\"'From the Spirit’s Choice and Free Desire': Friendship as Atheology in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s...

$: \"'From the Spirit’s Choice and Free Desire': Friendship as Atheology in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison\" Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 22.1$
© 1993 Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion / Corporation Canadienne des Sciences Religieuses

"From the spirit’s choice and freedesire": Friendship as atheologyin Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters

and Papers from PrisonJAMIE S. SCOTT

Jamie Scott is Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Program, York University,North York, ON M3J 1 P3; he completed this article with the aid of a Sabbatical Leave Re-search Grant from York University.

1

We all have friends, yet until recently the topic of friendship has hadsurprisingly few takers among Christian writers. The Bible does offersome pointers. The Old Testament gives us the example of Jonathanand David, and through the prophet Isaiah God speaks collectively ofIsrael as &dquo;the race of Abraham my friend&dquo; (Isa. 41:18). In the New Tes-tament, Matthew describes Jesus as the &dquo;friend of tax collectors andsinners&dquo; (Matt. 11:19), and John has Jesus declare to the disciples thatthey are not his servants but his friends (John 15:12-15). Elsewhere inthe Bible God himself becomes our friend. In the early church, Augus-tine speaks in the Confessions of &dquo;the solace of other friends, and JohnCassian wrote on the subject. In the Middle Ages, Aelred of Riveaulx iscelebrated for his book Spiritual Friendship, and Aquinas draws uponAristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to praise the virtues of certain kinds offriendship.2 Other Christian writers have taken up the topic occasion-ally, from Thomas Traherne through Jeremy Taylor to Karl Barth and

1 Augustine, Confessions, translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1961), p. 79.

2 For a sustained analysis of Christian friendship in the medieval monastic tradition,see Adele M. Fiske, Friends and Friendship in the Monastic Tradition (Cuernavaca: CIDOCCuaderno No. 51, 1970).

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http://sir.sagepub.com/

50

Emil Brunner. But considering the ubiquitousness of the phenomenonof friendship, the paucity of sustained or systematic studies of the sub-ject reveals an odd diffidence among Christian theologians.

In our own time friendship seems to have attracted wider attention,although theological ambivalence towards it often still prevails. C. S.

Lewis, for example, counts friendship among &dquo;the four loves,&dquo; but ar-gues that precisely because friendship &dquo;is the most spiritual of loves ...[it] is unable to save itself.&dquo;3 In another vein, Sallie McFague lists someof the positive characteristics of friendship: &dquo;mutuality, respect, accept-ance of differences, cooperation, solidarity, attraction, perseverance, tol-erance, gift-giving, delight, sacrifice, constructive criticism.&dquo;’ Other con-temporary approaches to friendship focus on the reciprocal or mutualnature of such relationships. This focus then leads different authorsdown different paths for the same reasons. On the one hand, friendshipis derogated, because such reciprocity is at odds with certain traditionalunderstandings of the cross as the epitome of altruistic self-sacrifice; onthe other hand, friendship is lauded because such reciprocity is more

palatable than self-sacrifice as a way of understanding God’s relationshipto the world and the nature of Christian responsibility.’ I take my cuefrom a recent addition to the Christian literature offering a more posi-tive view of friendship, a later book by Sallie McFague, Models of God:Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. This book will have surprisedsome readers by including Dietrich Bonhoeffer among the major au-thors on friendship.~ Since McFague does not pursue the full implica-tions of Bonhoeffer’s thinking on friendship, this essay undertakes thetask.

2

Bonhoeffer’s story is not unfamiliar. Suspected of involvement in Fabianvon Schlabrendorff’s assassination attempt on Hitler, he was tried bythe Nazis in a summary court martial before dawn on April 9, 1945, andhanged. Anticipating death in prison for months beforehand, Bon-

3 C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1960), p. 124.4 Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religlous Language (Philadel-

phia : Fortress Press, 1982), p. 182.5 Certain writings of Anders Nygren and Reinhold Niebuhr advocate a Christian ethics

of altruistic self-sacrifice. For a recent contribution to the literature on a Christian

ethics of mutuality, see Stephen G. Post, "The Inadequacy of Selflessness: God’s Suf-fering and the Theory of Love," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 56, 2(1988): 213-28.

6 See Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for An Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadel-phia: Fortress Press, 1987), p. 157-80. For further reading on the subject of friend-ship, see p. 218, n. 22.



51

hoeffer committed many of his thoughts to paper. Thanks to the editor-ship of Eberhard Bethge, more and more of these writings have come tous in expanding editions, the most recent titled Letters and Papers fromPrison.7 Even if theologically unsystematic, Letters and Papers representsthe climax of Bonhoeffer’s thinking, offering us tantalizing glimpses intonew ideas, some with roots in his earlier work, most notably the Ethics,which also belong to this last period.

Bonhoeffer was preoccupied with the problem of finding specificways of realizing the reality of Christ in &dquo;the ambiguous and contortedeveryday world where good and evil exist side by side.&dquo;’ In the Ethics,he begins to meet this challenge in two ways. On several occasions, herefers to the scriptural category of the &dquo;four mandates.&dquo; &dquo;This relative-ness of the world to Christ,&dquo; he writes, &dquo;assumes concrete form in cer-

tain mandates of God in the world ... labour, marriage, government,and the church.&dquo;’ At the same time, Bonhoeffer talks of &dquo;the structure ofthe responsible life,&dquo; in which &dquo;freedom displays itself in the self-examina-tion of life and of action and in the venture of a concrete decision In hisown life, carrying out these divine mandates and living the responsible lifecame to mean active confrontation with the powers of this world in thename of the transcendent authority of God. Letters and Papers bears witnessto the terms in which this confrontation was worked out.

7 Of particular importance are the first edition, Widerstand und Ergebung: Briefe undAujzeichnungen aus der Haft, edited by Eberhard Bethge (München: Kaiser Verlag,1951); ET Prisoner for God, translated by Reginald H. Fuller (New York: Macmillan,1952); and the third and most recent edition, Letters and Papers from Prison, edited byEberhard Bethge (London: SCM Press, 1973). The quotation in the title of this articleis from Bonhoeffer’s poem "The Friend" (p. 38). This third edition is cited in the textby page in parentheses. We should note a crucial difference between these two edi-tions. The first edition is organized by subject-matter and literary genre. The thirdedition, however, falls into four parts—"Time of Interrogation, April to July 1943,""Waiting for the Trial, August 1943 to April 1944," "Holding out until the Over-throw, April to July 1944" and "After the Failure, July 1944 to February 1945." AsBethge himself makes clear, this division "is not a theological one," for the fragmen-tary nature of both the matter and the method of Bonhoeffer’s writings makes it im-possible that "such a division ... either be extracted or established" (p. ix). Instead,"it seemed natural to divide the imprisonment into periods, following the decisivepoints of the legal investigations" (p. viii-ix). In effect, this new principle of organiza-tion creates a plot structure, enabling us to read the text much as we would a novel,though that is not to say, of course, that we do not at the same time recognize thatthe events recounted and the characters we meet are historical, not purely imagined.On this and other literary critical matters, see Jamie S. Scott, "Epistula non erubescit:On Literary Intentionality in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison,"submitted to Christianity in Literature.

8 André Dumas, Dietrich Bnnhoeffer: Theologian of Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1971), p. 156.9 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 209, 286, 330, 344.

10 Ibid., p. 225.



52

Letters and Papers opens with a &dquo;Prologue,&dquo; entitled &dquo;After TenYears.&dquo; This &dquo;Prologue&dquo; makes it clear that a strong sense of the needfor solidarity against the Nazis motivates all of Bonhoeffer’s writingfrom prison. 1 I A key term here is &dquo;responsibility&dquo; (Verantwortung),meaning no more and no less than &dquo;the ability to respond.&dquo; When tradi-tional categories of responsibility have been thrown into disarray by&dquo;the great masquerade of evil,&dquo; one looks for leadership to those peoplewho show &dquo;civil courage&dquo; (p. 5). Civil courage involves &dquo;the free respon-sibility of free men,&dquo; which in turn &dquo;depends on a God who demandsresponsible action in a bold venture of faith, and who promises forgive-ness and consolation to the man who becomes a sinner in that venture&dquo;

(p. 6). This courage demands the careful cultivating of trustworthiness.Solidarity against the Nazis will wither without such trustworthiness. AsThomas Day has noted, the central theme of &dquo;After Ten Years&dquo; may besummed up in the apothegm, &dquo;neutrality begets stupidity, solidarity in-sight.&dquo; 12 Letters and Papers testifies to Bonhoeffer’s paradoxical efforts asa prisoner of the Nazis to exercise freedom, that is, the ability to re-spond to the suffering inflicted on others by the Nazis.

While deprived of freedom in prison, Bonhoeffer exercises free re-sponsibility principally by writing, most importantly by writing letters.Corresponding-or more accurately, the attempt to explore co-respon-sibility-creates a drama of epistolary exchange, an active solidarity be-tween Bonhoeffer and those who care most about him and about whomhe cares most-his parents, his siblings and in-laws. To read Letters andPapers is to re-enact this drama. But as we make our way from the firstpart of the book, &dquo;Time of Interrogation, April to July 1943,&dquo; to the sec-ond section, &dquo;Waiting for the Trial, August 1943 to April 1944,&dquo; a domi-nant correspondent emerges - Eberhard Bethge. The first mention ofBethge coincides with the first hint of impending tragedy-Bonhoeffer’s&dquo;Testament.&dquo; This document expresses Bonhoeffer’s own determina-tion to be ready for the worst-to be ultimately responsible-even as hedoes all he can to avert the worst. The fact that Bonhoeffer hands his&dquo;Testament&dquo; to Bethge, not to his fianc6e, Maria von Wedermeyer, orto any member of the family, symbolizes the ultimate importance of thecorrespondence between these two men. The epistolary relationship be-tween Bonhoeffer and Bethge becomes a key factor in the former’s de-velopment, not only of the idea of Christian responsibility but also of itspractice in the solidarity of resistance to the Nazis.

11 See Thomas I. Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Christian Community and Common Sense(Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982), p. 192.

12 Ibid., p. 192.



53

Bonhoeffer’s first letter to Bethge makes clear why their correspond-ence is so central to any interpretation of Letters and Papers. Bonhoefferunderstands himself to be waiting on the threshold between life anddeath. Unable to burden Maria or his parents with such thoughts, he in-troduces the phrase &dquo;boundary situation&dquo; to describe his situation andhe wonders aloud to Bethge whether or not he will be condemned

(p. 129, 131). In such circumstances, the pastor plays an important con-fessional role. But even if he had been allowed visits from a pastor, Bon-hoeffer tells Bethge, &dquo;I wouldn’t have been able to speak to him in thatway which is only possible with you&dquo; (p. 128). Bethge is Bonhoeffer’s

pastor (ibid.). The rest of the letter has the ring of a formal confessionabout it.

At the same time, however, Bonhoeffer is confident that his relation-

ship with Bethge transcends formal confession. To put it another way,he seems to draw a distinction between confessing formally to the prisonchaplain, say, and confessing to Bethge. Bonhoeffer and Bethge areboth pastors, able to respond to one another’s formal confessions, butsomething extra is involved here. We get a clue a little later. Should

anything happen to him, Bonhoeffer has bequeathed &dquo;almost every-thing&dquo; to Bethge, and he even asks Bethge to &dquo;be very good to Maria&dquo;(p. 130). Aware of the tensions which might arise in such a situation, heremarks: &dquo;At the beginning it’s not at all easy to resolve the conflict be-tween marriage and friendship&dquo; (p. 131). This remark reveals what is

special about Bonhoeffer’s relationship to Bethge. There is to their rela-tionship a quality at once deceptively simple and difficult to define:friendship. Friendship thus develops as the principal theme of Bon-hoeffer’s correspondence with Bethge, and because this correspondenceis the most significant part of Letters and Papers, friendship must be un-derstood as the central theme of the book.

Confidence (Vertrauen) literally describes the faith together-the mu-tual trust-defining friendship and conditioning the expectations andobligations which characterize friendship in action. As the mutual exer-cise of complete trust, friendship becomes the governing metaphor forBonhoeffer’s reflections on the free responsibility of the true Christian.In a &dquo;Wedding Sermon from Prison,&dquo; for instance, Bonhoeffer associ-ates &dquo;love and friendship&dquo; and &dquo;families and friends&dquo; (p. 42). Similarly,we discover that Bonhoeffer’s &dquo;story of a contemporary middle-classfamily&dquo; is really a story &dquo;of two families on terms of friendship living in asmall town&dquo; (p. 129-30). Or again, Bonhoeffer is confident God watchesover Bethge, because so far he has been &dquo;guided with such unbelievablefriendship&dquo; (p. 138). Most of all, however, being able to correspond withBethge provides Bonhoeffer with the chance to face and overcome fur-ther suffering and danger. As friends, their correspondence takes place



54

in the presence of God; it epitomizes Christian confession. Bonhoeffermay not tell the whole truth in letters to his parents; nor dare he bur-den Maria with it. But letters to a friend are a different matter. &dquo;I must

spare my parents and also Maria,&dquo; Bonhoeffer tells Bethge, &dquo;but you I

will not deceive in any way, and you must not deceive me&dquo; (p. 173).Thus, Bonhoeffer closes a Christmas letter to Bethge with a reference toProverbs 18:24 (p. 173): &dquo;There is a friend who sticks closer than abrother.&dquo;

In another vein, Bonhoeffer seems to understand friendship in termsof children’s play. A round of correspondence reveals that Maria has vis-ited Tegel with joyful news. Bethge and his wife, Renate, Bonhoeffer’sniece, wish to name their newborn son after his great uncle. Through-out this round of correspondence there are explicit references to friend-ship. Immediately after the birth of little Dietrich, for instance, Bon-hoeffer tells Renate, &dquo;In the midst of all our hardships we keep ex-periencing an overwhelming kindness and friendship&dquo; (p. 210). Butmore importantly, Bonhoeffer introduces the metaphor of play to de-scribe his relationship to Bethge: &dquo;This ability to keep on the samewavelength, to play to each other,&dquo; he writes, &dquo;took years to cultivate,not always without friction, and we must never lose it&dquo; (p. 178). Thisplaying to one another is the interplay of friendship. Friends are alwaysthere for one another. Bonhoeffer is glad that Bethge was around atChristmas. &dquo;No one could have filled my place better,&dquo; he writes

(p. 189). V’hen he and Bethge are unable to reciprocate in person, cor-respondence expresses this mutuality (p. 191). The exchange of lettersexpresses the interplay of friendship.

Bonhoeffer’s stress on the importance of correspondence-of explor-ing the nature of co-responsibility-leads him to try to locate friendshipsociologically, as well as theologically. When earlier Bethge had de-scribed marriage as &dquo;what remains stable in all fleeting relationships,&dquo;Bonhoeffer agreed, but also wished to &dquo;include a good friendshipamong these stable things&dquo; (p. 164). A little later Bethge reiterates thisview, but distinguishes friendship from other kinds of relationship.&dquo;Friendship,&dquo; he suggests, &dquo;no matter how exclusive and how all-

embracing it may be-has no necessitas,&dquo; or, to put it more positively,&dquo;Friendship is completely determined by its content and only in this waydoes it have its existence&dquo; (p. 181).

As far as the sociology of human relationships is concerned, what isthe content of friendship? In the Ethics Bonhoeffer adopts traditionaltheological categories and speaks in terms of four divine mandates:

&dquo;marriage, work, state, and church&dquo; (p. 192). Where do we locate

friendship among these mandates? In Letters and Papers Bonhoeffer sug-gests that friendship may be &dquo;a sub-heading of culture and education&dquo;



55

(p. 192). Yet the categories culture and education are also problematic.Where do we locate culture and education in relation to the four divinemandates? Clearly they have something to do with work, but they arenot limited to this mandate. Rather, Bonhoeffer argues, &dquo;they belong,not to the sphere of obedience, but to the broad area of freedom, whichsurrounds all three of the [other] divine mandates&dquo; (p. 193). That is tosay, marriage, work, state and church constitute different aspects of thesphere of obedience, but collectively these four divine mandates do notexhaust the possibilities of human action. The exercise of free responsi-bility transcends the sphere of obedience.

For present purposes, talk of exercising free responsibility brings tomind the notion of friendship. But having introduced the notion thatthe divine mandates are somehow circumscribed by the &dquo;broad area of

freedom,&dquo; Bonhoeffer goes on to identify what is peculiar to the exer-cise of ecclesiastical responsibility in particular. He suggests that &dquo;theidea of the church&dquo; is critical for the proper exercising of the otherthree mandates. This apparently privileged position of the church doesnot entail some sort of hierarchical relationship. The idea of the churchdescribes the circumstances under which we may most fully exercise thefreedom implicated in the proper fulfilment of the other divine man-dates. In Bonhoeffer’s own words, &dquo;the idea of the church&dquo; is the idea ofthat divine mandate which provides &dquo;an understanding of the area offreedom&dquo; (p. 193). But how are we to understand the connection be-tween this area of freedom and the idea of the church? In an effort to

clarify this connection Bonhoeffer inverts Kierkegaard’s privileging ofthe ethical over the aesthetic dimension of spirituality. In a time inwhich &dquo;the ’ethical’ man&dquo; is not at all the same as &dquo;the Christian,&dquo; Bon-hoeffer argues, it is necessary to re-establish the aesthetic dimension ofexistence. &dquo;Who is there, for instance, in our times,&dquo; Bonhoeffer asks,&dquo;who can devote himself with an easy mind to music, friendship, games,or happiness?&dquo; Bonhoeffer once more introduces the notion of friend-ship in a context of culture and education. That is to say, the idea of thechurch is to be found where the free play of culture and educationexpresses the interplay of friendship. &dquo;I believe that within the sphereof this freedom,&dquo; writes Bonhoeffer, &dquo;friendship is by far the rarest andmost priceless treasure.&dquo; In a world in which pretenders to ethical au-thority claim &dquo;the necessitas of a divine decree&dquo; in the spheres of work,marriage and the state, the church must defend friendship in the nameof &dquo;the necessitas of freedom&dquo; (p. 193).The idea of the church, then, refers to that sphere of responsibility

which may be distinguished from the other divine mandates preciselybecause by describing the circumstances of freedom, it informs theother divine mandates with the freedom of friendship. How is this spe-



56

cial position among the four mandates possible? Because the freedom offriendship &dquo;cannot be compared with the treasures of the mandates, forin relation to them it is sui generis; it belongs to them as the cornflowerbelongs to the cornfield&dquo; (p. 193). In this respect, the freedom of friend-ship is the freedom &dquo;of the Christian man.&dquo; &dquo;The man who is ignorantof this area of freedom,&dquo; Bonhoeffer argues, &dquo;may be a good father, citi-zen, and worker, indeed even a Christian; but I doubt whether he is acomplete man and therefore a Christian in the widest sense of theword&dquo; (p. 193). Bonhoeffer identifies the freedom of the Christian withthe notion of being fully human, an idea which in turn he identifies withbeing together with others as friends. Friendship in action epitomizesthe sort of elasticity of behaviour which enables the divine to enter in atany time, in any place. For Bonhoeffer, the true Christian is the personwho responds to others in the freedom of friendship in all spheres oflife, and to be a true Christian in this sense is to be fully human. Putotherwise, to respond to one another as friends is to assume responsibil-ity for completing one another. This completion may be understoodquite literally. Bethge may have to complete Bonhoeffer, as the bitterirony of a facetious remark indicates: &dquo;And since one day you will becalled to write my biography, I want to put the most complete materialat your disposal! So!&dquo; (p. 202). But more importantly, the correspond-ence between Bonhoeffer and Bethge at once enacts and reflects thissense of completeness, which is both fully human and fully Christian. AsBonhoeffer elsewhere tells Bethge, &dquo;I’m living in a daily spiritual ex-change&dquo; which &dquo;automatically takes the form of this letter, even if thereis really nothing ’to report’ &dquo; (p. 223).The third part of Letters and Papers, &dquo;Holding Out until the Over-

throw, April to July 1944,&dquo; opens with a letter in which Bonhoeffer re-minds Bethge that &dquo;we are beginning the tenth year of our friendship&dquo;(p. 272). This friendship enables Bonhoeffer to turn the occasional long-ing into something constructive. Unlike a year earlier, for example, thiscalmer Bonhoeffer is now able to respond more openly to his parents.He thanks Bethge for the &dquo;very good, friendly thought&dquo; of writing toMaria (p. 275; emphasis in the original). At the same time, however,while Bonhoeffer and Bethge hope for the death of Hitler we know it isBonhoeffer who is going to die. Of course, Bonhoeffer himself knewnothing of the tragedy to come, and yet the presence of the shadow ofdeath marks a rhetorical shift in the text from sociological to theologicalcategories. Perhaps this shift owes something to the editorial hand ofBethge; at any rate, it is quite striking. In these letters and other docu-ments Bonhoeffer offers tantalizing glimpses of the full theological im-plications of his understanding of the idea of the church as the exerciseof the free responsibility of friendship.



57

The celebrated letter of April 30 1944, contains most of the key ques-tions and many of the key phrases characterizing Bonhoeffer’s later the-ology. He wishes to speak meaningfully about God &dquo;in a ’non-religious’sense&dquo; (p. 286, 285); he also says he often feels more at home in prisonwith &dquo;religionless people&dquo; than with &dquo;the religious&dquo; (p. 281). Bonhoefferfeels &dquo;in brotherhood’ with those who do not think of God as a &dquo;deus exmachina&dquo; (p. 281-82). We are reminded here of the consolatio fratrumcharacterizing the vita communis of Bonhoeffer’s beloved Finkenwalde,the controversial seminary of the Confessing Church he and others setup in resistance to the German Lutheran church’s perceived complicitywith the Nazis (p. 150).13 What do these two communities-Tegel andFinkenwalde-have in common? Oddly enough, Bonhoeffer’s fondnessfor ,V. F. Otto’s The Gods of Ancient Greece offers a hint. &dquo;Instead of a

symbol for the absolute, instead of bewildering monstrosity,&dquo; Otto findsin the gods of ancient Greece efforts to give concrete shape to the per-fect human form&dquo;; &dquo;The divine [is to be found] not in absolutes, but inthe natural human form&dquo; (p. 332). Turning from the gods of ancientGreece to the New Testament, Bonhoeffer reiterates this stress upon the

simply human. The disciples, those who enjoyed table-fellowship withJesus, the converted Zacchaeus, the woman who was a sinner, the healedsick, the accepted children, the shepherds, the wise men, the centurion atCapernaum, the rich young man, the eunuch and Cornelius, Nathanieland Joseph of Arimathea do not turn to Jesus through &dquo;religious method&dquo;(p. 362). Granted their very different contexts, Bonhoeffer associates hisexperience at Finkenwalde and at Tegel with aspects of the religious cul-tures of ancient Greece and the New Testament in terms of a shared senseof the immanence of the divine in the simply human.

But what form does this shared sense of the immanence of the divinein the simply human take? Of those ordinary folk who were drawn tothe person of Christ, Bonhoeffer writes, &dquo;The only thing that is com-mon to all these is their sharing in the suffering of God in Christ&dquo;

(p. 362). What does it mean to share in this suffering of God in Christ in

13 The phrase consolatio fratrum appears in Bonhoeffer’s first letter to Bethge. "Andnow," Bonhoeffer writes, "after these long months without worship, penitence andeucharist and without the consolatio fratrum—once again be my pastor as you have sooften been in the past, and listen to me" (p. 128). Had Bonhoeffer survived, it is

probably safe to assume that in response to contemporary feminist theology he wouldhave allowed the complementary consolatio sororum, uniting both under some such ru-bric as consolatio discipulorum. In any case, as is clear from the direction pursued insuch earlier works as Life Together and The Cost of Discipleship, what is important is theway in which Letters and Papers privileges even more radically the spirituality of hu-man communion in the here and now over any preoccupation with life together insome hereafter.



58

the contemporary world? How does the contemporary Christian live theChristian life in a world come of age? Bonhoeffer remarks, &dquo;one has tolive for some time in a community to understand how Christ is ’formed’in it&dquo; (p. 359). Again, we are reminded of both Finkenwalde and Tegel,and perhaps of Bonhoeffer’s family. Yet Finkenwalde prepared sem-inarians for ministering to a world beyond its walls, whereas now Bon-hoeffer seems to think of the world itself as the Christian’s properschool of training. Ironically, however, the world beyond the walls ofFinkenwalde is the walled world of Tegel, a microcosm of resistencestanding both literally and symbolically as antitype to the distortions andperversions of the world of the Nazis beyond its walls. Assuming completeresponsibility for this world in the only appropriate response to the factthat God has given over the world to humanity completely. Within thecommunities of both Finkenwalde and Tegel, and even within the family,Bonhoeffer’s friendship with Bethge has played a crucial role. Beyond thewalls of both Finkenwalde and Tegel Bonhoeffer expresses his sense ofChristian responsibility for the family and for the community of human-kind as a whole in and through the freedom of friendship.

&dquo;

When the assassination attempt on Hitler does not succeed, all in-volved become prime targets for Nazi revenge. Tension thus increasesas we move from the third to the fourth and final part of Letters and Pa-

pers, &dquo;After the Failure, July 1944 to February 1945.&dquo; Bonhoeffer seemsto have spent a good deal of time during his final days writing poetry.Interspersed among the other documents making up the last pages ofLetters and Papers, we find several poems. One poem, &dquo;The Friend,&dquo; is ofspecial significance. Sent as a birthday present to Bethge, this poemmarks the dramatic climax of Letters and Papers. Having been tempted,we feel, almost to doubt Bethge, Bonhoeffer had two weeks earlier

quoted Giordano Bruno’s apothegm, &dquo;There can be something fright-ening about the sight of a friend; no enemy can be so terrifying as he&dquo;;glossing this remark, Bonhoeffer suggests that nothing is more terrify-ing than the prospect of being betrayed by a friend, as Judas betrayedJesus (p. 375). Now, however, &dquo;The Friend&dquo; makes the connection be-tween friendship and freedom quite explicitly:Not from the heavy soil,where blood and sex and oath,rule in their hallowed might,where earth itself,guarding the primal consecrated order,avenges wantonness and madness—not from the heavy soil of earth,but from the spirit’s choice and free desire,needing no oath or legal bond,is friend bestowed on friend. (p. 388)



59

The freedom of friendship is a gift-a blessing bestowed, as it were,from above. Friends grace one another. Friendship is not of the world,but it is enjoyed for its own sake in the world. It is a refuge from thecares of the world, and yet the strength with which one confronts theworld. &dquo;Like a fortress to which, from confusion and danger, / the spiritreturns, / wherein he finds refuge and comfort and strengthening, / is afriend to a friend&dquo; (p. 389). True friendship admits no limits to the free-dom of co-responsibility; friends find &dquo;counsel&dquo; in one another, see inone another a &dquo;true helper / to brotherly freedom&dquo; (p. 390).

Paradoxically, friendship entails the possibility of self-sacrifice as theultimate act of mutuality. Understood as an exchange achieved throughthe free interplay of co-responsibility, the mutuality expressed in andthrough correspondence between Bonhoeffer and Bethge now assumesa form in which death is understood not as the end of life, but as part oflife, &dquo;the crowning of human freedom&dquo; (p. 375). As an act of self-sacri-fice, &dquo;The Friend&dquo; celebrates a mutual agreement, the exchange of onelife for another. Bethge himself explains why: &dquo;There is no greater self-sacrifice, no better way of signifying an otherwise unattainable nearnessthan in a poem&dquo; (p. 395). In hindsight, we may say that &dquo;The Friend&dquo;

expresses the correspondence between Bethge’s birthday and Bon-hoeffer’s imminent death. In Bethge’s words, its &dquo;touch is steadier andmore far-reaching than a letter&dquo;; its &dquo;restrained surrender&dquo; is &dquo;the

highest degree of friendship and understanding&dquo; (p. 395). This cyclingof birth and death recapitulates the way in which the plot of Letters andPapers comes full circle, yet reaches forward beyond the pages of thetext into the lives of future readers through the work of one of thefriends, Bethge, who becomes Bonhoeffer’s literary executor and theeditor of Letters and Papers. 14 .

3 - - ’

, . ,.

During his final days Bonhoeffer set himself the task of finding newways of Christian speaking in and through which to call into questionold ways of Christian speaking and, perhaps, old ways of Christian act-ing ; in so doing, he points to new ways of Christian acting without fall-ing into the temptation of seeming to prescribe these new ways in toopresumptuous or rigid a fashion. In a famously cryptic phrase, Bon-hoeffer refers to Jesus as the Christ because he is &dquo;the man for others&dquo;

(p. 382). This deceptively simple human formulation lies at the heart ofBonhoeffer’s new way of refusing to speak traditionally about God. In-

14 On ambiguities of literary intentionality in Letters and Papers, see "Epistula non erube-scit" (above, n. 7).



60

terpreted in terms of Bonhoeffer’s focus on the freedom of friendship,this refusal marks the beginnings of what we might call an atheologicalapproach to questions having to do with the exercising of proper Chris-tian responsibility in a world come of ages

Mark Taylor describes atheology as a species of deconstructive think-ing : &dquo;Irrevocably liminal or marginal,&dquo; deconstructive thinking &dquo;marks anunstable border along which marginal thinkers wander.&dquo;16 Pervading andsubverting &dquo;the hierarchical system of theological concepts,&dquo; nonetheless&dquo;this parasitic discourse presupposes the continuing existence of its

host.&dquo; ~’ Characterized in this sense as &dquo;erring thought,&dquo; atheology &dquo;is nei-ther properly theological nor nontheological, theistic nor atheistic, religiousnor secular, believing nor nonbelieving.&dquo;18 Taylor continues:

The a/theologian asks errant questions and suggests responses that often seemerratic or even erroneous. Since his reflection wanders, roams, and strays fromthe &dquo;proper&dquo; course, it tends to deviate from well-established ways. To tradi-tional eyes, a/theology doubtless appears to be irregular, eccentric, and vagrant.At best it seems aimless, at worst devious. Within this framework, a/theology is,in fact, heretical. For the a/theologian, however, heresy and aimlessness are un-avoidable. Ideas are never fixed but are always in transition; thus they are ir-

repressibly transitory.... His writing, therefore, remains unfinished. His workis less a complete book than an open (perhaps broken) text that never really be-gins or actually ends. The words of a/theology fall in between; they are always inthe middle. The a/theological text is a tissue woven of threads that are producedby endless spinning. This vertiginous wordplay points to the paradoxical non-binary (a)logic of the cross. ~9

Bonhoeffer is just such a liminal figure, confronted by the equally im-possible worlds of traditional religion and the Nazis, lying to preservethe truth, poised on the threshold between life and death. Just as boththe theoretical and the practical reason (logos) of atheology at once as-sume and deny the presence of the divine (theos), so for Bonhoeffer,&dquo;Before God and with God we live without God&dquo; (p. 360). As the ex-ample of Jesus, the man for others, makes clear, living as a complete hu-man being in the world is living before God and with God, althoughBonhoeffer’s involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler is livingwithout God. Only the free interplay of friendship characteristic of theidea of the church, as Bonhoeffer has come to understand it, is capable

15 The term atheology adapts Mark C. Taylor’s title, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). The present essay, and my "EPistula non eru-bescit," together constitute parts of a book on Bonhoeffer as a postmodern figure.

16 Taylor, Erring, p. 10.17 Ibid.18 Ibid., p. 12. 19 Ibid., p. 12-13.



61

of sustaining the tension arising from such an apparent conflict betweenprincipal and practice.

Bonhoeffer is pointing to a new way of Christian thinking and do-ing-an atheological way-when he construes the idea of the church asthe exercise of the free responsibility of friendship in and through thespheres of obedience described by the divine mandates of work, mar-riage and citizenship. If the &dquo;Prologue&dquo; to the book calls for &dquo;plain, hon-est, straightforward men,&dquo; Letters and Papers as a whole reveals that thesequalities characterize friendship. Bonhoeffer’s friendship with Bethgeprovided the strength he needed to justify involvement in the conspir-acy to assassinate Hitler, a strength which at once fulfils and transcendshis responsibilities to wife and family, to his country and to his tradi-tional work as a pastor (p. 17). Towards the end of Letters and PapersBonhoeffer tells Bethge, &dquo;Human relationships are the most importantthings in life&dquo; because &dquo;God uses us in his dealings with others&dquo; (p. 386).Among human relationships Bonhoeffer singles out the &dquo;spiritual ex-changes&dquo; with Bethge, for &dquo;in each other we shall always have someonein whom we can place unlimited trust&dquo; (p. 387). Bonhoeffer’s reflectionsand ability to respond to Bethge may be summed up in an ethics offriendship, not because friendship characterizes their relationships asone different from relationships obtaining between the imprisoned Bon-hoeffer and others with whom he corresponds, but precisely because theconditions of incarceration in war accentuate the need for flexibility andplay which characterize the active life of the person of responsibility.

McFague has suggested that friendship becomes a &dquo;world come of

age,&dquo; because &dquo;the principal overriding characteristic of friendship as amode of relating to another is ‘maturity’ - it is a way of relating that ispertinent to adults.&dquo; 20 Letters and Papers thus offers us a vision of Chris-tianity as the activity of friendship in all areas of life, under all the divinemandates. To be the fully loving parent or offspring is to transcend thenorms prescribing such relationships in the name of the greater open-ness of friendship. Similarly, to be the fully loving spouse, the properlypatriotic citizen or the faithful churchgoer is to be open to kinds of ac-tivity not necessarily provided for under the necessitas of those mandates.Love understood and practised as friendship fulfils, and hence tran-scends, the ethical necessities associated with the traditional mandates.

Bethge is such a friend to Bonhoeffer. As he reminds Bethge, &dquo;I’ve

again seen from our conversation recently that no one can interpret mythoughts better than you&dquo; (p. 320). If, as Gibson Winter has remarked,the work of art serves as a kind of root metaphor for the postmoderncondition characterizing atheological discourse, Bonhoeffer’s poem,

20 McFague, Metaphorical Theology, p. 182-83.



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&dquo;The Friend,&dquo; provides a root metaphor for the atheology of friendshipat the heart of Letters and Papers; &dquo;The Friend&dquo; at once reflects and en-acts the exercising of response-ability to others, &dquo;from the spirit’s choiceand free desire.&dquo;21 Paradoxically, relationships expressed in such non-theological terms express the theological fact that Christ &dquo;remains Lordof the earth&dquo; (p. 387). For Bonhoeffer Christ reigns over the earth asthe spirit of true friendship, and in this spirit lies the Christian’s resur-rection.

21 Gibson Winter, Liberating Creation: Foundations of Religious Social Ethics (New York:Crossroads, 1981), passim.



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