Abstract
This article brings Dietrich Bonhoeffer's christological conception of “natural life” into critical theological conversation with the natural law tradition. After briefly examining why Bonhoeffer critiques Protestant thought for omitting the category of the natural altogether and Roman Catholic thought for underappreciating the natural's christological determination, I explore Bonhoeffer's creative attempt to recover the concept of the natural “from the gospel itself.” I argue that while Bonhoeffer shares with natural law reasoning a teleological structure, he departs from it by locating the telos of natural life in the future coming of Christ (eschatology) rather than in a prelapsarian human condition (protology). Finally, I suggest that Bonhoeffer's mature account of the natural, though firmly grounded in Protestant commitments concerning justification by faith alone, nevertheless opens a limited but significant space for ecumenical cooperation in the penultimate sphere, where Christians and non-Christians alike discern and defend the material goods of human life.
The Absence of the Natural in Protestant Thought
By and large, Protestant thought has tended to focus on grace to the detriment of nature. This tendency was perhaps a necessary corrective at certain points in the history of Western Christianity. One thinks of Martin Luther's trenchant critique of a certain propensity in the late-medieval Roman Catholic church to overestimate the natural capacities of the human vis-à-vis divine salvation. 1 In particular, Luther attacked the notion, championed by Gabriel Biel and other Nominalist theologians, that “to those who do what is in them God will not deny grace.” 2 Over against this belief, Protestantism (here I use the word to encompass religious movements usually associated with the “Magisterial Reformation”) raised the banner of divine grace. The free and unmerited grace of God, over and above and in contradiction to natural human ability, descends to humans as a gift. Not works, but mercy. Not nature, but grace. Sola gratia. This has been, and in many ways continues to be, the great Protestant insight—Protestantism's greatest strength. 3
And yet, perhaps an unintended weakness lingers here. As so often happens in history, when the extremes embedded within one movement quickly give way to the opposite extremes, Protestantism came to speak only of grace. Grace became not merely the most interesting thing, but the only interesting thing. As a result, the sphere of nature was abandoned, left to itself. Dietrich Bonhoeffer examines this theological deficiency in his Ethics manuscript titled “Natural Life.” He summarizes the situation in the following way: The concept of the natural has fallen into disrepute in Protestant ethics. For some theologians it was completely lost in the darkness of general sinfulness, whereas for others it took on the brightness of the primal creation. Both were grave misuses that led to the complete elimination of the category of the natural from Protestant thought; it was left to Catholic ethics.
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This failure on the part of Protestantism has resulted in its “inability to give clear guidance on the burning questions of natural life. Thereby [Protestantism] left numerous people without answers or help in vital decisions, and fell more and more into a static proclamation of divine grace.” 5 The concept of grace thus took on a totalizing force, and as a result “the significance of the natural for the gospel was obscured.” 6 Grace was construed as merely over-against nature as such. “Confronted by the light of grace, everything human and natural sank into the night of sin, so one no longer dared pay any attention to the relative differences within the human and the natural, for fear that grace would lose its character as grace.” 7 Fixated on grace alone, Protestantism lost sight not only of the importance of the category of the natural, but also of the “relative differences” within the natural. In Bonhoeffer's estimate, this has resulted in a great loss for Protestant thought: having abandoned the natural altogether, “the way was clear for any kind of arbitrariness and disorder, and natural life, with its concrete decisions and orders, could no longer be considered responsible to God.” 8 The Protestant antithesis thus came to be grace versus nature rather than the natural versus the unnatural. “God's word condemned the natural and unnatural alike. That means complete dissolution in the sphere of natural life.” 9
Despite Protestantism's failure on this score, the category of the natural, Bonhoeffer notes, was not totally abandoned by Christian thought. Reflection on the natural was “left to Catholic ethics.” 10 And Bonhoeffer did, indeed, find Catholic reflection on the natural to be immensely helpful to him while working on his Ethics. In a letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer wrote the following: “In my work [Ethics] I am just coming to the question of euthanasia … I find Catholic ethics in many ways very instructive and more practical than ours. Up to now we have always dismissed it as ‘casuistry.’ Today we are grateful for much—precisely on the topic of my present theme.” 11 In particular, Bonhoeffer consulted Jacques Maritain's Integral Humanism, various Catholic catechisms, as well as Josef Pieper's Reality and the Good. 12
There is no denying that Roman Catholic ethical reflection, past and present, is a veritable treasure of insights into the category of the natural. It is no surprise that in recent years, a number of scholars working from within the Roman Catholic tradition have produced major publications on the concept of natural law. Among them include Russell Hittinger, Jean Porter, and Matthew Levering. 13 Contemporary Protestant thought, it should be noted, has also tried to produce its own conception of natural law—though this is, admittedly, not the norm within Protestantism. 14 To this day, it remains something of an uphill battle for Protestants who attempt to reengage the category of the natural. And even those Protestants who do formulate an account of natural law end up falling prey to many of the very criticisms that Bonhoeffer leveled against the Roman Catholic natural law theories of his own day. This deficiency within Protestant thought is still an issue that needs to be addressed.
In my article, I examine how Bonhoeffer tries to correct these Protestant failures by recovering the concept of the natural “from the gospel itself.” 15 Yet rather than proceed straightaway into an exposition of Bonhoeffer's thought on this matter, I first discuss the work of certain Roman Catholic natural law theorists, which sets the stage for my reading of Bonhoeffer. I suggest that by bringing Bonhoeffer into conversation with these contemporary theorists, and more specifically by reading Bonhoeffer's reflections on the natural in concert with their accounts of natural law, a vision of moral theology that is at once distinctly Christian and provisionally ecumenical in the penultimate sphere becomes visible to us. My ultimate goal in this article is thus to show how Bonhoeffer's christologically mediated conception of the natural, seen through the lens of natural law theory, not only challenges existing approaches to natural law but more importantly provides an under-resourced vision for moral theology today.
Natural Law as a Theological Category
Among many notable Roman Catholic natural law theorists, it is unanimously agreed that natural law is a distinctly theological category. Contrary to certain approaches that seek to ground natural law within practical reason alone—thereby circumventing the need for any metaphysical assumptions about the existence or nature of God—Hittinger, Porter, and Levering insist that the natural law as law requires a moral Lawgiver (i.e., God). Having distinguished between three different foci that reflection on natural law can gravitate toward—(1) law in the human mind, (2) law in nature, and (3) law in the mind of God—Hittinger explains that “the theologian is (or ought to be) chiefly concerned with the third of these foci: namely, natural law as an expression of divine providence.” 16 He then cites with approval Barth's paradigmatic claim in his Church Dogmatics that “Ethics [is] a Task of the Doctrine of God,” adding by way of comment that “whatever else Barth said or thought about natural law, the proposition that moral theology is a task of the doctrine of God is incontestable. The Christian theologian is interested in who God is, and what God does.” 17 Porter concurs: having distinguished her project from what she nominates the “influential ‘new natural law’ theory of Germain Grisez and John Finnis,” she responds that the “medieval natural law thinkers did not attempt to derive moral principles from a supposedly self-evident and fixed conception of human nature. The concept of nature was a theological and not merely a philosophical notion for them.” 18 Levering comes to the same conclusion, claiming that “natural law doctrine requires the recognition of a divine lawgiver” because “as a rational sharing in God's providence,” natural law is simply “our participation in God's eternal law.” 19 Natural law is thus accountable to God because it ultimately comes from God.
And yet, this begs a very important question. If natural law is necessarily interested in who God is and in what God does, as Hittinger rightly notes, then one cannot avoid asking, “Who, exactly, is this God?” It is in the face of precisely this question that Bonhoeffer's objection to Roman Catholic natural law, even in its robustly theological form, comes into view. Bonhoeffer's basic critique of natural law reasoning is not that it is a-theological per se, but that it pays insufficient attention to the particularity of God's revelation in Jesus Christ. Natural law reasoning shows a certain affinity for protology: going “back to Genesis” (or to the “first grace,” in Hittinger's words). 20 It brackets the particular revelation of God in the person of Christ in preference for the eternal Lawgiver, from whom its conception of the natural law descends. All categories pertinent to the natural law are already in full swing by the time the revelation of Christ comes onto the scene. In so doing, that which is most pertinent about who God is, and about the natural vis-à-vis God, gets completely overlooked. According to Bonhoeffer, then, natural law reasoning is insufficient not because it is a-theological, but because it is a-christological. The natural law, in short, is knowable apart from and without Christ.
Bonhoeffer writes of this issue in two other Ethics manuscript titled “On the Possibility of the Church's Message to the World” and “The Concrete Commandment and the Divine Mandates.” He states that “the message of the church to the world can be none other than the word of God to the world. This word is: Jesus Christ, and salvation in this name. It is in Jesus Christ that God's relationship to the world [and thus to the natural] is determined.”
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In other words, the manner in which the church ought to speak about the world is necessarily mediated through Jesus Christ: Christians may not and should not speak of the natural apart from him. By implication, Bonhoeffer continues, We do not know any other relationship of God to the world apart from Christ. Therefore the church, too, has no relationship to the world other than through Jesus Christ. This means that the proper relationship of the church to the world [and thus to the natural] does not derive from some natural law, or law of reason, or universal human rights, but solely from the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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Attempting to speak to the world on the basis of “some kind of shared insights, derived from a rational or natural law,” would be possible only by “temporarily disregarding the gospel. The church of the Reformation, unlike the Roman Catholic Church, cannot do that.” 23
Bonhoeffer further draws out the problematic consequences of separating the natural (law) from the revelation of Christ. He argues that doing so results in “a double morality for the church, namely, one for the world and another for the church-community, one for pagans and another for Christians, one for Christians in their worldly vocations and another for the homo religiosus.” 24 The natural law, in other words, comes to exist alongside the law of Christ, putting Christians in the strange position of having two different ethical ideals: one exemplified in the Decalogue and the other in the Sermon on the Mount. When operating in a worldly vocation, one reasons according to the natural law; later, when operating in a Christian vocation, one reasons as a Christian. Against such a dual framework, Bonhoeffer asserts that “there is no legitimate proclamation by the church that is not proclamation of Christ. The church does not have a twofold word, the one general, rational and grounded in natural law and the other Christian—that is, it does not have one word for unbelievers and another for believers.” 25 Bonhoeffer thus refuses to let natural law thinking return to a source of moral norms that is independent of Christ. Because the revelation of Christ has come, the church's relationship with the natural is now mediated entirely through Christ. Christians must, therefore, think about the natural in explicitly christological, as opposed to merely theological, terms. The time “before Christ” has ended; Jesus’ coming has fundamentally changed the manner in which Christians relate to the natural. 26
Recovering the Natural From the Gospel Itself
Thus far, we have seen how Bonhoeffer levels criticisms against both Protestant and Roman Catholic thought concerning “the natural.” Whereas Protestantism is prone to overlook the category of the natural altogether, Roman Catholicism tends to overlook Christ in its admittedly theological account of the natural law. Now, I turn to Bonhoeffer's constructive attempt to recover the concept of the natural “from the gospel itself.” 27 This section will contain two parts. In the first, I argue that Bonhoeffer's project parallels Roman Catholic natural law thinking insofar as they both rely on a teleological line of reasoning. They differ, however, in that Bonhoeffer orients teleological reasoning strictly toward the coming of Christ “from above” (von oben). In the second part, I explore how Bonhoeffer's conception of the natural gets fleshed out concretely in his account of ultimate and penultimate things. 28 I also note the ways in which the ultimate impinges upon the penultimate sphere, paralleling how the “natural law” impinges on positive (human) law in Roman Catholic thought.
Bonhoeffer's Christological and Teleological Conception of the Natural
Returning to Bonhoeffer's Ethics manuscript titled “Natural Life,” I would like to get a better handle on what precisely Bonhoeffer means by “the natural.” His definition is as follows: “The natural is that which, after the fall, is directed toward the coming of Jesus Christ. The unnatural is that which, after the fall, closes itself off from the coming of Jesus Christ.” 29 Two things are immediately apparent here: the natural is (1) after the fall and (2) directed toward the future. For Bonhoeffer, in other words, the natural is not something primordial, rooted in a prelapsarian state of affairs; it is, rather, decidedly postlapsarian. Moreover, he says that the natural comes into view not by looking back, but by looking ahead toward the future coming of Christ. It is thus oriented not toward the past, but the future: not “back to Genesis,” but forward toward Christ. Its opposing concept, “the unnatural,” is identical in these two respects: it is also a postlapsarian reality that is oriented toward the coming of Christ, yet as that which closes itself off from this future.
The difference between the natural and the unnatural is thus a “relative” one. Bonhoeffer writes, “the natural does not compel the coming of Christ, nor does the unnatural make it impossible; in both cases the real coming is an act of grace.” 30 In typical Protestant fashion, the category of grace is still above and beyond the natural and the unnatural alike, on Bonhoeffer's account. If and when the natural is open to Christ, this does not simply necessitate Christ's coming; if and when the unnatural is closed off to Christ, this does not necessarily make Christ's coming an impossibility. Grace is still gratuitous, operative on its own. And yet, Bonhoeffer stresses that this fact does not minimize the fundamental difference between the natural and the unnatural: “Only through the coming of Christ is the natural confirmed in its character as penultimate and the unnatural definitively exposed as the destruction of the penultimate. So, even in the presence of Christ, there remains a difference between the natural and the unnatural that cannot be erased without serious damage.” 31 Bonhoeffer here introduces the concept of the penultimate, which I will explore in more detail below in the second part of this section. For now, it is important to note that the natural and the unnatural possess an important, though relative, difference in Bonhoeffer's thinking.
Another significant distinction Bonhoeffer makes in this article is between “the natural” (natura) and “creation” (creatura). Whereas the former concept contains “a moment of independence [and] of self-development,” the latter signifies life in “unmediated relation to God.” 32 Bonhoeffer claims that “through the fall, ‘creation’ became ‘nature.’” 33 Creaturely existence, which was once in simple union with God, became the relative freedom of natural life. “Within this freedom,” he continues, “there is a difference between its right use and its misuse, and this is the difference between the natural and the unnatural; there is therefore a relative openness and a relative closedness for Christ.” 34 While this relative freedom, he again clarifies, is “not to be confused with the absolute freedom for God and for our neighbor,” it nonetheless “remains important for those who in Christ have been granted freedom for God and for their neighbor.” 35
In detailing Bonhoeffer's remarks on the topic, it is crucial to note that, for him, Christians must regard the natural not as “a preliminary stage toward life with Christ,” but as receiving “its confirmation only through Christ.” This is the case because “Christ has entered into natural life. Only by Christ's becoming human does natural life become the penultimate that is directed toward the ultimate. Only through Christ's becoming human do we have the right to call people to natural life and to live it ourselves.” 36 In short, the natural is for him a christological concept. For it is only in light of Christ's becoming human that the category of the natural becomes meaningful. The natural and the unnatural are what they are in their orientation toward Christ—whether that orientation be one of relative openness or relative closedness. The natural, then, is not strictly a biological or scientific or even theological category for Bonhoeffer—it is, rather, a christological one. Without denying, of course, the right of philosophy and the sciences to scrutinize the “nature” of living creatures or the natural environment, Bonhoeffer insists that Christian theologians have their own specific conception of the natural that is discoverable within the bounds of its own subject-matter, that is, the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. If Bonhoeffer fixes his conception of the natural within precisely this christological domain, he does not do so in the attempt to simply dismiss all other conceptions of the natural, each of which has its own proper place in its respective discipline.
Having shown that Bonhoeffer's account of the natural is christological, I would now like to make the further claim that Bonhoeffer's account of the natural is at the same time teleological. Though he does not explicitly use the language of “teleology” in any of these writings, what he does say clearly lends itself to this sort of interpretation. While teleology is typically used to explain certain immanent capacities within the creature by showing that they serve a specific goal or purpose (e.g., the telos of the eye is to provide sight), Bonhoeffer claims that the telos of the natural, from the standpoint of revelation, is the coming of Jesus Christ. As we have seen, the natural is essentially a certain relation to and openness for Christ. The telos of the natural is, in short, the future coming of Christ. Whatever obstructs the natural from achieving such a goal has the effect of turning the natural into the unnatural.
Relatedly, among many natural law theorists within Roman Catholic thought, it is common to invoke teleological reasoning as a way to critique certain unnatural, unjust, or relativistic states of affairs.
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Cristina Traina, in her book Feminist Ethics and Natural Law, exemplifies this sort of moral reasoning: Not only does political change of the kind feminism demands require solidarity behind strong, positive, ‘universally shareable’ rights claims, but to back up these claims we need an anthropology, a normative description of embodied human life … [W]e need not just any anthropology but a telic anthropology: one with convictions about the ends toward which human beings individually, and human society generally, are to strive. And we need methods of hammering out the concrete requirements of thriving in particular circumstances.
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That human nature is “telic” means that there are certain conditions (be they material, social, psychological, etc.) that must be taken seriously for genuine flourishing to take place. Without such a “thick” teleological account of the various conditions necessary to achieve these ends, Traina thinks that our attempts to improve the flourishing of human beings, particularly of women, will suffer. Similarly, Karen Taliaferro, in her book The Possibility of Religious Freedom, claims that teleological reasoning is our best means of arbitrating between various subjective “purposes” that compete in our political landscapes. She writes, “Our options are to recognize the ends inherent in people and things and to adapt our purposes and actions to those ends—that is, to live by natural law—or, on the other hand, to accept only our purposes and refuse to see ends.” 39 It is clear, for Taliaferro, which is the better option: “Both individual humans, with their varied purposes, desires, and actions, and the ruler, with his power, must be held accountable to something outside themselves. Natural law theories posit that this ‘something’ is found in respecting the natural ends of things.” 40 In short, teleological reasoning is a means of challenging unjust (i.e., unnatural) states of affairs by appealing to the natural ends (teloi) inherent in human beings—and using such ends to criticize what precludes their attainment.
In the next part of this section, I will argue that Bonhoeffer's teleological account of the natural—as that which is oriented toward the coming of Christ—offers a parallel line of critique of unnatural conditions within the existing world. Unnatural conditions make the coming of Christ more difficult—that is, preclude the ability of the natural to attain its proper end (telos). In view of this proper end (the coming of Christ), there is good reason to change, sometimes radically, any such unnatural structures. In Bonhoeffer's words, the ultimate must impinge upon the penultimate. It is to this topic that I now turn.
The Penultimate That Is Directed Toward the Ultimate
Everything that Bonhoeffer says about the natural and the unnatural gets recapitulated in his Ethics manuscript titled “Ultimate and Penultimate Things.” According to Bonhoeffer's definition, the ultimate (Letztes) is synonymous with the revelation of the gospel of Jesus Christ and faith that believes in this gospel. The ultimate is the justification of the sinner by grace alone, faith in this grace, and the hope and love that necessarily follow from them. The ultimate is thus both qualitatively and temporally ultimate. It is qualitatively ultimate because it is “God's final word,” behind which there is no other or higher word. 41 It is temporally ultimate because “something penultimate always precedes it, some action, suffering, movement, intention, defeat, recovery, pleading, hoping—in short, quite literally a span of time at whose end it stands.” 42 The penultimate is the sphere of human life that is relatively independent from the ultimate revelation of Christ. The relationship between the natural and grace, outlined above, thus mirrors the relationship between the penultimate and the ultimate. As was the case with grace vis-à-vis the natural, “we must also speak of penultimate things not as if they had some value of their own, but so as to make clear their relation to the ultimate. For the sake of the ultimate we speak of the penultimate.” 43
Bonhoeffer is particularly interested in the proper relationship between the two: especially in how the Christian—the person who already resides in the sphere of the ultimate—relates to the penultimate: “We are asking, in other words, about the penultimate in the life of a Christian.” 44 Again, this quite clearly parallels the classic question about the relationship between nature and grace. Bonhoeffer's reflection on the penultimate in the life of the Christian begins with a personal experience of pastoral care: “Why, precisely in completely serious situations—for instance, when facing someone grieving deeply over a death—do I often decide on a ‘penultimate’ response, such as a kind of helpless solidarity in the face of so terrible an event, expressed through silence, instead of speaking the words of biblical comfort familiar to me, which are at my disposal?” 45 Is it from fear? Distrust of the power of the ultimate word? Answering his own questions, Bonhoeffer suggests that such a penultimate response is, in fact, “objectively justified.” “Isn’t it occasionally,” he wonders, “a more genuine reference to the ultimate … to remain consciously in the penultimate?” 46 This experience, which “embraces not just a single case but basically the entire range of Christian common life,” is taken as a launching pad into Bonhoeffer's examination of the importance of the penultimate sphere for Christians. 47
At the level of theological analysis, Bonhoeffer thinks the proper coordination of ultimate and penultimate things is achieved only in Jesus Christ: “There is no Christianity as such [i.e., self-contained ultimate sphere] … There is no human being as such [i.e., self-contained penultimate sphere] … Both are ideas. There is only the God-man Jesus Christ who is real, through whom the world will be preserved until it is ripe for its end.” 48 Rather than being opposed, then, the ultimate and penultimate (grace and the natural), are united in Jesus Christ. The accent, of course, must always fall on the ultimate, but never to the exclusion of the penultimate. “From this follows now something of decisive importance, that the penultimate must be preserved for the sake of the ultimate. Arbitrary destruction of the penultimate seriously harms the ultimate.” 49 This theological axiom, it turns out, has robust practical and political significance.
Bonhoeffer gives a number of examples that indicate how arbitrary destruction of the penultimate greatly prevents the arrival of the ultimate. He writes that “when, for example, a human life is deprived of the conditions that are part of being human, the justification of such a life by grace and faith is at least seriously hindered, if not made impossible.”
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Slaves, for instance, “who have been so deprived of control over their time that they can no longer hear the proclamation of God's word cannot be led by that word of God to a justifying faith.”
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Indeed, there are conditions—both of the heart and in the world—“that especially hinder the receiving of grace, that is, which make it infinitely difficult to believe.”
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Therefore, “the condition in which grace meets us is not irrelevant … We can make it hard for others to come to faith.”
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It becomes clear that Bonhoeffer is here speaking about a variety of conditions that are material, social, and psychological. It is hard for those thrust into extreme disgrace, desolation, poverty, and helplessness to believe in God's justice and goodness. It becomes hard for those whose lives have fallen into disorder and a lack of discipline to hear the commandments of God in faith. It is hard for the well-fed and the powerful to comprehend God's judgment and God's grace. It is hard for those who are disappointed by a false faith and who have lost self-control to find the simplicity of surrendering their hearts to Jesus Christ.
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In other words, the penultimate conditions in which a person lives affect whether or not the ultimate word of proclamation can be heard properly. In this way, Bonhoeffer is quite sensitive to the particular manner in which the ultimate touches the penultimate. All of these unnatural conditions are part and parcel of the arbitrary destruction of the penultimate.
In the face of such destruction, Bonhoeffer responds that Christians are simply to “prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; all flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Luke 3:4-6). Rightly understood, Bonhoeffer writes, this means that “the hungry person needs bread, the homeless person needs shelter, the one deprived of rights needs justice, the lonely person needs community, the undisciplined one needs order, the slave needs freedom.” 55 Such “preparation is not only an inward process, but a visible, a creative activity on the greatest scale.” 56 So serious is this penultimate “preparing of the way,” in fact, that Bonhoeffer claims, “if the hungry do not come to faith, the guilt falls on those who denied them bread. To bring bread to the hungry is preparing the way for the coming of grace.” 57 In this way, the ultimate impinges upon the penultimate realm—making space for itself through the alteration of unnatural conditions within the world. “Those who proclaim the word yet do not do everything possible so that this word may be heard are not true to the word's claim for free passage, for a smooth road.” 58
We are now in a better position to appreciate precisely what Bonhoeffer means by the natural and the unnatural. The unnatural is synonymous with those unjust conditions within the world that make the coming of Christ difficult—in some cases, it seems, nearly impossible. The natural is synonymous with those just conditions in the world that allow for, but do not necessitate, the coming of the Lord—that is, proclamation of the gospel. The penultimate, therefore, is the relatively independent sphere within which the natural and the unnatural compete with each other. Christians ought to be interested in how things fare in the penultimate sphere because “it makes a difference before God whether, in the midst of a fallen, lost world, people preserve or violate the order of marriage, whether they practice justice or despotism … [I]t makes a difference whether the penultimate is respected and taken seriously.” 59 The unnatural, in other words, prevents the natural from attaining its telos in Christ. 60
Furthermore, the maintenance of the penultimate is a responsibility of all human beings, Bonhoeffer thinks: such maintenance is what allows people the possibility of “being human” (Menschsein) and “being good” (Gutsein). “Whatever in the fallen world is found to be human and good belongs on the side of Jesus Christ.” 61 It is as Jesus said to his disciples: “Whoever is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:40). As Bonhoeffer explains, “We truncate the gospel when we proclaim that only the broken and the evil are near to Jesus Christ and when, proclaiming the love of the father for the prodigal, we belittle the father's love for the son who stayed home.” 62 Therefore, “the human and the good should not be made into self-sufficient values, but they may and should be claimed for Jesus Christ.” 63 Christians thus find penultimate, if not ultimate, allies in those who seek to critique and ameliorate unnatural conditions that prevent people from “being human” and “being good.” Such efforts, while not themselves the coming of the ultimate, nevertheless prepare the way of the Lord—often without explicit awareness of the christological horizon in which Christians understand that work to stand.
Discerning the Natural Together: An Ecumenical Task
I would now like to briefly consider what Bonhoeffer says about the task of discerning the natural with non-Christians. Based on his decidedly christological account of the natural, one could mistakenly conclude that only Christians are capable of discerning the natural. Such a conclusion would be wrong, however. In this final section, I explore the ways in which discerning the natural is an ecumenical task, something all humans participate in together.
Returning again to the article “Natural Life,” Bonhoeffer poses a question: “How is the natural recognized?”
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It would seem that since the natural is, for him, a christological category, no one could discern the natural apart from knowledge of Christ. This would clearly have disastrous consequences for Christians who are trying to discern what it means to be “human” and “good” with our non-Christian interlocutors. In the face of this question about recognizing the natural, Bonhoeffer makes an important distinction: The natural therefore is determined both formally and according to its content. Formally, the natural is determined by the preserving will of God and by its orientation toward Christ. Its formal side, then, can only be recognized by looking at Jesus Christ. As to content, the natural is determined by the form of preserved life itself as it embraces the whole human race. With respect to content, human “reason” [Vernunft] is the organ for recognizing the natural.
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Thus far, we have explored Bonhoeffer's attempt to think about the natural “formally,” that is, in its orientation toward Christ. Such a formal dimension only comes into view “by looking at Jesus Christ” and is thus possible only for Christians. Yet, it is also possible, we now learn, to recognize the natural according to its content. The organ that makes this possible is what Bonhoeffer nominates “reason,” which is something that embraces “the whole human race.” Reason, he goes on to explain, is that which allows us to “take in” (vernehmen) as a unity “the whole and universal in reality.” Though reason is always “fallen reason,” it is still able to perceive “what is given in the fallen world and, indeed, exclusively according to its content.” 66
This distinction between form and content allows Bonhoeffer to affirm both the christological determination of the natural and the genuine epistemic participation of non-Christians in its discernment. The formal orientation of the natural—its direction toward the coming of Christ—belongs to faith and is visible only within the horizon of revelation. The material content of the natural, however, concerns the concrete structures and goods of preserved life: bodily integrity, justice, community, freedom from arbitrary violence, and the conditions necessary for humane existence. These are encountered not as speculative theological claims but as features of shared creaturely life. For this reason, Christians and non-Christians can converge upon the same penultimate ends without sharing the same ultimate horizon. The telos that reason discerns materially is not identical with the eschatological telos of communion with Christ, but with the proximate ends of creaturely flourishing within history. Christians interpret these penultimate goods within the formal orientation toward Christ; non-Christians may recognize and defend them without explicit reference to that horizon. The convergence, therefore, concerns shared penultimate goods, not a shared account of ultimate righteousness.
Later in this article, under the section titled “Suum Cuique,” Bonhoeffer explains that the natural is honored according to its content when reason recognizes human rights. That the content of the natural is “taken in” means that it is not a product of positive law, but something “given” to reason. “If there is a right that is rooted in what is naturally given, a ‘right we are born with,’ it may not be abolished or destroyed by some law [Recht] that comes from without. Otherwise the natural itself will be driven to revolution against an unnatural law.” 67 Here Bonhoeffer is clearly referring to unjust positive laws that violate the natural. He continues, “The dictum suum cuique [to each his own] acknowledges the priority of rights given in what is natural over all positive law.” 68 Reason's role, then, is not creative but receptive. It does not invent natural rights, nor does it confer their authority. Rather, it recognizes what is already given within preserved life. Even as fallen reason, it remains capable of perceiving injustice as injustice and goodness as goodness, because it participates—however imperfectly—in the created order that God continues to preserve.
In the remainder of the article, Bonhoeffer discusses topically what these natural rights entail: since God has created humans as bodily beings, humans are born with “a right to bodily life” (which includes protection of the body from intentional injury, violation, and killing); since the body is an inherent good—that is, good as an end in itself—there is a God-given right to bodily joy and happiness: a human dwelling, food and drink, clothing, relaxation, purposeless play, and sexuality; humans have a natural right to reproduction, which includes a right to the personal choice of a marriage partner; humans have a right to freedom from the “arbitrary encroachment” of another person through rape (the forcible use of another body for one's own sexual purposes), exploitation (which reduces another person to property), and torture.
While Bonhoeffer never finished this document, and thus the rights he details are by no means exhaustive, it contains many worthwhile reflections about what it means to honor the content of the natural by fostering being “human” and “good” in the penultimate sphere. In the words of Jens Zimmerman, “Bonhoeffer's discussion of the natural is explicitly framed by the desire for a common ethical platform with non-Christians.” 69 By distinguishing between “form” and “content” when it comes to the natural, Bonhoeffer opens up a space for ecumenical dialogue with and about civil law, that is, whether or not it currently recognizes and respects the priority of natural rights over all positive law. The Christian, of course, will see the full picture of natural rights: that they are God's means of preserving the world for Christ. The Christian knows that “God wills life and gives life a form [i.e., natural rights] in which it can live, because left to its own resources it can only destroy itself.” 70 The Christian knows that “the rights of natural life are the reflection of the glory of God the Creator in the midst of the fallen world” and that “it is in the first place God who stands up for these rights.” 71 In other words, Christians see the natural in its formal dimension: vis-à-vis Christ. And yet, non-Christians too, without knowledge of Christ, may and should know the natural according to its content: “It is therefore the business of reason within natural life to take account of the right of the individual, even when the divine background of this right is not recognized.” 72 The shared task, then, is not agreement on the ultimate source of these rights, but cooperation in recognizing and defending their material substance within history. This specific task of reasoning together about natural rights is an ecumenical task that each human being can participate in—even when the divine background of these rights is not properly acknowledged or outright denied. Indeed, the natural suffers greatly when we fail in this regard. Yet, insofar as we collectively contribute to making people human and good in the penultimate sphere, we prepare the way for the coming of the Lord.
Conclusion
This article has been an attempt to bring Bonhoeffer's christological account of the natural into dialogue with natural law thinking. I have tried to highlight some of the most notable parallels and divergences that emerge when these two streams of thought are juxtaposed. Bonhoeffer emerges, on my account, as a quasi-natural law thinker—albeit one who highlights, more than most natural law accounts, the strictly christological and eschatological meaning of the natural.
At the practical level, however, Bonhoeffer's account of the natural is quite similar to natural law thinking in that it invites a conversation among all human beings. Through reason (the organ that “takes in” the natural), we discern those fundamental rights given to us by God. Reason does not grant access to the saving knowledge of God in Christ, nor does it establish a shared soteriological horizon. It does, however, enable recognition of the material goods of preserved life within history. While reason does not give us access to the God who gifts us with these rights, it does allow us to discern the rights themselves—thereby fulfilling its purpose. Christians may and should, therefore, engage in conversations with our non-Christian interlocutors about the natural, seeking to become “human” and “good” together in the penultimate sphere. Insofar as Christians and non-Christians alike recognize and defend the rights inherent in natural life, they participate—whether intentionally or not—in the preservation of the world that God intends for Christ.
Bonhoeffer's contribution, then, is neither a rejection of natural law nor an uncritical embrace of it. Rather, he reconfigures reflection on the natural christologically and eschatologically, locating its telos not in a recovered prelapsarian order but in the coming of Jesus Christ. This reconfiguration both challenges natural law accounts that abstract from the gospel and invites Protestants to recover a robust account of the penultimate without compromising justification by faith alone. In this way, Bonhoeffer offers a vision of moral theology that is at once confessionally grounded and publicly engaged: a theology in which the natural is neither autonomous nor abolished, but preserved, ordered, and directed toward its fulfillment in Christ.
