Abstract
In a letter penned to his great friend Eberhard Bethge in the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler in July 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote of his preoccupation with the concept of ‘unconscious Christianity’ (Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Isabel Best et al., vol. 8, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Fortress, 2004, p. 489). For Eleanor McLaughlin, this concept offers a rich resource to both the church and confessing Christian theology that in the West today is faced with pressing questions about its relationship to post-Christian secular culture. More specifically, McLaughlin views ‘unconscious Christianity’ as useful for shaping a positive ecclesial response to both growing secularization and declining church attendance, and more fundamentally for rethinking ecclesial self-identity. Indeed, most usefully—but also most controversially—the concept affords (according to McLaughlin) the possibility ‘for people to be Christians without self-identifying as Christians’ (p. 2). The suggestion being, seemingly, that the church is therefore more densely populated than actual church attendance would suggest. And from the perspective of soteriology and missiology, that there is, in fact, a whole section of the population—people of other faith traditions and atheists included—who are ‘nevertheless righteous in God's sight’ (p. 191) and thus ‘must be considered as Christian’ (p. 191) and ‘now part of the Church’ (p. 169).
While McLaughlin is careful to distinguish her reading of ‘unconscious Christianity’ from the anonymous Christianity of Karl Rahner (pp. 8–10), and to note both ‘the risk of paternalism’(p. 191) that her reading runs and ‘the potentially damaging way in which [unconscious Christianity] can be understood’ (p. 120), one cannot escape the concern that what her outstandingly lucid interpretation of the concept ultimately amounts to is a highly sophisticated way of saying that all ‘good’ people go to heaven. And if it is, then one might want to ask, logically, what hope there is for those of us (including myself) who are so often ‘bad’ people, and why one would bother being a conscious (or practising) Christian in the first place? One also cannot escape a slightly more troubling concern: that to suggest to someone who does not self-identify as a Christian that they are really a Christian but just not aware of it is to do them a tremendous violence. Is it not problematic to tell, for example, a Torah-observing Jew who survived the Holocaust that she is actually an ‘unconscious Christian’? As Geffrey B. Kelly warns: ‘Christians may need to hear themselves called “anonymous Jews” or “unconscious Moslems” to get the drift of how limited even these helpful theological concepts are for the practical social application of one's Christian outreach to all people’ (Kelly, ‘“Unconscious Christianity” and the “Anonymous Christian” in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Rahner’, Philosophy and Theology 9 (1995): 147). However, what we make of such concerns and the questions they raise—and of whether such theological concepts are indeed ‘helpful’ or not—will be shaped by the extent to which we are persuaded by McLaughlin's reading of what is undoubtedly one of Bonhoeffer's most enigmatic concepts.
The reading and interpretation of ‘unconscious Christianity’ that McLaughlin proffers represents the first in-depth study of the concept in extant Bonhoeffer scholarship. McLaughlin works to construct a definition of ‘unconscious Christianity’ from Bonhoeffer's late theology, notably his Ethics and his prison writings, including the fiction he wrote in Tegel. The task that McLaughlin sets herself is itself remarkable: Bonhoeffer only ever mentions ‘unconscious Christianity’ directly four times in his corpus, and when he does mention it, not once does he offer any substantial commentary to indicate what he means by it. The constructed definition that McLaughlin works towards in Part I of the book (chapters 1, 2 and 3) is therefore founded on a description (in chapter 1) of the Bürgertum—or educated middle-class—to which Bonhoeffer and his family belonged, and in the context of which his fictional work is set. From this description, McLaughlin then proceeds to build her definition of ‘unconscious Christianity’ by engaging (in chapter 2) the four texts in which Bonhoeffer mentions the concept: his Ethics fragment, ‘Ultimate and Penultimate Things’ (where ‘unconscious Christianity’ appears in a scribbled marginal note); the unfinished Novel; his letter to Bethge of 27 July 1944; and ‘Notes II’ (ideas and phrases for a book that Bonhoeffer was preparing to write). McLaughlin's close and careful engagement with these texts subsequently leads her to propose (in chapter 3) the following constructed definition of ‘unconscious Christianity’: ‘Unconscious Christianity refers to the whole body of good people who have encountered Christ without being aware of it and do not self-identify as Christians’ (p. 95). Additionally, ‘[unconscious Christians] may fulfil any of these six criteria: (1) to have faith without knowing it, (2) to be selfless and participate in Jesus's being-for-others, (3) to not seek to be other than what they are, (4) to value the penultimate, (5) to perform acts of faith without reflecting on them, (6) to be a member of the Bürgertum’ (p. 95). And finally, ‘unconscious Christians are recognized as righteous by God’ (p. 95).
To unpack this definition a little further with reference to McLaughlin's own analysis of each of the four texts, ‘unconscious Christians’ are ‘good human beings’ (p. 82) who value and uphold the goodness of the world (p. 91), and who perform ‘righteous action’ (p. 88) that is ‘directed toward others’ (p. 72) as ‘a way of being’ (p. 89). This way of being human is such that ‘unconscious Christians’ are said to be ‘naturally’ pious: ‘The person who is naturally pious does not strive for an appearance of holiness, but lives effortlessly according to God's will’ (p. 86). Consequently, ‘acts of faith … come about naturally within [them], without the individual being able to reflect on them’ (p. 86). Further, this way of being—of being directed toward others and away from oneself—enables the ‘unconscious Christian’ to unconsciously encounter and participate in Christ's own being-for-others. In turn, this means that the ‘unconscious Christian has faith, as faith is equivalent to participation in Jesus's being-for-others’ (p. 89). Moreover, the ‘unconscious Christian’ is ‘changed’ by her unconscious encounter with Christ: ‘the change is that the unconscious Christian is now considered by God to be among the righteous’ (p. 92). Critically, however, this change—and indeed all that leads to it—takes place ‘without [the unconscious Christian] realizing it’ (p. 159), and is thus ‘completely detached from any conscious desire to follow Christ’ (p. 162).
At this juncture, any number of questions might be raised in relation to the trajectory of McLaughlin's analysis, but one question—arising from Bonhoeffer's hamartiology and soteriology—will suffice. For Bonhoeffer, and because of Adam's fall, ‘[a] third power, sin, has stepped between human beings and God, as between human beings themselves’ (Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens, vol. 1, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Fortress, 2009, p. 63). The result of this is to orient human beings away from relationship with God and with each other, and toward oneself, cor curvum in se (see Bonhoeffer, Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology, ed. Wayne Whitson Floyd, Jr, trans. H. Martin Rumscheidt, vol. 2, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Fortress, 2009, p. 137). In this sense, sin is individualism, and Adam's fall infinitely alters human ontology; ontologically and theologically Bonhoeffer conceives of humanity in duality. On the one hand, as being ‘in Adam’, and on the other, as being ‘in Christ’. Further, this separation is all-embracing: the human being is either ‘in Adam’ in sin, or ‘in Christ’ in the church (see Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, p. 153). That there is for Bonhoeffer no neutral metaphysics of humanity independent of this theological ontology of ‘being in’ Adam or Christ raises the question of how one is transposed from ‘old’ or sinful humanity-in-Adam to ‘new’ humanity-in-Christ, and such that one is turned outward—away from oneself—and reoriented toward God and other human beings in love? Is it simply a matter—as McLaughlin's reading of Bonhoeffer's late theology seems to suggest it is—of ‘naturally’ pious, ‘good human beings’, performing ‘righteous action’, which arises ‘naturally’ within them? Or does it have something to do, for example, with the Holy Spirit, who ‘establishes the relationship between God and human being and between human being and human being’ (Bonhoeffer, Theological Education at Finkenwalde: 1935–1937, ed. H. Gaylon Barker and Mark S. Brocker, trans. Douglas W. Stott, vol. 14, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Fortress, 2013, p. 456)? And might it have something to do, for example, with baptism, which for Bonhoeffer—by the baptized receiving Christ into her heart through the gift of the Spirit—is ‘the actual consummated transposition of human being’ from ‘being in’ Adam to ‘being in’ Christ in the church, ‘the act of sealing-off’ the baptized ‘in the eschatological church-community for the day of judgment’ (Bonhoeffer, Konspiration und Haft 1940–1945, ed. Jørgen Glenthøj et al., Band 16, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke, Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996, p. 569)?
Such questions are in some senses related to the task that McLaughlin sets herself in Part II of the book (chapters 4 and 5). Here, McLaughlin works to build on the constructed definition of ‘unconscious Christianity’ that she arrives at in chapter 3. She does this by assessing (in chapter 4) the extent to which her definition is compatible both with Bonhoeffer's wider prison theology (in particular, his concepts of ‘the world come of age’ and ‘religionless Christianity’) and extant Bonhoeffer scholarship on ‘unconscious Christianity’ itself. For McLaughlin, each concept from Bonhoeffer's prison theology is complementary and serves to illuminate and add depth to the others. Meanwhile, her constructed definition of ‘unconscious Christianity’ is shown to be compatible with extant Bonhoeffer scholarship and to shed new light not only on aspects of the concept itself but on Bonhoeffer's late theology as a whole. Further, ‘unconscious Christianity’ is then said by McLaughlin (in chapter 5) to represent ‘a new departure in [Bonhoeffer's] thinking’ (p. 7) that ‘causes a definite shift in his understanding of Christianity’ (p. 140), and also in his whole theology. In particular, this shift is indexed by McLaughlin to what she sees as Bonhoeffer's changing view of what Christianity is (see pp. 140 and 152). As McLaughlin writes: ‘In developing the idea of … unconscious Christianity, Bonhoeffer abandons the necessity of the individual's self-identification as Christian’ (p. 156). Bonhoeffer (apparently) thus ‘rejects’ what once was a ‘deeply held conviction: that self-identification as a “Christian” … is a central element of Christianity’ (p. 155). The consequences of such a rejection are, of course, radical and indeed troubling (as noted above). But whether such a rejection as McLaughlin reads it is a responsible interpretation of Bonhoeffer's late theology on the basis of his complete theological oeuvre is an entirely different matter. As is whether such a rejection is faithful to the legacy of Bonhoeffer's own life itself. We are, after all, speaking here about a Christian martyr—someone who paid the ultimate price for his conscious commitment to following-after Christ; and someone whose final act as a confessing Christian disciple was to lead his fellow prisoners in Morning Prayer shortly before his execution. The sheer dissonance between Bonhoeffer's own steadfast self-identification as a Christian unto death and McLaughlin's suggestion that Bonhoeffer abandons the necessity of self-identification as a Christian as a central element of Christianity is, for me, simply too stark for that suggestion to hold good. Others, however, will disagree. But whether we are persuaded by McLaughlin's reading and interpretation of ‘unconscious Christianity’ or not, Bonhoeffer scholars and all theologians interested in the church's relationship to post-Christian secular culture will find in McLaughlin's study much food for thought.