Sacred Rhetoric: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Participatory Tradition

Sacred Rhetoric

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Participatory Tradition

Justin Mandela Roberts

Sacred Rhetoric

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Participatory Tradition

Copyright © 2015 Justin Mandela Roberts. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Sacred Rhetoric

2. The Abolition of Meaning, the Advent of Truth

3. Metanoia

4. Being Grateful

5. Returning the Word of God

6. Reverent Seeing

Bibliography

Subject Index

To my son, Ezra Mandela

"Seine Augen blicken unverwandt

in das heilige, gelobte Land.

Daß er auf das Sterben ihn bereite,

tritt der Herr dem alten Knecht zur Seite.

Will auf Höhen, wo die Menschen schweigen,

selber ihm verheiß’ne Zukunft zeigen"

"Steady is his gaze and tired his hand;

he surveys the sacred promised land.

That he might for Moses’ death provide,

God appears now by his servant’s side,

shows, from heights where humankind is dumb,

what is promised for the years to come"

–Letters and Papers from Prison,

532

.

Acknowledgments

In my first year of college, I was given Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. I admit that I understood very little at the time, but was convinced of its value. The book sat on my shelf and a few times a year I would pick it up again to see if I gained any ground on comprehending his work. After a number of years like this, I was finally able to receive it in its entirety and read bits each morning. I’m sure I read it over a dozen times, some mornings reading the last page and turning immediately back to the first. When thinking of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I am fundamentally grateful to know his life and his work, and therefore my first acknowledgement is, simply, one of thankfulness for him.

Most of the chapters in this book were presented at one time or another in PhD seminars at McMaster Divinity College. The first essay presentation on Bonhoeffer piqued interest, but after two years on the same topic, I am sure even the most generous among my colleagues were happy to see an end to this manuscript. For those who endured that time and graciously offered insightful responses, I am grateful. Dr. Steven Studebaker had the additional task of reading and grading these essays, and I thank him for the challenging but edifying critique to be comprehensible.

Since my undergraduate studies, I have looked up to my good friend David Fuller who copyedited this volume. His subtle but poignant contributions added what I could not do in a thousand rereads. Throughout our process, he was infinitely accessible and genuinely intrigued with the work. For your efforts Dave, I am truly grateful.

Additionally, I had the privilege of meeting Victoria Barnett at the 2014 Annual Karl Barth Conference at Princeton where she offered timely encouragement at an early stage of this manuscript. Since that time, she has enthusiastically and diligently responded to my many email enquiries and offered learned feedback on Bonhoeffer.

To those who took the time out of their immensely busy schedule to review and endorse the book, thank you.

I would also like to express my appreciation to the faculty and students at Regent College who first introduced me to the debate surrounding participation and revelation, in their case, a debate between the theology department and the New Testament department. This project is the fruit of my contemplation that began there, and I am happy to have had the opportunity to engage in so lively a discussion.

Finally, it is undeniably the case that any achievement of mine is made possible, and more enjoyable, by my wife Abbie. We work together and celebrate together. Thank you Abbie for your tireless love.

Abbreviations

DB Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English:

SC Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church

AB Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology

CF Creation and Fall

D Discipleship

LT Life Together and The Prayerbook of the Bible

E Ethics

LPP Letters and Papers from Prison

EAPW Ecumenical, Academic, and Pastoral Work: 1931–1932

B Berlin: 1932–1933

CI Conspiracy and Imprisonment: 1940–1945

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke:

DBW 1 Sanctorum Communio: Eine dogmatische Untersuchung zur Soziologie der Kirche

DBW 2 Akt und Sein: Transzendentalphilosophie und Ontologie in der systematischen Theologie

DBW 3 Schöpfung und Fall

DBW 4 Nachfolge

DBW 5 Gemeinsames Leben und Das Gebetbuch der Bibel

DBW 6 Ethik

DBW 8 Widerstand und Ergebung

DBW 11 Ökumene, Universität, Pfarramt: 1931–1932

DBW 12 Berlin: 1932–1933

DBW 16 Konspiration und Haft: 1940–1945

Introduction

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is beloved by our time, but one cannot be exactly sure why. His academic pieces, including Sanctorum Communio, Act and Being, and Creation and Fall, offer nothing particularly remarkable as scholarly resources for the theological and philosophical traditions. His positive theological arguments (for example, Christ existing as the church-community), while often appropriated, have never given way to an undigested Bonhoefferianism. His intriguing participation in the plot to assassinate Hitler is shrouded to some degree in historical and ethical darkness. His notoriety during his lifetime was relatively modest, especially when one considers his reputation today.

It remains to be seen what makes Bonhoeffer so captivating. But to be sure, something does captivate. Even as scholarship continues to bring the mythic Bonhoeffer back to earth, his subtle and complex idiosyncrasies only endear us more to him. Whatever one’s academic interest in the man, it is the man that interests. For all his achievements, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is always more than the particulars, even when more implies shortcomings. While there is no exact take away from his life, he is attractive in the truest sense of the word, being morally desirable and aesthetically pleasing. His attractiveness, in the end, may very well validate his theology more than any exposition or defense. Thus, there is something fitting about the cover image, in which Bonhoeffer stands in a row of engraved martyrs (fourth from the right) above the west entrance to Westminster Abbey. He is part of that heavenly architecture, luring the eyes upwards to himself and then directing them beyond. What Karl Barth was for the twentieth century, Bonhoeffer may well be for the twenty-first.

His appearance at Westminster Abbey in some way represents the impetus of this book. For however underdeveloped, inconsistent, or iconoclastic his ideas may be, Bonhoeffer contributes to the doxological architecture of the church. I will seek to elaborate the profound ways in which that is true by placing his unique doxological ontology within the theological rhythms of the participatory tradition (namely the patristic-medieval heritage, appropriated more recently by various Anglican, Catholic, and Orthodox theologians).

Without offering any kind of exhaustive history, it may be helpful to introduce certain key figures to the contemporary discussion of participation, especially those who make a notable appearance in this book.

Christian participatory metaphysics has existed since the patristic period in various forms; being the vernacular of the church fathers, it also proved to be an ecumenical discourse for medieval philosophers (notably Thomas Aquinas, Ibn-Sina, and Moses Maimonides). By no means has participation had a static theological career, as it underwent radical changes as early as John Duns Scotus. But it was discontent French Catholic theologians at the turn of the twentieth century that initiated a significant reappraisal of the church’s historic metaphysics. Their genius was to read the ascent of modernity as an unfolding departure from the church’s ancient theological vision. Consequently, their work offers a corrective to modernity from the pre-modern tradition.

These theologians were ironically ridiculed for going back in time, as being new or novel (hence the derogatory label Nouvelle Théologie, New Theology). They reread Augustine, Aquinas, and the Eastern fathers within context while accounting for their limitations, so that the perennial witness of the church at large might be heard. Nineteenth-century Catholicism had been resistant to the historical investigation of theology and theologians, fearing it might undermine the timelessness of its truths.

When in 1879 Pope Loe XIII commissioned a return to Aquinas in his encyclical Aeterni Patris, his intentions were apologetic. Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Feuerbach all posed a threat to the church. Saint Thomas represented the chief accomplishment of natural reason, which the First Vatican Council had confirmed was capable of reaching certain truths about God without the aid of revelation. All clergy were required to pass an examination in philosophy, which was shaped by a distilled Twenty-Four thesis summary of Saint Thomas. Additionally, beginning in 1910 they were required to swear the anti-Modernist Oath.¹ While intending to combat modernist tendencies, this subtle separation of faith from reason only instantiated modernity in ecclesial dress, as it was rooted in a view of pure nature (natura pura) distinct from grace, accompanied by the desire to solidify timeless propositions defendable by reason.

Completing seven years of neoscholastic training under the preeminent Garrigou-Langrange, Marie-Dominique Chenu (1895–1990) wrote his doctoral thesis on contemplation as a decidedly theocentric act in opposition to the prevailing thought that it was individualistic and moral.² Chenu taught the patristic sources of the thought of St. Thomas, among other historical investigations, which earned him an official interrogation in Rome (1938).³ Hoping to remain within the church, though acutely aware of contemporary skepticism, Chenu sought to recover (ressourcement) premodern convictions. Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), perhaps the most significant proponent of nouvelle théologie, contended with the prevailing concept of natura pura. The Neo-Scholastic version of theology (sometimes called Neo-Thomism or manual Thomism, for its purported theological poverty evinced by the dissemination of bare, summative manuals to seminarians) saw the possibility of a natural realm with full integrity, including proximate natural ends, which receive a divine orientation only extrinsically by grace. Creation required a second work of grace, the desire to see God (the beatific vision) endowed by supernatural means. A deep ontological shift gave way to the division of faith and reason, nature and grace, sacred and secular. De Lubac set course to revise such an ontology, arguing that nature is something always already graced.⁴ Divine supplementation stands in continuity with creaturely motion and perfects its inherent and natural form, fulfilling what creation innately anticipates, as opposed to contradicting or imposing upon it.

The movement developed into multivalent avenues, and while there was no absolute unanimity, all derived a particular sensibility reappropriated by Chenu and de Lubac. Their controversial beginning would be overshadowed by their later achievements, including attending the Second Vatican Council as experts (de Lubac has significantly influenced Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI and fellow Jesuit Pope Francis, as he was appointed cardinal by his admirer Pope John Paul II). A key exponent of the nouvelle movement was Erich Przywara, who extended the implications of de Lubac’s return to Saint Thomas and the church fathers into a comprehensive metaphysic. With profound philosophical insight, Przywara formulated this new vision according to the analogia entis (analogy of being), which he leveraged to interpret the entire Western philosophical tradition from Parmenides to Heidegger. Hans Urs von Balthasar, another notable contributor, employed the ontology of ressourcement throughout his fifteen volume dogmatic series (The Glory of the Lord, Theo-Drama, and Theo-Logic). Przywara’s infamous debates with Karl Barth set the context out of which Bonhoeffer himself would contend with the analogia entis; as we will see, Bonhoeffer was really unable to see Przywara as anything other than a Neo-Scholastic.

The debates continue. Some Catholic theologians defend a Thomistic reading of natura pura, some support the general correction of the movement without endorsing the same metaphysical details.⁵ What began, quite courageously, in Chenu and de Lubac proved to be the origins of perhaps the most significant trajectory for contemporary theology.⁶

A rather unlikely source inaugurated the reign of de Lubac in English speaking Protestantism, a single volume in a cultural engagement series, inconspicuously titled Theology and Social Theory by John Milbank. The usual suspects (Nietzsche, Marx, and Kant) all played prominent roles within Milbank’s narrative of the intellectual birth and rise of secularity. This magisterial piece extended the positive tradition of the ressourcement movement, a Neoplatonic-Aristotelian synthesis concurrent with ancient and medieval theology, while expanding its negative philosophical critiques. Theology and Social Theory traced the lineage of secularity to the intellectual developments of the thirteenth and fourteenth century. If all creation is inherently graced, composed of natures drawn towards God "naturally, then the possibility of purely neutral (or secular") sciences is expunged.

The supposition that a thing can be known without reference to God, a deeply presumed modern thought, was an impossibility within the Christian tradition for over a thousand years. William of Ockham (1287–1347) and John Duns Scotus (1265/66–1308) challenged Saint Thomas’ theses and offered three novel ideas that, according to Milbank, laid the foundations for secularity itself.⁷ The three major developments are: the univocity of being, the challenge of Being (esse) as a reference to God (as it was for Aquinas), and its transformation into a common (neutral) category provable by the mind; voluntarism, the prioritization of will over being, primarily in the prioritization of covenant making as opposed to sacramental participation; and nominalism, the reduction of essences to experientially determined names (nomos–nominalism). Consequently, God and creation became situated by a larger all-encompassing reality called Being, which has its own science (namely Scotus’ new understanding of metaphysics), and one has the choice of whether or not to include God; as creation has no inherent relation to divine form, it has a nearly arbitrary independence that operates according to predetermined decisions in the divine mind. John Milbank, with Catherine Pickstock, among others, developed this overarching critique, rooted in a theological retrieval of the tradition, into a theological sensibility called Radical Orthodoxy.⁸ Participatory metaphysics, according to the Neoplatonic-Aristotelian synthesis, continues to flourish outside of the Catholic-Anglophone context in the work of various Orthodox, Reformed, and Lutheran theologians (though certainly not only in these traditions).

The narrative is really much more complex than this, and wonderfully so. Some are familiar with the history, but for others it contains a critical aspect that often goes unnoticed to the demise of fruitful dialogue. However systematic, abstract, and scientific participatory metaphysics may appear, at its core lies the logic of mystery. The specificity of sacred science makes no attempt to seal off compartments knowable through reason and speculation, rather it is a doxological mode that mediates the divine sacramentally through intellectual theoria. The ontological permits the historical, concrete worldliness summoned by Bonhoeffer and others. My intention is to retrieve the great tradition and its theological vision that metaphysics may no longer be a four letter word; many others have done this superbly, so my more modest ambition is, in some way, to convince Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I suspect he would be quite taken with John Milbank.

Chapter one takes rather broad strokes, attempting to present a unified portrait of Bonhoeffer’s writings, from his earliest to his latest, while along the way demonstrating how the larger pieces of his thought fit with the categories and rhythms of the participatory tradition. It lays the ground work for the subsequent chapters. The following three chapters are dedicated to the themes of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty respectively. These transcendentals are classically conceived as convertible, or the same, according to the logic of divine simplicity. Because the topics cannot be divorced from one another, each chapter represents an alternative lens through which the entire ontological vision is perceived.

Chapter five examines Bonhoeffer’s exegesis of Genesis 1:1, found in Creation and Fall, to demonstrate the theological and thus hermeneutical continuities between his interpretive practices and sacramental interpretation, especially as found in nouvelle theologians. The sixth and final chapter elaborates upon and exposits Bonhoeffer’s response to Eberhard