Bonhoeffer's eschatology in a world “come of age”

The fragmentary nature of the doctrine

Dietrich Bonhoeffer never outlined a comprehensive doctrine of eschatology. Among the many elements of his theology that, on account of his untimely martyrdom at the hands of the Nazis in 1945, were left to us in only fragmentary form, Bonhoeffer's eschatology is one of the most intriguing. Some have assumed, wrongly, that the fragmentary nature of Bonhoeffer's eschatology proves that he was uninterested in that particular element of doctrine. Martin Honecker, for example, writing in the early 1960s, argued that “the eschatological dimension took a back seat in all of Bonhoeffer's writings.” ² More recently, Philip Ziegler has noted that many commentators “have adjudged him [Bonhoeffer] to be “almost immunized” against [at least apocalyptic] eschatology.” ³ Eberhard Bethge on the other hand, whose knowledge of Bonhoeffer's life and thought was surely unparalleled, repudiates such an easy dismissal. He notes, on the contrary, that eschatological concerns captured Bonhoeffer's attention on no less than three occasions during his academic studies, and indeed dominated his Nachfolge period. ⁴ Towards the end of his life, and particularly during his years of imprisonment, eschatology—which takes shape specifically in the form of the ultimate (Das Letzte) and the penultimate (das Vorletzte) ⁵ —underpinned Bonhoeffer's entire ethical framework.

There is, in other words, still some work to do to illuminate more precisely the nature and extent of the presence of eschatological thinking in Bonhoeffer's overall theology. That is not, however, the specific concern here. Of greater interest in the context of this article is Bonhoeffer's creative ethical linkage between the eschatological presence of Christ and what he terms the “world come of age.” In his view, the world that has come of age is more godless and yet, in paradoxical consequence, closer to God than the world that is not yet of age. That Bonhoeffer elsewhere, in affirmation of Karl Barth's 1930 essay “The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life,” defined eschatology as the radical repudiation of every continuity that is presumed to exist between humanity and God, suggested that the eschatological presence may indeed be present precisely where that continuity has already been rejected from the human side, that is, in a non-religious world. ⁶

Bonhoeffer's early eschatology

To begin, however, it is instructive to look briefly at the way in which Bonhoeffer's eschatology developed throughout the course of his all-too-short career. According to Bethge, Bonhoeffer's first academic excursus into the doctrine of eschatology was in early 1926 when he was a student in Reinhold Seeberg's systematic theology seminar. In a paper for Seeberg entitled “Kirche und Eschatologie oder Kirche und Reich Gottes,” and in which he shows himself to be influenced by, but in opposition to, Albrecht Ritchl's definition of the Kingdom of God, Bonhoeffer declared that

It is always a sign of religious strength and seriousness when in theology the area of eschatology is its own domain, and not only a modest footnote to dogmatics that fills only a few pages, as we so often observe in the theology of the 19th Century. On the contrary … for the Reformers, a doctrine of justification without eschatology was like an arrow with the tip broken off. ⁷

Later the same year, Bonhoeffer again addressed the question of eschatology, in his essay “The Teaching of Early Protestant Dogmatics on Life after Death and the Last Things:”

In this [essay], it is argued that the early Protestant dogmatics simply overlooked the whole of the biblical testimony. Difficult issues in Scripture, such as the apokatastasis and chiliasm were ignored without adequate consideration … and that the Johannine eschatological problem was not touched upon at all … ⁸

Clearly, the young Bonhoeffer was already setting himself in opposition to both his early and his more recent predecessors. At the very least, he was insistent that eschatology not be marginalized by Protestant dogmatics, and that to do so is to run contrary to both the Bible and the Reformation.

He also, it would seem, set himself apart from his American teachers during his first brief sojourn at Union Theological Seminary in New York, in 1930–31. Bethge notes that the UTS curriculum of the day focused on ethics and an understanding of contemporary American philosophy and literature. Bonhoeffer was undoubtedly impressed by Union's emphasis on social action and its engagement with New York civic life, particularly as it took shape in the midst of the Depression. Nonetheless, social activism by itself could not make up for the fact that UTS had hardly any courses devoted to exegesis or dogmatics. And so it was inevitable that Bonhoeffer's American teachers, such as Reinhold Niebuhr and John Baillie, were greatly disturbed by the emphasis that their young German student placed in his seminar papers on the traditional doctrinal loci of revelation, justification, and eschatology. ⁹

As Bonhoeffer left behind his student days and entered into ministry, and as Germany's socio-political problems simultaneously grew more acute, eschatological questions continued in various ways to press to the forefront of his thoughts. An intriguing anecdote from the Christmas of 1932 speaks volumes. After working with an unruly group of confirmands in the rough Wedding district of Berlin, he noted in a letter to his friend Erwin Sutz that “what helped most was telling them quite simple biblical stuff with great emphasis, particularly eschatological passages.” ¹⁰ The curricular focus in New York had assumed that preparation for the task of ministry was best achieved by learning about the “realities of everyday life” (“den Dingen des täglichen Lebens”). ¹¹ In contrast, however, this incident from Wedding shows that Bonhoeffer had perhaps begun to grasp that eschatology was not quite so divorced from mission and ministry as might be expected; in later years, he would begin to develop ways of making that connection more apparent. And, of course, it has already been noted that his Creation and Fall lectures, also from this time, were predicated upon a thoroughgoing eschatological dimension.

If one turns to the Nachfolge period, a similar attention to eschatology appears. With Germany in the early grip of Nazism, and Bonhoeffer heading up an illegal seminary for the Bekennende Kirche in Finkenwalde, he explored with his seminarians the contemporary meaning of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount—lectures that would form the basis of his most famous book, Discipleship. ¹² Towards the end of the book, Bonhoeffer spoke, in no small measure in reflection of his contemporary situation, of the threat that the world poses to the church. Having argued for a rightful “living-space” (Lebensraum) ¹³ of the church in the world, Bonhoeffer went on to note that

The older the world grows, the more heated becomes the conflict between Christ and Antichrist, and the more thorough the efforts of the world to get rid of the Christians. Until now the world had always granted them a lodging-place… But a world that has become one hundred percent antichristian cannot allow them even this private sphere. The Christians are now forced to deny their Lord for every crumb of bread they need. Either they must flee the world, or go to prison; there is no alternative. ¹⁴

This, he said, is a world in which the end is near. And yet flight from that world is the very thing that Bonhoeffer refused to countenance. The very thing that differentiates the Christian from the non-Christian is what he terms “the peculiar,” or “the extraordinary.” It is the incarnated life of the beatitudes:

It is the life of the followers of Jesus, the light which lights the world, the city set on a hill, the way of self-renunciation, of utter love, of absolute purity, truthfulness and meekness. It is unreserved love for our enemies, for the unloving and the unloved, love for our religious, political and personal adversaries. ¹⁵

In other words, in a world in which the end has come perilously close, the presence of the future hope to which we are called is nonetheless being enacted in that world, in the life of those marked by the extraordinary character of Christ. To live by this “extraordinary” is, of course, the life of the sanctified: the Christian life. As such, being lived in the world, the sanctified life of the church is, says Bonhoeffer, a constant battlefield; a “war to prevent the breaking of the Holy Spirit's seal … [a] struggling to prevent the world from becoming the church and the church from becoming the world.” ¹⁶ And so out of necessity, says Bonhoeffer, “Sanctification is always related to the End.” ¹⁷ In reality, though, this is no new discovery for Bonhoeffer. On the contrary, it is the embodying of his earlier insistence in Schöpfung und Fall that the eschatological end determines the church's witness in the present middle. To live according to the christological extraordinary is to witness to the person, life, and meaning of Christ, and thus to proclaim in word and deed the very essence of eschatology, that is, the universally valid event of reconciliation.

If we jump forward four years, to the time of Bonhoeffer's underground resistance work for the Abwehr and his later imprisonment, we find him in the midst of his Ethics. Like his eschatology, Bonhoeffer's Ethik was never completed. Some of it survived in reasonable form, but much of it remained only fragmentarily. Whether one considers the material that he wrote in the Benedictine monastery at Ettal, or the sections he drafted in his cell in Tegel, it is clear that eschatological concerns dominated his thoughts and theology.

We see this concern evident in Bonhoeffer's first ethical principle, which once more returns us to his Creation and Fall lectures from the early 1930s. In those lectures, Bonhoeffer stated that to seek after the knowledge of good and evil is to fall unthinkably away from one's centre in God, and to become hopelessly Zwiespalt—split in two. ¹⁸ It is to tear apart the primal unity of being that properly belongs to the person, but only to that person, who knows only God. The moment one does this—to think, that is, ethically—one has separated oneself from God. “In the possibility of the knowledge of good and evil, Christian ethics knows already a fall away from the origin [Ursprung]. Because in its origin, humanity knows only one thing: God … . [And therefore] only against God can humanity know good and evil.” ¹⁹ Or, as Bonhoeffer put it elsewhere, “the origin of Christian ethics is not the reality of the I, nor the reality of the world, nor even the reality of common standards and values, but on the contrary the reality of God in His revelation in Jesus Christ.” ²⁰ And, because the revelation of God in Christ is fundamentally the revelation of grace, Bonhoeffer proceeds to argue that the final word, not only in ethics but indeed in all things, is justification by grace and faith alone; the forgiveness of sins. God's mercy, he says,

must and can be heard only as God's final word; for otherwise it is not heard at all … There is no word of God that goes beyond His mercy [and therefore] this word implies the complete breaking off of everything that precedes it … It is the irreversible final word, and ultimate reality (letzte Wirklichkeit). ²¹

The grace of God is, for Bonhoeffer, das Letzte. This, in fact, is the very definition of eschatology. As Christiaan Mostert has affirmed, “In theological terms, the whole question of reconciliation…is set within an eschatological framework.” ²² The way in which we understand God's breaking-in to the world of fallen humanity is and must be the gracious event of reconciliation, by which a new ontological status, valid for all people, is effected through Jesus.

Nonetheless, there is also a penultimate, das Vorletzte, which cannot be ignored. Indeed, one cannot get to the final reality without traversing that which precedes it. “A way must be traversed.” Even Luther, according to Bonhoeffer, had to go through the monastery, and Paul had to go through his zeal for the Law. ²³ But even more to the point, Bonhoeffer insisted that the penultimate has its own dignity and necessity, even in its penultimacy. To set up a dichotomous Either–Or, pitting the last things, and the things before the last things, in stark opposition, leads only to error and threat. The dangers of both radicalism and compromise must be avoided. Compromise sets the reality of the ultimate “on the far side of the everyday” (jenseits des täglichen), and lives as though it has no necessary impact on the here-and-now. ²⁴ Radicalism, conversely, “sees only the ultimate” and believes that everything else is of no matter at all. ²⁵ And so, “Radicalism hates time, and compromise hates eternity. Radicalism hates patience, and compromise hates decision. Radicalism hates wisdom, and compromise hates simplicity… Radicalism hates the real, and compromise hates the word.” ²⁶ The key for us here, though, is in Bonhoeffer's appreciation of the necessity of the penultimate, of the here-and-now, and his consequent refusal to fall victim to the danger of radicalism. For it is precisely in this affirmation, however qualified, of the “things before the last,” that we see him claiming a space for a totally unradical—which in this context means ‘secular,” or better, “non-religious”—statement of the gospel. The eschatological horizon thus provides the framework in which all that is penultimate, including a religionless Christianity, is granted its due dignity. To put it in Bonhoeffer's own terms, the (secular, unradical) middle can only be parsed by reference to the end from which the Church must speak.

Eschatology, ethics, and prison

Bonhoeffer's thinking around das Letzte and das Vorletzte remained incomplete within his Ethik, but he was able to flesh out its implications more thoroughly during his imprisonment. Consequently, it is in his Letters and Papers from Prison ²⁷ that we begin to see the direction in which Bonhoeffer may have wanted his eschatology, and its correlative “religionless Christianity” in a “world come of age,” to develop. In a series of letters to Eberhard Bethge, between April and July 1944, Bonhoeffer wrestles with the indisputable fact that, in his eyes, the world is increasingly turning its back on religion, and the God whom that religion has presented to it.

What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today … We are moving towards a completely religionless time … 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 … what does that mean for “Christianity”? ²⁸

Decisively, though, Bonhoeffer understood this in a fundamentally positive way, and not at all as a cause for despair. Certainly, being birthed in the harsh confines of a Gestapo prison cell, and with the horrors of war evident all around, Bonhoeffer's prison theology was not in the slightest “a round of applause for the moral maturity of the world.” ²⁹ But neither, says Stephen Plant, was it a despairing capitulation. On the contrary, the new theological directions into which Bonhoeffer ventured during his imprisonment were “oriented to the future and [were] characterized by a profound optimism for theology, the Church, and humanity.” ³⁰ Talk of historical transience notwithstanding, Bonhoeffer is not here reverting to a Troeltschian historicism. The “adulthood of the world”—the world, that is, that has “come of age”—is a world that in fact refuses to allow the question of God to be confused with any particular stage or form of human religiosity. It is also a world that refuses any longer to accept the type of God that is all-too-often proposed by religious people when they come to the end of their own cognitive abilities; a God, that is, who is little more than a convenient solution to otherwise insoluble problems, a deus ex machina. ³¹ As Martin Heidegger realized, the God of religious metaphysics is a God to which “man can neither pray nor sacrifice… He can neither fall on his knees in awe nor sing and dance. Accordingly, godless thinking that must give up the god of [philosophical theology] … is perhaps nearer to the divine God.” ³² The non-religious world, suggested Bonhoeffer, has given up precisely this type of God. But it is nonetheless not, at heart, a world that wishes to be without God—just without this type of God who has been foisted upon it in all manner of religious trappings.

And thus, says Bonhoeffer, the question is not how one can make God palatable by demythologizing him, in a Bultmannian sense, but rather how one can both interpret and proclaim God in a “non-religious sense.” ³³ How, that is, can Karl Barth's critique of religion, so forcefully proposed in his Epistle to the Romans (and, according to Bonhoeffer, Barth's “greatest service”) be prosecuted further to make sense of and in a non-religious world? Critically, however, Bonhoeffer insists that this should not be through the liberal theological reduction of Christianity, but rather in a way that retains the “full content” of Christianity (miracles, the resurrection, etc.). How this is to be done is, for Bonhoeffer, the decisive challenge and opportunity. ³⁴

To where, to what, or to whom, did Bonhoeffer look for the answer to this challenge? Paradoxically, his determination to find a way of speaking about God in a secular, non-religious way, was to return again to the Cross. In a pre-figuration, perhaps, of Moltmann's The Crucified God, ³⁵ Bonhoeffer insisted that the God about whom we must speak is a God who is thoroughly and personally immersed in the sufferings and worldliness of this world. Bonhoeffer thus did not try to escape from the problematics of questioning God's impassability. Reflecting his own circumstances, Bonhoeffer insisted that for the Christian, as for Christ, there is “no last line of escape available from earthly tasks and difficulties into the eternal.” Rather, there is only the drinking of the earthly cup to its dregs; there is only the watching with Christ in Gethsemane; the participation with God in God's sufferings in the secular life. And thus a secular interpretation of God directs us, not to the wrong-headed religious myth of God's power in the world, but rather to his powerlessness. ³⁶ For Bonhoeffer, the gospel of God's grace may be “above” this world, but it is intended to exist for it, and therefore necessarily exists in it: not, he says, “in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystic pietistic, ethical theology, but in the biblical sense of creation and of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” ³⁷ And therefore, the gospel, and the God of that gospel, are encountered not through any radical escape to the eternal ultimate, but deeply and committedly embedded within the sufferings of the penultimate. Edwin Robertson is therefore quite correct to claim that Bonhoeffer recovered “the real concept of the secular” by refusing to play it off against some arbitrarily determined opposite, such as “supernatural,” or “Christian.” ³⁸ As Bethge reminds us, while Bonhoeffer did

Not dream of identifying God and the world … he wanted to rediscover genuine transcendence by drawing it down from its aloofness. God and the world are not one and the same, but God and worldliness belong together as truly as God is God. ³⁹

In this sense, the revelation of grace in Christ is thoroughly and necessarily secular and this-worldly.

This referral back to the cross and resurrection reminds us of something that has often been overlooked in, or even disingenuously read into, Bonhoeffer's prison theology. In stark contrast to those like John Robinson who sought to popularize Bonhoeffer in the fifteen or so years after his death, the emphasis for Bonhoeffer himself was on a non-religious, or secular, Christianity, and not in a Christian-less, or worse, a Christ-less Christianity. Bonhoeffer would surely have agreed with Harvey Cox's claim that, once metaphysical speech about God has been discarded as the equivocal language that it is, there is no choice but to leave the subcultural enclave of Christendom firmly in the past. However, this was not, for Bonhoeffer, the same thing as leaving Christ firmly in the past. The whole thrust of his exploration into a non-religious Christianity was so that Christ himself would indeed be seen to be who he really is.

In what way are we “religionless-secular” Christians, in what way are we the έκ-κλησία, those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favoured, but rather as belonging wholly to the world? If that is the case Christ is no longer an object of religion, but … really the Lord of the world. ⁴⁰

As Andreas Pangritz has stated, this question of how Christ can really be the Lord of the world, in all its secularity, is fundamentally a christological question and not an historical one. ⁴¹ In other words, and with once again a look back to Schöpfung und Fall, if the world is to be understood better than it understands itself, then this is not to be done on the basis of, either, a conception of the world “as such,” or of the world as religion wishes to define it, but rather “on the basis of the gospel and in the light of Christ”—that is, from “the end.” ⁴²

In sum, then, Bonhoeffer's eschatological considerations caused him, during the last few years of his life, to explore the relationship between the last things, the ultimate, and those things that precede the last things, the penultimate. In doing so, he was forced to conclude that religion (and the Christian religion most of all) has all-too-frequently radicalized its own speech about God, seeking to turn religion into the ultimate, and thus displacing God's grace as that which is truly das Letzte. This was his reluctant charge against Barth who, in his view, had turned his back on his earlier devastating critique of religion, and who had instead returned to what Bonhoeffer called a “positivism of revelation.” On the contrary, however, and firmly on the basis of his Christology, Bonhoeffer understood Christianity to be deeply and necessarily worldly, committedly secular, and to that extent fundamentally engaged with, and for, the penultimate of this non-religious world.

Bonhoeffer's eschatology in a west “come of age”

Having explored the evolution of Bonhoeffer's eschatology, and its relationship to “religionless Christianity” in a “world come of age,” we can now ask how this might prove relevant and helpful to the Churches in the context of a Western society that has now also, perhaps, “come of age.”

I do not at this point wish to interrogate the claim that Western society is in fact “of age.” One could argue both sides of that particular coin. Indeed, even if most Western democracies now regard themselves as fundamentally secular, secularity as such is no guarantee that religion has become irrelevant to those democracies. Recent scholarship in sociology and political science has pointed out that the definition of secularity is far more nuanced than has commonly been understood, and certainly does not equate simply to the isolation of religious discourse from the public sphere. ⁴³ Having said that, I will take it as a (contestable) given that the West has come of age in a Bonhoefferian sense, insofar as it has largely turned its back on a fundamental commitment to organized religion as an organizing principle of society. If that is so, in what way might Bonhoeffer's eschatological awareness assist the Churches of the West in responding to this challenging new reality?

The key lies, as has been suggested above, in unapologetically reiterating that the centre of the Church's proclamation is the event of reconciliation in Christ. In Bonhoeffer's words, the Church must continue to speak “from the end” in order to be able to speak into “the middle.” This runs fundamentally counter to the post-Christian presupposition, regrettably so evident in much contemporary missiology, that in order to make the Church's message relevant in contemporary society two things about the Christian message need to be changed; first, that it is necessary to diminish the christological particularity of the church's witness in favour of a supposedly more inclusive message; and second, that the “miraculous” needs to be expunged in deference to a more scientifically literate society.

As to the first, it is vitally important for the integrity of the Christian witness to deconstruct and indeed reject the assumption that christological particularity is in fact exclusionary. On the contrary, if 2 Cor 5:19 is to be believed, then the new ontological reality effected by the event of reconciliation in Christ Jesus is the most radically and universally inclusive theological affirmation in Scripture. It is an affirmation that bridges all hitherto-impassable gulfs between all imaginable socio-economic, racial, and gender divisions. As Markus Barth has affirmed, “The whole work of Christ is not only related to, but consists of the breaking down of the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles” and, by extension, of all other walls that humans invent to separate themselves from each other. ⁴⁴ Truly Christian particularity is more genuinely encompassing of all, precisely because in Christ alone is the actualizing of the electing will of God for all humanity. To quote Mostert again, while “[the] doctrine of reconciliation is a doctrine of the church … its scope includes the whole of humankind.” ⁴⁵ As to the second, we must be reminded again that, for Bonhoeffer, religionless Christianity must nonetheless retain the “full content” of the Christian message, with all the miraculous essentials that that entails. To insist on anything else is to allow the fallen ontology of the present middle to dictate the terms of the Church's witness, rather than the end by which she is in fact determined.

But this does not thereby mean a retention of the Church's existence, or of its proclamation, as they currently exist. Crucially, a genuinely eschatological proclamation of Christian witness will interrogate the ecclesial adiaphora that have accrued to the Church over the centuries, and will discard such accretions as and when they are uncovered. What those accretions may be is one of the most problematic questions facing the Christianity of the twenty-first century, and is undoubtedly affected by geopolitical, economic, and gendered contexts (to name but a few factors). It is tempting at this point to wish that Bonhoeffer had himself written more about what he saw as the implications for the Church in a “world come of age.” But as Stephen Plant reminds us, regardless of how hard it might be, “Christian[ity] must take responsibility for her own moral views.” “Making sense of … a world come of age is up to us.” ⁴⁶ To suggest that it is perhaps best left to individual church communities to decide for themselves what their own accretions are is a less than satisfactory solution. Some possibilities may include, however, the marginalization of gays and women from full inclusion within Christian communities, structures, rituals, and offices; the clericalization of church structures at the expense of both the laity and the mobility of the Church; the presumption of the Church's socio-political privilege within Western society—a presumption that necessarily means that the Church apparently thinks it has an inalienable right to a political voice; and the retention of a strict dichotomy between Christians and those of other faiths.

All these issues and more may need to come under scrutiny if the christological eschatology of the Church's witness into the present middle is to be taken seriously. Self-evidently, if the Church wishes to remain the Church that bears testimony to Jesus, then its proclamation and service must be unambiguously christological; it is not the religious maturity of the world that dictates the content of the gospel, but obedience to the Word of God. Conversely, if that christologically determined witness is to find open ears within the world, then the form of the proclamation must be unashamedly eschatological; that is, taking serious account of the world in which God wishes to speak and, in fact, has spoken. Only by keeping these two in creative tension will the Church be able to bear faithful witness to das Letzte while also giving the this-worldly Vorletzte its due dignity. In the process, the Church may also begin to bear faithful witness to the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.