Bonhoeffer's "Religionless Christianity"

Needed is Bonhoeffer's works and a good historical theologian's brain to pick. Alas, I'll settle for a brief meditation and any feedback my off-the-cuff remarks get. Keep in mind that for me this post stems very much from a preunderstanding.

Relevant reading.

There's a large bit of semantics involved in this discussion, but semantics are not the issue for Bonhoeffer. There are substantive issues for which I believe Bonhoeffer articulated with the most appropriate semantics options. They are not particularly misleading per se, rather misreadings kinda seem the fault of his readers' faithless interpretive reads. They either downplay his anti-religious or pro-faith themes. So his writings are difficult to read cause we are not ready to read them and because...well he's wrong, or he says a lot of right things for the wrong reason.

In trying to understand Bonhoeffer, Barth's basic understanding of religion seems to bring us to a close approximation of Bonhoeffer's meaning.

[R]eligion is the contradiction of revelation, the concentrated expression of human unbelief, i.e. an attitude and activity which is directly opposed to faith....

Religion is never true in itself and as such. The revelation of God denies that any religion is true, i.e. that it is in truth the knowledge and worship of God and the reconciliation of man with God. For as the self-offering and self-manifestation of God, as the work of peace which God himself has concluded between himself and man, revelation is the truth beside which there is no other truth, over against which there is only lying and wrong. If by the concept of a ‘true religion’ we mean truth which belongs to religion in itself and as such, it is just as unattainable as a ‘good man’, if by goodness we mean something which man can achieve on his own initiative. No religion is true....

This judgement means that all this Christianity of ours, and all the details of it, are not as such what they ought to be and pretend to be, a work of faith, and therefore of obedience to the divine revelation. What we have here is in its own way – a different way from that of other religions, but no less seriously – unbelief, i.e. opposition to the divine revelation, and therefore active idolatry and self-righteousness....

It is therefore a fact that we can speak of the truth of the Christian religion only within the doctrine of the iustificatio impii. The statement that even Christianity is unbelief gives rise to a whole mass of naïve and rationalizing contradictions. Church history itself is a history of this contradiction. But it is this very fact which best shows us how true and right the statement is (source; embolding mine).

BTW - iustificatio impii means justification of the ungodly. This is going to be disappointing to some, as it essentially means that Bonhoeffer is a hyper-Protestant (i.e. sole fide fanatic) and secularist. For the record, Barth counter-balances these insights. The point of bringing them up and not contextualizing them is that with Bonhoeffer you can't. Hence why in the letter he states that Barth started off good, but arrives at a religious restoration.

The value of secularism is while it does not nor can eliminate the divine revelation, it provides a scathing critique of religiosity. Secularism in this regard is a natural ally of revelation, not so much in its commitment to truth per se, but in its commitment to neutralizing religious expression. Bonhoeffer as is apparent by other remarks could care less about making the church relevant to his contemporary world and is highly critical of attempts to do such. Indeed, cultural relevancy is a type of religious renewal, even in a secularized form. Rather he sees a secular lifestyle and approach as genuinely better, in that it is both more honest and accurate to our human condition. It also opens the possibility of churches fulfilling their mission, which cannot be done with religion's inherent individualism. If anything secularism as is commonly espoused does not go far enough for Bonhoeffer, as it merely wishes to repress religious expression in the public life whereas Bonhoeffer wishes the secularizing effect to be more thoroughgoing.

The ideal then becomes for Christians to live etsi deus non daretur, as if there is no God. This notion for Bonhoeffer does need to be contextualized though for a proper reading, as he isn't betraying the gospel, making an attack on the institution of Church's existence, minimizing the authority of Scripture, or downplaying Christianity's myths. He's advocating a secularization, not godlessness. The implications of etsi deus non daretur move though beyond critiques of Christianese, religious displays, shared understandings, and other markers to a theological understanding of the relation of God and humans that is both profound and disconcerting, as well as humans' own self-understanding. Hopefully I'll write more of these two implications before the end of the world.

To the question of how he positively understands a religionless Christianity outside of God's relationship to humanity, it seems safe to say that Christianity is a hyper-Biblical Judaism. There's a stressed continuity for Bonhoeffer's historical hermeneutic, acknowledging obvious discontinuity as well. How he understands Judaism though is anti-metaphysical, and it is in a non-believing world with God. Religionless Christianity is participating in the life of the Church, but discarding its rot.

To the question of how he positively understands what it means to be a Christian, it is participating in the suffering of Jesus in the world. Again, I'll hopefully unpack this later, but briefly in contrast to piety or creedalism, Bonhoeffer understands it as existing for others without the hope of God's comfort. This includes engaging the status quo (which is godless) as well as actively ministering to others.

I think some of his claims and critiques are valid, but the ones influenced by his secularism are not, and don't get textually supported. Unfortunately Bonhoeffer didn't make it far enough to textually support some of these arguments, whereas others have who don't share his secular commitments have. The chapters to his book that he did write were lost, and before he could follow through with the project he was executed. I'd love some feed back especially from those familiar with his work as I'm probably wrong on a lot of points.

Letter of Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Eberhard Bethge

April 30, 1944

Dear Eberhard,

Another month gone. Does time fly as fast with you as it does with me here? I’m often surprised at it myself—and when will the month come when you and Renate, I and Maria, and we two can meet again? I have such a strong feeling that great events are moving the world every day and could change all our personal relationships, that I should like to write to you much oftener, partly because I don’t know how much longer I shall be able to, and even more because we want to share everything with each other as often and as long as we can. I’m firmly convinced that, by the time you get this letter, great decisions will already be setting things moving on all fronts. During the coming weeks we shall have to keep a stout heart, and that is what I wish you. We shall have to keep all our wits about us, so as to let nothing scare us. In view of what is coming, I’m almost inclined to quote the biblical dei, and I feel that I “long to look,” like the angels in 1 Peter 1: 12, to see how God is going to solve the apparently insoluble. I think God is about to accomplish something that, even if we take part in it either outwardly or inwardly, we can only receive with the greatest wonder and awe. Somehow it will be clear—for those who have eyes to see—that Psalm 58: 11b and Psalm 9: 19f. are true; and we shall have to repeat Jeremiah 45: 5 to ourselves every day. It’s harder for you go to through this separated from Renate and your boy than it is for me, so I will think of you especially, as I am already doing now.

How good it would seem to me, for both of us, if we could go through this time together, helping each other. But it’s probably “better” for it not to be so, but for each of us to have to go through it alone. I find it hard not to be able to help you in anything—except by thinking of you every morning and evening when I read the Bible, and often during the day as well. You’ve no need to worry about me at all, as I’m getting on uncommonly well—you would be surprised, if you came to see me. People here keep on telling me (as you can see, I feel very flattered by it) that I’m “radiating so much peace around me,” and that I’m “always so cheerful,”—so that the feelings that I sometimes have to the contrary must, I suppose, rest on an illusion (not that I really believe this at all!). You would be surprised, and perhaps even worried, by my theological thoughts and the conclusions that they look to; and this is where I miss you most of all, because I don’t know anyone else with whom I could so well discuss them to have my thinking clarified. What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience—and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as “religious” do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by “religious.”

Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old Christian preaching and theology rest on the “religious a priori” of mankind. “Christianity” has always been a form—perhaps the true form—of “religion.” But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression, and if therefore man becomes radically religionless—and I think that that is already more or less the case (else how is it, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any “religious” reaction?)—what does that mean for “Christianity”? It means that the foundation is taken away from the whole of what has up to now been our “Christianity” and that there remain only a few “last survivors of the age of chivalry,” or a few intellectually dishonest people, on whom we can descend as “religious.” Are they to be the chosen few? Is it on this dubious group of people that we are to pounce in fervour, pique, or indignation, in order to sell them our goods? Are we to fall upon a few unfortunate people in their hour of need and exercise a sort of religious compulsion on them? If we don’t want to do all that, if our final judgment must be that the western form of Christianity, too, was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, for the church? How can Christ become the Lord of the religionless as well? Are there religionless Christians? If religion is only a garment of Christianity—and even this garment has looked very different at different times—then what is religionless Christianity?

Barth, who is the only one to have started along this line of thought, did not carry it to completion, but arrived at a positivism of revelation, which in the last analysis is essentially a restoration. For the religionless working man (or any other man) nothing decisive is gained here. The questions to be answered would surely be: What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we speak of God—without religion, i.e. without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now even “speak” as we used to) in a “secular” way about “God”? In what way are we “religionless-secular” Christians, in what way are we the “ek-klesia,” those who are also called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favoured, but rather as belonging wholly to the world? In that case, Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world. But what does that mean? What is the place of worship and prayer in a religionless situation? Does the secret discipline, or alternatively the difference (which I have suggested to you before) between penultimate and ultimate, take on a new importance here?

I must break off for today, so that the letter can go straight away. I’ll write to you again about in two days’ time. I hope you see more or less what I mean, and that it doesn’t bore you. Goodbye for the present. It’s not easy always to write without an echo, and you must excuse me if that makes it something of a monologue.

I’m thinking of you very much.

Your Dietrich