II. PRESENTACIÓN DEL INFORME
3. PRESENTACIÓN JUSTIFICATIVA DEL INFORME
4.6.1 Data from the primary sources
This section will trace a particularly prominent theme in Bonhoeffer’s thought over the course of the 1930’s, and its provisional resolution in the practices of discipleship. Bonhoeffer, as both pastor and theologian, sought to determine the appropriate response which the church ought to make to the rising power of Nazism. Much of his thought from 1931-1937 was consumed by— as he put it in a 1932 letter to his friend, Erwin Sutz—“the question of whether it is possible for the concrete commandment to be proclaimed throughout the church.”88 Did the church have both a right and a responsibility to declare God’s attitude towards the state of affairs in Europe and, if so, how would it determine God’s will?
One avenue along which Bonhoeffer ventured in search of an answer was his deep involvement in international ecumenical movements. The nature of the church universal, surpassing the par- ticular identities of individual national or confessional churches, was both an interesting theo- logical problematic for Bonhoeffer and a potential practical solution to his desire for the church to speak on world affairs. In a 1932 lecture at a youth conference in Czechoslovakia, Bonhoef- fer reminded the participants that “the church as the one church-community of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Lord of the world, has the task of speaking his word to the entire world.”89 This could only be possible should the church speak “in the authority of the Christ who is present and living in it.”90 While Bonhoeffer thus hoped for a bold statement from individual churches, the warrant for declaring a particular statement as God’s comes with a caveat. Only the church faithful to God could speak on God’s behalf, and so the church must, if necessary, carry out “a protest against every form of church that does not honor the question of the truth above all.”91 If the church could not look at its own conduct and be assured of its faithful in- tentions, then perhaps “qualified silence would perhaps be more appropriate for the church today.”92
This question about the conditions of the church’s faithfulness which could justify proclama- tion only became more pronounced after Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933. Given the rhetoric
88 DBWE 11, 136. 89 DBWE 11, 358. 90 DBWE 11, 359. 91 DBWE 11, 358. 92 DBWE 11, 358.
emerging from the chancellory, the possibility of war already appeared on the horizon. Bon- hoeffer—as he put it in a 1933 ecumenical conference in Denmark—still hoped that “one great Ecumenical Council of the Holy Church of Christ” might soon have “taken the weapons from the hands of their sons, forbidden war, and proclaimed the peace of Christ against the raging world.”93 An objective, concrete knowledge of God’s present will could emerge, in Bonhoef- fer’s mind, but only from a church completely dedicated to Christ.
In a sense, then, what the Bekennende Kirche proclaimed at Barmen and Dahlem in 1934 was an answer to Bonhoeffer’s hopes. He became known as one of the most ardent advocates for fidelity to the confessing statements, even famously arguing in a 1936 article that “whoever knowingly separates himself from the Confessing Church in Germany separates himself from salvation.”94 Yet the question of how exactly—even within a church confessing itself as faith- ful—one might pursue faithfulness to God in a way that would yield knowledge of divine intent still haunted Bonhoeffer.
In the autumn of 1933, Bonhoeffer left his academic work in Berlin to take up a pastorate at a German church in London. Over the course of 1934, he visited a number of Quaker, Mennonite, and contemplative communities across the north of England. He began to express to friends and acquaintances—in the recollection of the Hutterite leader Hardy Arnold—a desire “to found a sort of Protestant monastic community, with confessions, spiritual exercises, remaining unmarried as far as possible.”95 This community Bonhoeffer imagined was to be an “attempt to begin to follow Jesus’ words as a rule,” thus hoping “to come nearer to the essential core of the truth of Christ, by being open right from the start about not yet knowing the will of God for our time.”96 Perhaps in the course of a communal pursuit of spiritual disciplines, one might found the grounds of faithfulness necessary to speak on God’s behalf.
This experiment was realized in 1935 when Bonhoeffer returned to Germany as the director of a confessing preachers’ seminary at Finkenwalde. There, Bonhoeffer instituted a structured
93 DBWE 13, 309.
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communal life for the students which revolved around worship, prayer and meditation on scrip- ture.97 In so doing, Bonhoeffer’s hope was the structure of their life together would offer an- swers to the question, “How can I live a Christian life in this concrete world, and where are the ultimate authorities for such a life that alone is worth living?”98 The answer would be theolog- ical, but in the sense of being intensely particular, a manifestation of God’s will for a particular moment, an answer “no longer . . . abstract” but instead “articulated only by actually living and reflecting together on the commandments in a concrete, objective fashion.”99 The practical consequence of this conviction was to make Finkenwalde a place of communal prayer, exege- sis, learning, and discernment. In this corporate obedience to Christ, Bonhoeffer intended to establish “a group of completely free, committed pastors” able “to preach the word of God for the sake of decision and discernment of the Spirit in the present and future struggles of the church.”100 At the heart of Finkenwalde’s practice was scriptural reflection, “I read the Bible,” Bonhoeffer wrote to his brother, “I ask every passage: what is God saying to us here? And I implore God to show us what he wants to say.”101 As a morning routine, this same question were placed before a lectionary text by each student at Finkenwalde, and was the foundation of their ‘gemeinsamen Leben.’
The insights of Nachfolge have to be understood in this context. Discipleship, for Bonhoeffer, meant something quite specific, a communal life of common worship, fellowship, confession and service, with prayer and meditation on scripture as background. This was as close as Bon- hoeffer would ever come to describing a kind of method by which the presence of God could become known, albeit a method which was intended to involve what Derek Taylor has called “practices of un-mastery,”102—disciplines by which one could be confronted by truth rather than assuming one’s own knowledge of it. The life of discipleship was thus a praxis in which both certainty and uncertainty could have their place within faithful participation in God, a theme which would become more pronounced in the late 1930’s.
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102 Derek W. Taylor, “Reading Scripture in the Wake of Christ: The Church as a Hermeneutical Space” (PhD
4.6.2 Observations
For much of the 1930’s (and, in some ways, for the entire latter half of his life) Bonhoeffer was on a restless search to discern how best to be faithful to God in the midst of a hostile and violent political climate. This quest led him into opposition to his own church and then opposition to his own government, all while trying to understand these positions theologically. In the face of a Deutsche Christen movement that had fashioned a God to support its own positions, Bon- hoeffer was painfully aware of the temptation to theological self-deception. In pursuing the will of God, he was simultaneously pursuing a way of understanding theology that would per- mit God’s speech at the level of greatest particularity while preventing sinful humans from abusing the privilege of speaking on God’s behalf.
It is no coincidence that Bonhoeffer’s growing opposition to his own church in their accom- modation of Nazi rule coincided with an intense focus on the nature of obedience. His task was not only to be obedient, but to help his church into obedience, and to give that church the resources necessary to speak about obedience to God to the broader world. His determination to pursue the will of God revealed in Christ led him along a path to Finkenwalde, to the con- viction that the church could “only achieve true inner clarity and honesty by really starting to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously.”103 Preliminarily then, it is worth noting that Bon- hoeffer’s interest in discipleship began as an interest in discerning the grounds of faithfulness upon which God’s will could be known. Discipleship, at this early stage, took a semi-contem- plative, reflective form—Bonhoeffer asking his students to live together, work together, play together, all while praying, reading, serving, and discerning together. Throughout the 1930’s Bonhoeffer’s work was conditioned by the belief that “Jesus is living, living here in our midst. Look for him, here or at home, call to him, ask him, beg him, and suddenly he will be there with you, and you will know that he lives.”104
For the theologian attempting to establish a universal and indubitable basis for accessing divine truth, there is good reason to question the revelatory immediacy of such practices. But Bon- hoeffer approached them as one neither jaded nor naively credulous, aware of the temptation “to seek universal, eternal truths that might correspond to our own ‘eternal’ nature and that
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might be demonstrable as such.”105 In saying this, Bonhoeffer inverts the theologian’s pre- sumption. It is not the kneeling disciple who is at risk of hearing her own desires and calling them God’s will. The disciple, in kneeling, at least grasps the limitations of her understanding. It is the scholar, applying to every notion a supposedly objective standard of universal validity, who is most at risk of enshrining personal beliefs as immutable laws.
We have two features of Bonhoeffer’s thought to this point which are relevant to this thesis’ larger project. First, we find in Bonhoeffer a more positive aspect to the notion of divine pres- ence than the totality of negation in which Kierkegaard often speaks. This is not to separate the two thinkers, but to suggest that Bonhoeffer’s confidence in Christus praesens provides an even more concrete notion of divine approach than Kierkegaard’s universal-particular. Second, however, Bonhoeffer is well aware of how easily ideology creeps back into the most well- intentioned attempts to speak about the will of God. And so, while discipleship appears to offer a grounds for understanding God, Bonhoeffer intends to define discipleship in such a way that, within the notion itself, there is an understanding of God’s perpetually surprising, convicting, directing speech. It is this more particular kind of Bonhoefferian dialectic—the singular move- ment of the disciple through both knowing and unknowing—which we will continue to explore in the next section.