Kevin O’Farrell,Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a Theology of the Exception

Abstract

On 23 March 1933, the heavily coerced German Reichstag voted by the required two-thirds majority to give Hitler the right to make laws without the Reichstag’s approval for four years. A fatal Ausnahmezustand (literally, an emergency) which would last until 30 April 1945 was created. Hitherto, serious study of Bonhoeffer’s contextual theology has been slow in attending to this connection. But now, Kevin O’Farrell has written a sophisticated, brilliantly researched and constructed case for Bonhoeffer’s ‘Theology of the Exception’, which offers additional possibilities as to his motives for supporting the bomb plot against Hitler.

An essential aspect in understanding this theology is the disclosure that boundaries between Church and world are not static, but porous and constantly discerned anew. In his lifetime Bonhoeffer witnessed the proponents of weltlich values being faithful to Christ in confession (by deeds and courage) rather than the Lutheran Church in the face of persecution. This experience affirms for Bonhoeffer that the Church is a community defined primarily not by form or by doctrinal confessions but by its faithful witness to Christ (p. 148). A key text O’Farrell highlights comes in a 1932 Bonhoeffer sermon on John 8.32. Here, Bonhoeffer asserts:

[I]n human life, the truth is something foreign, something unusual, an exception (Ausnahmehaftes) … and reminds us that it is the fool in ridiculous attire who stands among the princes and knights in the rooms of the court, neither blending in nor belonging who is the one speaking the truth no one else can speak … but every court needed an exception (Ausnahme). (p. 7)

For O’Farrell’s Bonhoeffer, it is only in the light of the event (of the truth) that one can probe into the character of ethics, politics and free action, since persons would otherwise isolate themselves through the pervasive political and moral lies they adopt. Using the metaphor of language tense, O’Farrell writes:

[W]hile the imperative force of the command sets itself against the political excesses of National Socialism, the liberating aspect of the command encounters one in jussive mood … the freedom of the command liberates the conspiracy circle for a differing mode of witness that not merely obeys or enforces the imperative of the law, but prayerfully awaits and boldly grasps after God’s permissive command in resistance. (p. 157)

Accordingly, O’Farrell suggests that superficial adoptions of ‘tyrannicide’ in seeking to understand Bonhoeffer’s motives divert attention away from Bonhoeffer’s attempt to attend to the exceptional form of God’s commandment. Here, it is the self-assertion of God’s law that needs emphasizing.

When political life disintegrates and reflection upon God’s commandment becomes obscure and distorted, God’s address can be trusted to undercut these aberrations … the exception is a krisis of human forgetfulness and the law’s obscuration, necessitating a divine incursion that renews political life … in this manner, the exception does not suspend meditation on God’s commandment and law [as if the moment were a lacuna in God’s commandment] but is, rather, a time that generates renewed meditation on the character and form of life of the various mandates when they teeter towards dissolution. (p. 142; a fuller discussion of the mandates is not possible here)

In this exploration of the exception, O’Farrell does not encourage the canonizing of Bonhoeffer’s theology but rather makes critical use of it in attempting to understand the Scriptures and Christian faith in our own context. For O’Farrell, Bonhoeffer positions fallen history as remaining in irrevocable relation to the suprahistorical events of creation and eschaton, and suggests that using Bonhoeffer’s theology responsibly can help us deliberate about the meaning of history and ask what differentiates a responsible hermeneutic from a violent hermeneutic in reading and responding to history. Yet, he astutely observes that it is difficult to imagine how the violence enacted by the conspiracy circle would not somehow enter into and determine the politics that follow thereafter (p. 152). O’Farrell comes to a measured conclusion about the exception. He cites Hans Ulrich on the ‘free action’ of the conspiracy: ‘handing over everything to God, remaining powerless, casting aside “the powerful deed” and in this case, embracing the ethically “wrong”’ (Hans G. Ulrich, ‘Stations on the Road to Freedom’, cited on p. 134).