingent on God’s free choice to make Himself known to the world. Thus, systems of theology that attempt to think God discursively from His effects in nature, like Thomism does, are discounted from the get-go. To appropriate creatio ex nihilo in this way entails a theory of revelation wherein the world, and humanity as part of the world, is at God’s behest, and solely contingent upon its knowledge of Him insofar as He chooses to reveal Himself.

It isn’t just Torrance who thinks this way about God’s relation to the world, but prior to TFT, we get this from theologians like Karl Barth, in his theology of crisis, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who in certain ways, although not in uncritical lockstep, is already thinking After Barth. Matthew Puffer writes the following with reference to Bonhoeffer’s own style of theology of crisis, and how that relates to a doctrine of creation, and more significantly, as this ties into a received doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, and the attending doctrine of creatio continua (God’s continuing creative power deployed in its sustenance from moment to moment).

During the 1930/1 academic year as a Sloane Fellow at Union Theological Seminary, Bonhoeffer’s paper on ‘The Theology of Crisis and its Attitude Toward Philosophy and Science’ introduced American students and professors to recent developments in German theology, including ‘the position of the founder and most original thinker of the theology of crisis, of Karl Barth’ (DBWE 10: 462-3). Bonhoeffer presents a view of science and theology in which the two, properly practiced, cannot conflict due to their differing roles. Science, in this heuristic, is concerned only with what takes place within the realm of the physical world. Theology, on the other hand, is concerned to interpret what takes place in the physical world as science presents it. Bonhoeffer applies this schema to cosmology and creation.

In its pure sense cosmology presumes to know nothing about God and can only speak about the universe on the basis of naturalistic explanations. Cosmology is limited in that it can never get beyond the limits of human thinking and perception, albeit aided and constrained by technology. Cosmology may come to the end of its investigative powers in discovering the foundational principles or the first moments of all that is and, if it so chooses, call that which it assumes must be the cause behind these discoveries “God.” The theology of crisis argues that such a God cannot be the Christian God of whom the Bible speaks as the creator for two reasons.

Firstly: I know God as creator not without the revelation of Christ. For God’s being the creator means being the judge and the savior too; and I know all that only in Christ. Secondly: creation means creation by absolute freedom, creation out of nothing. So the relationship of God to the world is completely free, it has been set and is always set anew ‘creatio continua’ by God. Thus God is not the first cause, the ultimate ground of the world, but its free Lord and creator [and] as such he is not to be discovered by any cosmology, but he reveals himself in sovereign freedom wherever and whenever he wants. (DBWE 10: 475)

According to Bonhoeffer, the god of the cosmologists is not the Creator, the Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer rightly ascribes to the Barth of Romans both creatio ex nihilo and creatio continua, and he gives no indication of any disagreement on his part. The creative act of God is always taking place beyond the empirical realm of natural science. God thus remains free with respect to creation, as the continuing creator, and cannot be discovered by means of human capacities and initiatives, whether by Christians or cosmologists. Only in Christ does God reveal Godself to be Creator, judge, and saviour. (In Ethics, Bonhoeffer’s language of Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer reflects Barth’s continuing influence in this matter [DBWE 6: 48, 402].)[1]

This dovetails nicely with a recent post vis-à-vis Bonhoeffer’s rejection of the analogia entis. Evangelicals, in particular, need to come to learn to think Christian Dogmatically about things; they need to understand that there is a theological taxis or order to the way various doctrines relate to each other, with particular reference to a theology proper.

But to the point of what was just said about Bonhoeffer by Puffer, if we think God radically as the God of creatio ex nihilo and creatio continua, we will come to better appreciate just why it is that many of us in this tradition repudiate natural theology at its core. We are contingent beings, as such our knowledge of God, the Creator, is contingent on His gracious willingness to make Himself known. This is why Evangelical Calvinism, as an iteration of this particular tradition, believes that a genuinely Christian theology can only unfold after Deus dixit (‘God has spoken’ [see Barth’s Göttingen Dogmatics]). There is no necessary linkage between our beings and God’s, not if our beings our contingent on His freedom in being for us first. As such this sort of theological ontology, in and order of being to knowing, implicates a theological epistemology. I.e. God first, then us, as He becomes us in Christ, and in this becoming we come to have a knowledge of God as we are participatio Christi (participants with Christ). The crisis of our situation, the anxiety produced by being a Gentile lot separated from God comes to an end, moment by moment, as God breaks down the veil, and makes one new humanity in the new humanity of His life for and with and in us, in Jesus Christ.

11 Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands— 12 remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14 For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility 15 by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, 16 and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. 17 And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. 19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. 22 In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God bythe Spirit. –Ephesians 2:11-22

[1] Matthew Puffer, “Creation,” in Michael Mawson and Philip G. Ziegler eds., The Oxford Handbook of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 182-3.