Silencing Speech, Speaking in Tongues: Bonhoeffer and the Beginning of Theology

"Teaching about Christ begins in silence."  D. Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer begins his lectures--transcribed and formed into the book Christ the Center--with these words on the silent beginning of theology.  It's a complicated opening.

The silence that precedes "teaching about Christ" cannot be discerned before this teaching actually commences.  Not all silences are this silent beginning:  the silent foreground of teaching "has nothing to do with the silence of the mystics, who in the their dumbness chatter away secretly in their soul by themselves" (27).  The only way to distinguish "proper silence" (27) from this silent "chatter" is to refer to what follows this silence (teaching about Christ or self-enclosed chatter).  It thus seems that theology has no beginning, for its proper beginning--silence--is constituted only after theology is already under way; and its commencement (teaching) can only begin properly, as real theology and not empty chatter, out of a proper silence (which is absent when it begins, or is its absent beginning).  "To speak of Christ means to keep silent; to keep silent about Christ means to speak.  When the Church speaks rightly out of a proper silence, then Christ is proclaimed" (27).

Blasphemous Confessions

Such blasphemies, because they are violently extorted from men by the devil against their will, sometimes sound more pleasant in the ear of God than a hallelujah or some kind of hymn of praise (Luther, Lectures on Romans).  

A recent post at AUFS has enticed me to make a few comments on my own understanding of "confessional" theology.  Duke is a place that prides itself in producing confessional theologians, theologians who write in and for "the church," whose theology is situated within the historic confessions of faith ("orthodox"), who take seriously "the grammar" and "liturgical performance" of "the historic Christian faith."  To put it briefly and polemically, Duke intends to produce Christian theologians.  As such, it has placed much emphasis on what it means to be "properly" Christian.

Discipleship and Bourgeois Theology

It took me many years to free myself from I called in my memoirs the 'bonds of my class.'  I know that even today there are many who accuse me of behavior instilled by the 'bonds of class,' especially some feminist women.  Perhaps they are right and one never overcomes the class into which one is born.  I don't know. 
--Simone De Beauvoir

It's an honest, and a bit terrifying, account of her life as an intellectual:  born into a bourgeois family, Beauvoir wonders whether she was ever able to overcome these class bonds and think for and from a different social situation.  Is she able to transcend the class--and the cultural forms that went with it--into which she was born, or does she remain, despite her best efforts, another bourgeois intellectual?  She doesn't know, and this confession is remarkable given her vast erudition and relentless pursuit to understand herself and the world into which she is born.

Bonhoeffer and the Relative Importance of Life Together

I recently had a conversation with our priest about small groups in our church.  During the meeting, I made a brief remark that Bonhoeffer, in _Life Together_, begins his description of communal life by discounting the value of it.  I decided I should write out what I meant.  What follows is taken from a longer paper I wrote yesterday.  After the section posted here, the paper turns to "Life Together and Small Group Structures" to defend the value of small group multiplication as a way to remind ourselves that our communities are not ends in themselves but means for Christ to encounter (and means submitted to his work for his glory).  I should also note that I haven't really edited the paper.  But it's been over a month since my last post, so I thought I should add something.

Bonhoeffer begins his little book on Christian community, Life Together, with an attack on, of all things, the celebration of communal life.  After announcing his intention to examine “our life together under the Word,” Bonhoeffer states, “It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians.  Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies” (17).  He then quotes Luther, who more provocatively asserts, “The Kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies.  And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people but the devout people.  O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ!  If Christ had done what you are doing who would ever have been spared” (17-18).  The Church does not exist to stay together, to cling to its own kind.  On the contrary, Christians are called to “dwell in far countries among the unbelievers” (18).  Christian life, even life together, is life under the Word, which means life submitted to Christ, the one who obediently went into the “far country” (Barth) to dwell with those who were not like him but were instead rebellious sinners.  

Bonhoeffer’s subordination of community to Christ corrects an overemphasis on community.  Christian community can only be praised after it has been devalued.  Community is not our mission.  It is not essential but a privilege, a gracious gift (18), and one which not all Christians have (or have continually).  It is subordinated to Christ, the one who died alone (17), in the far country, for the sake of us sinners.  Its value, therefore, never rests in itself but only in the one it worships, Jesus Christ.  Finally, Christian community is composed of sinners (23), and therefore it is a community that can never be placed in opposition to (or closed off from) “the sinful world.”  The community that shuts out the unbeliever or the stranger, the weak or the useless, may actually shut out Christ (see p. 38).  To isolate the community from the world--or to place the church in opposition to the world, which amounts to the same thing--undercuts our mission, ignores our present existence as sinners justified only by grace, and risks shutting out the source of all grace, Jesus, the righteous one who dwells with sinners.  All of these conclusions follow from the words of Luther placed by Bonhoeffer in the second paragraph.  Life Together begins, therefore, with the stark but realistic (and necessary) reminder that our communal life is, strictly speaking, only a means and never the end, and hence, only of value insofar as it points us to our end, Jesus Christ.  

This denial of the inherent value of community does not lead Bonhoeffer to assert the superiority of individual life--the book after all, is still about community.  Bonhoeffer refuses to make any form--whether communal or individual, or some blend of the two--essential for Christian life.  There is no right way because every step, every supposed path, exists only under the lordship of Christ.  All attempts to find the right form miss Bonhoeffer’s main point:  no form can guarantee that Christ is present, and therefore, all forms must be continually questioned and continually brought back into submission to Christ.  

By placing communal life in service to Christ, Bonhoeffer forces us to allow Jesus to stand between us and every relationship:  “we belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ” (21).  All relationships have the meaning in fulfillment insofar as they point us to Christ; therefore, Christ is at the center of all relationships.  As the center, Jesus Christ stands between me and my neighbor, me and my enemy, me and my friend, me and my lover.  Christ even stands between myself and me.  As Augustine famously puts it, Christ “is closer to me than I am to myself.”  No relationship escapes Christ’s mediation, and any relationship that tries to bypass Christ’s mediation is a sinful one.  We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.  Only through Jesus.  We can never belong to each other directly.

Jesus’ position as mediator between myself and all others destroys any attempt of heroic individualism.  To assert that one can go it alone--just me and Jesus--is often an arrogant denial of Christ’s presence in and through others.  We think we are strong enough, smart enough, holy enough to sustain our lives with Christ alone.  But we can never be certain of our own resources; we never can rely on our strength.  The one on whom we rely, Jesus, has told us where he is to be found:  in our neighbor.  God “has willed that we should seek and find His living Word in the witness of a brother, in the mouth of a man” (23).  Jesus tells us to rely on the words of our brothers and sisters, and therefore, as people dependent on Jesus, we obey.  We seek Jesus in community.  We trust that Jesus will speak through the mouths and lives of those around us. 

Nevertheless, we do not seek others to fill our needs, we seek Jesus in and through others.  Communal life often functions as an extension of individualism.  To return to the introduction, individualism is just a certain form of communal life (and hence a communal form that cannot be ended by advocating people join a community).  Aware that we are finite, limited, weak, and insecure, we seek to draw others into our own “sphere of power” (33).  We seek to sustain our lives--our individual, self-possessed lives--through others.  Community functions as “human absorption” (ibid).  Here “one soul operates directly upon another soul” (ibid).  No longer does Jesus meet us through the other--and hence place himself between us and another.  The other person directly satisfies our needs.  They are attached to us, as extensions of ourselves, as members of our body (the original definition of a slave).  We function through them; they sustain us.  

This direct contact often takes the form of love but it is in fact simply the other side of domination.  The other cannot be released because the other serves my needs. I need them, and that need determines our interaction.  The other person is simply an extension of my own body, my own life.  Love as direct contact--what Bonhoeffer calls “human love” (34)--is the desire for a community of slaves; it is the desire for a community to serve me.  Whether this desire is expressed directly (“oppression”) or more subtly and coercively (“love”), the result is the same:  the other person is brought under my control so as to serve and meet my needs.  

Christ, as the mediator of all relationships, destroys any hope of “direct contact,” and therefore undermines all coercive relationships and communal forms.  Since Christ stands between me and every other person, I “must release the other person from every attempt of mine to regulate, coerce, and dominate him [or her] with my love” (36).  For Christ’s sake, we release the ones we love.  We do not hold onto them, as if they were tools for the satisfaction of our own desires.  We see other people as what they truly are--persons for whom Christ died.  We see them as they already are “in Christ’s eyes” (ibid).   This means that we lose the ability to judge others, for they are ones judged by Christ.  We are willing to let go of others--to not try to influence them, but merely to “meet [them] with the clear Word of God” and let them be “alone with this Word for a long time” (ibid).  Knowing that it is only through Christ that my needs are met in another person, we are free to let go of that person (or that group of people), trusting that the same Christ will continue to satisfy our desires.  Forgoing all attempts at direct contact, we place our faith not in the relationship with the person but in the one who mediates--and hence controls and orders--that relationship.  The relationship is never “an end itself” (35); it exists in order to serve Jesus Christ.  

In Jesus Christ, all our relationships are eternally secure, for we know that we will be with our Christian community through all eternity (25).  We are free to let go of our community because we trust that Christ holds all things together, and therefore, in and through Christ, we are still united to those we love.  Knowing that we do not live by the experience of community but only through Christ (39), we are free to love each other truthfully, to honor one another’s freedom, and to sacrificial serve those in, and those outside of, our present community.

utopian genocide

"Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building...[Genocide] was promoted as a way not to create suffering but to alleviate it.  The specter of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual--always an annoyance to totality--ceases to exist."

Philip Gourevitch, __We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families:  Stories From Rwanda___, 95.  

It is tempting to analyze a few aspects of contemporary American politics from this perspective (post-9/11 wars, the reasoning behind torture) but I will resist.  Instead, I want to think about the role and function of utopian thinking in Christian theology.  It isn't something I've thought about--and Micah D., if you read this, you should let me know what you think.

Genocide builds community in two distinct ways.  First, it brings the community together against a common enemy, a plague or parasite that must be eliminated.  Secondly, the community is brought together for the sake of a better world.  The first aspect--being against an enemy--is subordinated to the second aspect--being for a new world.  The prospect of a new life, a new community, and a new world explains the necessity of being against the enemy.  After all, the enemy is the threat to this new order.  Genocide is never an end in itself, but a means to an end.  The end--the desired goal of genocide--is a new community and a better world (or perhaps a new situation for an existing community, again, for the sake of a better world).

One can trace this genocidal logic back even before colonization (which is where H. Arendt lodges it).  The genocidal logic was built into late-medieval Christian identity, in which Spain needed to expel the Muslims and use blood purity laws to keep track of Jewish converts in order to stabilize Christian European identity.  Right during this time--late 15th century--Spanish explorers started discovering "new" worlds.  Very quickly, these "new" worlds became spaces in which (and through which) Europe could build a new world (and through this new world, express its own identity).  Europe began the process of "reinventing Eden" (to use the title of a great book on the conquest of nature and peoples).  It was this quest for a new world--a new, better, harmonic, edenic world--that justified the abuses of those deemed "native" and the land on which they dwelled.  Acquiring the land was necessary for building a better world; civilizing the natives would bring them into this new world.  Those who were lost were unfit for this new world.  Some--Africans--were fit to labor for this world but must, like Moses perhaps, remain outside of the promised land:  they are useful for but unfit to live in the new world.

Since genocide is an exercise in the quest for a better world, is there any space for the utopian in Christian theology?  What do we make of the "kingdom of God"?  How do we rethink the story of fall/redemption given the way a genocidal impulse has been operating within this story since at least the late middle ages (redemption from the fall through spreading Christian civilization)?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer says (in "History and Good [1]" from the __Ethics__), "Christ did not cause the world to cease being the world, and every action that seeks to confuse the world with the kingdom of God is a denial of both Christ and the world.  By grounding responsible action in Jesus Christ we reaffirm precisely the limits of such action.  Because we are dealing with worldly action, this responsibility has a limited scope.  No one has the responsibility of turning the world into the kingdom of God" (224).

For Bonhoeffer, every dream of utopia fails Christologically, for it fails to realize that in Christ, "the world that is passing away has been claimed by God" (224).  All human reality has already been taken on in Christ.  To try to build a new community ignores the fact that Christ has loved and claimed this already existing sinful community.  The community--as it presently exists--has been claimed by Jesus, and thus there is no reason to try to create the kingdom of God on earth.

But does not this claim by Jesus reconstitute the community?  Yes!  There is neither slave nor free, male nor female, Jew nor Greek!  But doesn't this reconstitution of the community in Christ enable the utopian project to begin afresh?  No!  Why?  Because the community is reshaped and formed by Christ (through the Spirit).  It is never a human work; the formation is not mediated by our community (or any outside community) but is Christ's work (it is this point I've been trying to work out in the exchanges with Nick).  The Church testifies--witnesses--to Christ's work and urges others to see and believe it as well.  But it does not possess a form itself that it can then reproduce elsewhere (that belief lies at the very foundation of Christian imperialism, past and present).  

So, then, are utopian writings banned?  To use a Pauline expression--by no means!  But they are welcomed as judged and forgiven.  In other words, following every utopia stands Christ's "not my will but yours be done."  God's work is God's work, not ours, and our calling is to surrender our dreams and hopes to God.  Utopian thought can be valued and appreciated as long as one never forgets that any utopian scheme is sinful and must be surrendered to Christ (placed inside of Christ's cruciform obedience).  We are not excused from wanting to see a more just, more peaceful, more loving and harmonious world; we are not freed from our longings to see a new creation, a reconstituted Eden.  But we know, and must continually remind ourselves, that these dreams are dreams to be surrendered.  They are dreams to be brought into Christ's body, and from there, within that cruciform space, they are dreams that can be embraced.  In Christ, our dreams can be cleansed from our hidden hatred of the world (of the merely human); our hopes can be reordered by Christ's love for the world and for humans as they exist now.  Our actions, therefore, can be organized not by the attempt to create a new world but to let the world exist as the world--to let those in the world live merely human lives.  This work is always partial, always limited, always risky, and hence always needing humility and always standing in need of grace and forgiveness.  "Ultimate ignorance of one's own goodness or evil, together with dependence upon grace, is an essential characteristic of responsible historical action" (Bonhoeffer, 225).  "In God's own good, human good and evil are thus overcome" (227).  

We never know if our actions coincide with God's good (e.g., Judas' action of betraying Christ actually coincided with God's good...).  Far from excusing us to do evil, this fact causes us to know that even our best attempt to do the good might be horrendously evil (it certainly was for those missionaries trying to bring the natives into Christian civilization...).  We must let go of any attempt to be justified, righteous, good, beneficent, or otherwise free from blame.  But, instead of prohibiting action, the acknowledgement of our guilt frees us to act--as merely human actors striving after a merely human world (the merely human world that God has loved and reconciled to Godself in Christ).  

Utopian writings can be valuable--but only from within this perspective:  they are valued as long as one is reminded that what is hoped for is ultimately sinful and must be brought into judgment by Christ.  Therefore, they are extremely valuable--like everything else "merely" human.  But, like everything human, they must be filtered through Christ's love for the individual as he or she is now.  That only spells the death of utopia if utopia is nothing more than the hatred of the concrete, historical human person.  But if that is all utopia is, then genocide--hatred of the concrete human for the sake of the ideal human community--will always be at the core of any utopia.  And genocide will remain the most accurate expression of utopian ideals.