"The Truth Shall Set You Free": Bultmann and Bonhoeffer on the Doctrine of Justification as the...

PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

“THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE”:

BULTMANN AND BONHOEFFER ON THE DOCTRINE OF JUSTIFICATION

AS THE BASIS FOR AN ETHICS OF JOYFUL OBEDIENCE

IN FULFILLMENT OF THE

PH.D. QUALIFYING EXAMINATION IN ETHICS

DAVID W. CONGDON

OCTOBER 6, 2010

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Do not cite without express permission of the author

Introduction: Justification as the Ground for Christian Ethics

Protestant theology is inseparable from the doctrine of justification. Though today the

doctrine faces many critics, it remains of immense significance for the development of a

Christian theological ethic. In this paper, I will do so in dialogue with arguably the two most

prominent Lutheran theologians of the twentieth century: Rudolf Bultmann and Dietrich

Bonhoeffer. I have chosen Lutherans to provide a common confessional context within which a

charitable dialogue can constructively take place. Moreover, both share a history as participants

in the Kirchenkampf.1 These commonalities help to highlight the nuances of their positions.

Their shared commitments and experiences form the historical and theological context for the

appropriation of justification in their ethical thinking.

My argument is best introduced by the second thesis of the famous Barmen Declaration:

“As Jesus Christ is God’s comforting pronouncement (Zuspruch) of the forgiveness of all our

sins, so, and with equal seriousness, he is also God’s vigorous announcement (Anspruch) of his

claim upon our whole life. Through him there comes to us joyful liberation from the godless ties

of this world for free, grateful service to his creatures.”2 With this succinct statement we have the

theological basis for grounding ethical action in God’s gracious justification in Jesus Christ.

Truly human action takes the form of “free, grateful service” in response to our “joyful

liberation” from sin and death. Though each did so in different ways, both Bultmann and

Bonhoeffer make use of the Reformational doctrine of justification by grace and faith alone as

the critical starting-point for a properly theological ethics. For each theologian, God’s justifying

word of grace is a declaration of the truth of our being before God: it is a word that judges our

1 Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the Confessing Church is well-known. Less well-known is the fact that Bultmann

was a member of the Pastors’ Emergency League (Pfarrernotbund), founded in 1933 in opposition to the Aryan paragraph, which was the immediate precursory to the Confessing Church.

2 Eberhard Jüngel, Christ, Justice and Peace: Toward a Theology of the State in Dialogue with the Barmen Declaration, trans. D. Bruce Hamill and Alan J. Torrance (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1992), xxiv-xxv.

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sinfulness, and in judging us simultaneously declares us forgiven and righteous in Christ. The

divine truth about humanity is a liberating word that frees us for a life of faithful obedience and

service. While they share a basic commitment to the doctrine of justification, and even to similar

motifs and concepts related to justification, the distinctive ways in which this translates into a

concrete Christian ethic warrant careful analysis.

The paper will proceed as follows. First, I will treat Bultmann’s ethics as rooted in

justification as an eschatological and kerygmatic event that liberates us from our sinful past and

opens us toward a future of new possibilities. Bultmann’s soteriology results in an eschatological

ethic of radical obedience that is opposed to every ethical worldview (Weltanschauung) and

concretely defined by the command to love one’s neighbor. The central contrasts in his theology

are between ontological and ontic and, correspondingly, law and gospel. Second, I will examine

Bonhoeffer’s ethics in terms of God’s apocalyptic in-breaking in Jesus Christ which issues forth

in a divine commandment for living a truly human life, contextualized by the four divine

mandates. After exploring Bonhoeffer’s sociological alternative to the ontological-ontic binary in

Bultmann, I examine the theological and ethical implications of his contrast between the ultimate

and penultimate. I will conclude my analysis by suggesting a way to unite Bultmann and

Bonhoeffer for the sake of a postmetaphysical missionary ethic.

Bultmann: The Ethics of God’s Eschatological Event

Bultmann is not known for his ethics—not only because he wrote very little specifically

on ethical questions, but also because what he did say about ethics has been widely criticized.

Political theologians, such as Dorothee Sölle, criticize him for having an “apolitical” theology.3

Others, such as the editors of the German edition of Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, claim that Bultmann,

3 See Dorothee Sölle, Political Theology, trans. John Shelley (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974).

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along with Friedrich Gogarten, “denied even the possibility of any special Christian ethics.”4 I

will indirectly assess these claims by setting forth the theological basis for Bultmann’s ethical

thought. To do so first requires explaining two key distinctions in Bultmann’s theology that are

indispensable to understanding the role of justification by faith in his ethics. The first is the

distinction between theological science, on the one hand, and both Weltbild (world-picture) and

Weltanschauung (worldview) on the other. The second is the widely noted but often

misunderstood distinction between the ontological and the ontic, between the existential and the

existentiell. The two distinctions are interconnected, but only once the first becomes clear can we

properly assess the second. After these two pairs of terms have been clarified, we will be in a

position to see how Bultmann’s ethics is a truly Christian and theological ethics, with latent

political potential, rooted in God’s gracious justification of the sinner in Jesus Christ.

Theology, Weltbild, and Weltanschauung: The Relation between Theology and Philosophy

If the theme of “demythologizing” characterizes the second half of Bultmann’s career

(post-1940), then the first half of his career is characterized by the systematic distinction of

theology from every Weltanschauung. The latter distinction demands a further differentiation

between Weltbild and Weltanschauung.5 Explicating these concepts would require far more

space than I have here, so I will settle for brief summaries in order to anticipate my later

4 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W.

Stott, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 6 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 417. 5 One could say that Bultmann pre-1940 was concerned with differentiating theology from a Weltanschauung,

while Bultmann post-1940 was concerned with how to translate from the ancient, mythological Weltbild of Scripture. The transition in Bultmann’s thought may reflect (or be the cause of) a corresponding shift in Heidegger’s thinking. In Sein und Zeit, published in 1927, Heidegger refers to the concept of Weltanschauung on several occasions, even distinguishing between faith and worldview. In 1938, by contrast, Heidegger writes the essay, “Die Zeit des Weltbildes [The Age of the World Picture].” See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), 168; Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture [1938],” in Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57-73.

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discussion of Bultmann’s ethics.

A Weltbild, according to Bultmann in 1925, is an understanding of the world “conceived

without reference to our own existence.”6 We are born into a Weltbild; every culture throughout

history has a particular “picture” or conception of the world in which they live.7 A Weltbild is not

a new hypothesis or theory, but something everyone already assumes. The “world-picture”

changes only after major paradigm shifts in our thinking about the cosmos and human existence,

and the fact that such shifts have occurred is what separates the ancient mythological-

metaphysical Weltbild from the modern, post-Enlightenment “picture” that Bultmann

presupposes. Nevertheless, everyone “knows that all of the results of science are relative and that

any world picture worked out either yesterday, today, or tomorrow can never be definitive.”8

If Weltbild refers to a particular culture’s conception of the world, then a Weltanschauung

occurs when one adds to this world-picture a theory or explanation of human being and

existence.9 Throughout his writings, Bultmann consistently uses Weltanschauung to refer to a

totalizing philosophical system that claims to know in the abstract and in advance what it means

6 Rudolf Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, ed. Robert W. Funk, trans. Louise Pettibone Smith (Philadelphia:

Fortress, 1987), 58. Cf. Rudolf Bultmann, Glauben und Verstehen: Gesammelte Aufsätze, 4 vols. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1933-65), 1:31; hereafter cited as GuV.

7 In On Certainty, written near the end of his life, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein reflects on the idea of a Weltbild in a way that helps make sense of Bultmann’s use of the word: “I did not get my picture of the world [Weltbild] by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background [der überkommene Hintergrund] against which I distinguish between true and false” (¶94); “In general I take as true what is found in text-books, of geography for example. Why? I say: All these facts have been confirmed a hundred times over. But how do I know that? What is my evidence for it? I have a world-picture. Is it true or false? Above all it is the substratum of all my enquiring and asserting” (¶162). See Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969).

8 Rudolf Bultmann, “On the Problem of Demythologizing [1952],” in New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 97; Rudolf Bultmann, “Zum Problem der Entmythologisierung,” in Kerygma und Mythos: Diskussion und Stimmen zum Problem der Entmythologisierung, ed. Hans Werner Bartsch (Hamburg-Volksdorf: Herbert Reich, 1952), 181.

9 “It is customary to call the completion of such a world-picture [Weltbild] through the insertion of humanity a worldview [Weltanschauung].” Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, 58; translation revised. Cf. GuV, 1:31.

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to exist as a human being.10 This becomes especially clear in the posthumously published

materials from Bultmann’s Nachlaß, especially his lectures on theology from 1926-1936 and the

1929 lecture, “Truth and Certainty,” included as an appendix.11 As he puts it in the 1929 lecture,

worldviews “determine in the lump and from the outset [von vornherein im ganzen] how each

phenomenon encountered must be interpreted.”12 A worldview “claims to understand the world

and humankind as a totality [als ganze], and to show humans who or what they really are.”13 In

the Theological Encyclopedia, Bultmann refers to idealism, positivism, and National Socialism

as examples of Weltanschauungen. Each of these worldviews purports to be a “system of

science” (System der Wissenschaft), that is, an all-encompassing philosophy or a universal

theory.14 For Bultmann, every philosophy is a Weltanschauung, and for that reason Christian

faith forces us to decide: “Philosophy or faith?”15 André Malet puts it best when he states:

“Every philosophy, because it is a Weltanschauung, contradicts faith.”16

It is only after we grasp Bultmann’s sharp antithesis between theology and philosophy

that we can properly understand the nature of his appropriation of existentialist philosophy. The

basis for this appropriation is quite simple: “Heidegger’s ‘philosophy’ is not a philosophy.”17 To

adequately analyze this claim would distract us too far from our subject matter, so it must suffice

to point out the general contours of Bultmann’s position in order to set up his thinking on ethics.

From Bultmann’s perspective, the decisive factor is that Heidegger’s work in Sein und Zeit is a

10 The one notable exception occurs in Jesus Christ and Mythology. In both the English (1958) and German (1964) editions, Bultmann uses worldview where world-picture ought to be and usually is. See Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Scribner, 1958); GuV, 4:141-89.

11 Rudolf Bultmann, Theologische Enzyklopädie, ed. Eberhard Jüngel and Klaus W. Müller (Tübingen: Mohr, 1984); ET Rudolf Bultmann, What Is Theology?, trans. Roy A. Harrisville (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997). For the lecture “Truth and Certainty,” see Theologische Enzyklopädie, 183-205; Theology, 167-89.

12 Bultmann, Theology, 182. 13 Ibid., 179; translation revised. Emphasis always in the original unless otherwise noted. 14 Ibid., 28-29. 15 Ibid., 96. 16 André Malet, The Thought of Rudolf Bultmann, trans. Richard Strachan (Shannon: Irish University Press,

1969), 299. 17 Ibid., 319.

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phenomenology and not a philosophy. A philosophy is prescriptive, whereas a phenomenology is

descriptive; the latter is “an appeal to the things themselves,” and thus a “turning away from a

worldview with its mastery of things.”18 Insofar as any philosophy, including Heidegger’s

phenomenology, seeks to do anything more than provide a neutral, formal description of human

existence in the world, it becomes a worldview that competes with the unique claims of Christian

faith in God’s self-revelation.

At the same time, Bultmann is equally critical of the attempt by theologians to turn

theology into an all-encompassing worldview. This occurs when either the fides qua creditur (the

faith by which it is believed) or fides quae creditur (the faith that is believed)—what we might

call the subjective, formal, and volitional dimension and the objective, material, and kerygmatic

dimension—becomes the sole object of faith. He associates the former (fides qua) with

liberalism and the latter (fides quae) with Protestant orthodoxy.19 If liberalism dispenses with the

object of faith, orthodoxy dispenses with the believing subject; if liberalism makes a science out

of faith, orthodoxy makes a science out of the kerygma. In both cases, faith becomes

rationalistic, and theology becomes philosophy. The result in both cases is metaphysics:

orthodoxy is metaphysical because it speaks in advance and in the abstract about deitas and

humanitas apart from the concrete event of revelation wherein alone these concepts gain any

meaning; liberalism is metaphysical for much the same reason, since it attempts to speak, like

orthodoxy, about God and humanity as universal ideas, the difference being that liberalism

speaks in a scientistic and historicist, rather than scholastic and confessional, manner. Against

these errors, Bultmann declares:

In this basic sense, the truth of faith is universally valid. That is, the here and now must

18 Bultmann, Theology, 29. 19 See ibid., 45-49. Cf. Rudolf Bultmann, “Theology as Science [1941],” in New Testament and Mythology and

Other Basic Writings (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 45-67.

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be understood in this way and only in this way. There are no varying interpretations with equal rights. . . . But the truth of faith is not a universal truth so-called, a truth, say, of the idea of God, of freedom, of divine providence, of the idea of the good, etc. It is absolutely nothing but the truth of God, that is, of the moment. Otherwise, faith would again be made a worldview. But faith does not observe the world and humanity in general and from it draw a conclusion for the here and now as an individual instance.20

Theology is always and only critical reflection on the concrete object of Christian faith (viz. the

kerygmatic Jesus Christ) as this object—qua divine subject—encounters us here and now in the

proclamation of the word. Philosophy cannot predetermine theology’s object (in which case

philosophy would be a Weltanschauung), nor can theology speak about matters beyond the

relation to its object (in which case theology would be a Weltanschauung). The one is general

and phenomenological, while the other is concrete and pisteological. This distinction

corresponds to Heidegger’s differentiation between the ontological and the ontic, which

Bultmann famously presses into theological service in a way that crucially informs his ethics.

Ontological and Ontic: The Relation between Faith and Existence

While it is well known that Bultmann appropriates Heidegger’s philosophical concepts,

the nature of this appropriation and how it actually functions is widely misunderstood. We first

need to put the concepts “on the table,” so to speak, before exploring how Bultmann employs

them theologically (and thus ethically). To put it briefly, Heidegger distinguishes between the

ontological-existential analysis of what constitutes our being-in-the-world and the ontic-

existentiell understanding of our individual, existential possibilities.21 The former is a general,

neutral description of human existentiality, while the latter refers to the concrete situation of the

individual human being who finds herself responsible for her own future. Put in ethical terms,

the former speaks about our formal, ontological possibilities, while the latter refers to our

20 Bultmann, Theology, 186-87. 21 See Heidegger, Being and Time, 10-11.

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concrete, ontic possibilities as moral agents in the world. Philosophy is concerned strictly with

the former. Regarding the latter, as Bonhoeffer puts it, “philosophy is silent”;22 the ontic is the

unique purview of theology. On Bultmann’s terms, any theory that claims to encompass both the

ontological and the ontic is a misguided attempt to propound a Weltanschauung.23 The consistent

objection at this point is that Bultmann is allowing a general philosophical ontology to determine

what theology can and cannot say about God and the ethical life of a Christian.24 To adequately

explain why this judgment is mistaken would require a monograph of its own. I will instead

briefly focus on two basic points: (1) the true purpose of this distinction, and (2) the sui generis

character of the ontic.

The purpose of distinguishing between the ontological and the ontic has nothing to do

with allowing philosophy to determine what is theologically possible. On the contrary, it simply

ensures that theology is not concerned with supernatural activities that produce magical

transformations in the world. In other words, God’s actions occur on the ontic level: they

transform our existence in the world, but not the ontological nature of the world itself. To use the

example of this paper, the event of our justification by faith is not an event that changes our

human capacities on the phenomenological level, i.e., the level with which the category of the

ontological is concerned. God’s justification of the ungodly does not grant a person superhuman

22 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology, ed.

Hans-Richard Reuter and Wayne W. Floyd, trans. Martin Rumscheidt, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 68.

23 We can thus correlate Bultmann’s terminology: philosophy is the ontological explication of our present Weltbild, while a comprehensive theory embracing both the ontological and the ontic is a Weltanschauung. This leaves theology, understood as faithful reflection upon the ontic (in light of revelation), outside of the Weltbild-Weltanschauung binary pair.

24 The following criticism by Karl Barth is representative: “In my view the decisive and distinctive fact about Bultmann’s way is that he regarded it as indispensable to base the reorientation [of theology] on a (then the most recent) philosophical ontology or anthropology. He thought he could take from this ontology a definite ‘preunderstanding of man’ which is normative for theology, too, and in accordance with which the confrontation of man with a distinct Other could be described as a general phenomenon of the uniqueness of human existence.” Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, Barth-Bultmann Letters, 1922-1966, ed. Bernd Jaspert, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981), 142.

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strength or the ability to know the future. That would be a change in our ontological possibilities.

Magic, sorcery, astrology, and the like are activities interested in altering the ontological; faith

and theology, by contrast, are interested solely in God’s radical transformation of our ontic

possibilities. Human beings and the world remain the same on the phenomenological level before

and after Christ, and yet we confess that he is the turning point of history. But we do so in an

ontic, rather than ontological, sense.

This explains Bultmann’s controversial statement from his well-known 1930 essay, “Die

Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins und der Glaube,”25 that “das gläubige Dasein ist doch jedenfalls

Dasein” (“believing Dasein is still Dasein in every case”).26 Similarly, in his lectures on

theology, he says that “Dasein under revelation is continuous with Dasein apart from

revelation.”27 Bultmann partially clarifies his meaning when he writes in the 1930 essay that

theology must repeat the work of philosophy “if what occurs in the Christian event which takes

place in faith is not a magical transformation [magische Verwandlung] of the human being.”28

Many remain unhappy with this explanation, assuming that Bultmann fails to appreciate the

decisively new character of God’s justifying revelation in Jesus Christ.29 Bultmann himself

25 Rudolf Bultmann, “Die Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins und der Glaube: Antwort an Gerhardt Kuhlmann,” in

Neues Testament und christliche Existenz: Theologische Aufsätze, ed. Andreas Lindemann (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 59-83. Originally published as Rudolf Bultmann, “Die Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins und der Glaube: Antwort an Gerhardt Kuhlmann,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche N.F. 11 (1930): 339-64. English translation (ET): Rudolf Bultmann, “The Historicity of Man and Faith,” in Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), 92-110.

26 Bultmann, “Die Geschichtlichkeit,” 63. My translation. 27 Bultmann, Theology, 95. Original emphasis removed. 28 Bultmann, “Die Geschichtlichkeit,” 65; ET Bultmann, “The Historicity of Man and Faith,” 96. Translation

revised. 29 For example, in 1932-33, Bonhoeffer gave lectures on theological anthropology, wherein he leveled opposing

criticisms at Barth and Bultmann on this theme. “In Barth,” he says, “the self breaks apart: old self—new self. In Bultmann too: however [here it is a matter occasionally of] whole self now, whole self now, whole self now. In Barth, the continuity of the old self and the new [is] conceived at the expense of the whole self. In Bultmann, the continuity of the whole self [is] conceived at the expense of the new self.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Berlin: 1932-1933, ed. Larry L. Rasmussen, trans. Isabel Best and David Higgins, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 12 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 221. These statements are a development of the ideas formulated in his Habilitationsschrift. See below for a discussion of Bonhoeffer’s critique of Barth and Bultmann.

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provides an answer to this criticism, though it is generally overlooked by scholars. After stating

that theology, in a certain sense, “repeats” the work of philosophy, he says that theology must do

this “if existence-before-faith is sublated [aufgehoben] in existence-in-faith.”30 Bultmann is here

using the word aufheben in the double sense of negation and preservation.31 He explains what he

means in what follows, where he writes: “If, in faith, there is an existentiell-ontic overcoming

[überwunden] of existence-before-faith, that does not mean that the existential-ontological

conditions of existing are destroyed [vernichtet].”32 According to Bultmann, the event of

justification involves a simultaneous negation and preservation of our being: on the one hand,

justification negates our prior ontic reality as an existence-in-sin in order then to grant us ever

new possibilities in a justified existence-in-grace; on the other hand, revelation preserves our

ontological reality as constitutive of our mere creatureliness. Ontologically, we thus remain as

before; ontically, however, there is a complete death and resurrection, the end of the old and the

birth of the new.33

Bultmann’s point is that the truth of our being is ontic and not ontological; it is existential

and so not objectifiable. The Christ-event does not change the world on a phenomenological

level: the scientist sees no empirical difference in the world after the crucifixion and resurrection

of Christ, nor any measurable difference in the individual who goes from unfaith to faith. What

changes, therefore, is our ontic-existentiell relation to God, the world, and ourselves. Faith does

30 “Sie muß das tun, wenn in der gläubigen Existenz die vorgläubige aufgehoben ist.” Bultmann, “Die

Geschichtlichkeit,” 66. My translation. 31 Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977),

¶113, 68: “The sublation [Das Aufheben] exhibits its true twofold meaning which we have seen in the negative: it is at once a negating and a preserving.” Translation slightly modified.

32 Bultmann, “Die Geschichtlichkeit,” 66. My translation. 33 By finding in Bultmann a kind of Aufhebung, I mean to critique Christophe Chalamet’s otherwise excellent

book for seeing a dialectical sublation in Barth only, but not in Bultmann. Chalamet only sees the movement from ontological (No, Law) to ontic (Yes, Gospel), but not the sublation of the ontological in the ontic. Cf. Christophe Chalamet, Dialectical Theologians: Wilhelm Herrmann, Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann (Zürich: TVZ, 2005), 109-12.

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not change us ontologically, but rather existentially. Faith, Bultmann says, is the “transition into

eschatological existence.”34 It is a decision which transforms our existentiell possibilities, not the

ontological (i.e., phenomenological) structure of our humanity. This transformation—this

negation of our previous life and the establishment of a new existence—is entirely inaccessible

to philosophers, scientists, and historians. It is analogous, Bultmann says, to the change that

occurs in a person who enters into a relationship of mutual love with another human being. Such

change is radical in nature, but it thoroughly resists any attempt to analyze it within general

categories. It cannot be made a species of some larger scientific genus. It therefore refuses to be

systematized into an abstract Weltanschauung.

Radical Faith: The Eschatological Event of Justification

We are now in a position to assess Bultmann’s doctrine of justification and its ethical

implications. Justification serves two essential purposes in his theology: (1) negatively, it serves

to prevent theology from becoming a Weltanschauung, and (2) positively, it kerygmatically

establishes the ontic transformation of the human individual that occurs in the existential crisis of

faith—i.e., the crisis that takes place when existence-before-faith is sublated in existence-in-

faith. Justification is thus what binds together these other aspects of Bultmann’s theology, and

the point of connection is found in the all-important distinction between law and gospel. In fact,

the differentiation between law and gospel parallels—in fact, constitutes—the distinctions

between (1) Weltanschauung and faith and (2) the ontological and the ontic. In the same way that

justification ensures that faith is not a worldview and actualizes the unique character of the ontic

existence-in-faith, so too justification ensures that the gospel does not become a new law and

34 Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, trans. Kendrick Grobel, 2 vols. (New York: Charles

Scribner’s Sons, 1951-55), 2:78.

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actualizes the unique character of the gospel as the kerygmatic word of judgment and grace, a

point to which I will return later.

While Bultmann does not expound upon his own theology of justification as an

independent topic, the notion of God’s justification of sinners runs through nearly everything he

writes. According to Bultmann, justification is the divine eschatological event that differentiates

between law and gospel, old and new, past and future. To say that justification is eschatological

is to indicate that it is not reducible to the forces of cause-and-effect on the surface of history. It

comes from the “wholly other” God alone and thus cannot be circumscribed within the immanent

confines of the historical continuum. That justification is an event means that it is an ever new

occurrence and never a once-for-all datum that we can look back upon as a finished fact:

“Forgiveness does not divide life into two halves.”35 It was at the heart of the dialectical

opposition to liberal theology that God’s revelation is not a given object over which the human

being has possession but remains wholly a gift that must be given to us by God ever anew.36

Contrary to both liberalism and orthodoxy, “Christian faith . . . holds that God acts on me, speaks

to me, here and now. . . . [F]aith is not a knowledge possessed once for all; it is not a general

world-view. It can be realized only here and now.”37

Bultmann sees in this understanding of revelation a crucial soteriological insight: viz. that

justification does not concern our ontological existentiality or “essence”—understood in terms of

biology, psychology, and other objectifiable realities—but rather concerns our ontic existence in

the form of a decision (Entscheidung) that must be actualized in every new moment of our

35 Bultmann, Theology, 139. 36 On this point, see the essay, “Liberal Theology and the Latest Theological Movement,” in Bultmann, Faith

and Understanding, 28-52; GuV, 1:1-25. Cf. also the section on “Revelation as Historical Event [Die Offenbarung als geschichtliche Ereignis]” in Bultmann, Theology, 95-103; Bultmann, Theologische Enzyklopädie, 88-96.

37 Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology, 64.

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concrete historicity.38 If justification did concern our ontological existentiality, then it would not

be an eschatological event “visible” only to faith; it would instead be a magical change in nature,

an observable, datable occurrence on the surface of history. But God’s justifying word of

forgiveness is not “something on hand” (ein vorhandenes Etwas) that is at our disposal; it is not

“a once-for-all historical act available to historical investigation, such as the crossing of the

Rubicon.”39 Bultmann prevents justification from becoming an objectifiable datum by insisting

on its forensic character as an event of divine imputation. Precisely because “the justificatio is

forensis, consisting of God’s judgment,” the one justified “does not enjoy a new quality.”40 The

transformation occurs on the level of the ontic, not the ontological, and for that reason the change

is not in nobis but rather extra nos; it is entirely hidden apart from faith, apart from being a

judgment rendered ever anew by God. Justification is thus extra nos in the sense that it is non-

objectifiable, which means that it is known only to faith and is “not something that could ever

38 It is important to note that this act of Entscheidung does not mean that the human person justifies herself or

cooperates with God in her becoming a new creature. The decision of faith is not a choosing among various possibilities with a kind of abstract freedom (what Karl Barth referred to as Hercules at the crossroads). Bultmann sees in both liberalism and orthodoxy precisely this kind of self-justification, where the object of faith is a given reality over which a human being can then deliberate and choose whether or not to accept. Thus Bultmann asks: “If faith is a deed, then is it not the case that we intend to be saved through our own doing? . . . The old Protestant dogmatics replies that the deed of faith is worked in us by the Holy Spirit. But what does this mean? It means nothing if the Spirit is conceived as a mysteriously magical power at work behind our doing, so that our doing is no longer ours, and our faith is no longer ours. The Spirit is neither a tangible ‘something’ [Was], having causal effects as things of the world, nor descriptive of a psychic state. Rather, the Spirit denotes a how [Wie] of our historical existence, makes clear that since Christ it is possible for our existence to be determined by God’s grace, possible to belong to the new aeon.” He continues in a later footnote by distinguishing between decision and resolve: “Faith, however, is not based on resolve (Entschluss) but on decision (Entscheidung), and in hearing I have already always decided. If it were a matter of resolve, then we would be with orthodoxy.” See Bultmann, Theology, 142, 242n217; Bultmann, Theologische Enzyklopädie, 142, 152-53n62. Cf. Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, 133. Despite making this distinction in these lectures, it is important to note that Bultmann is often quite inconsistent regarding the use of Entschluss and Entscheidung. So in his 1933 essay on “The Christology of the New Testament,” for example, Bultmann says that the reality of the new life is actualized “im Entschluß” and that “dieser Entschluß ist der Glaube” (GuV, 1:259).

39 Bultmann, Theology, 139. The echoes here of Heidegger’s notion of Vorhandensein (“objective presence” or “being present at hand”) are no doubt intentional.

40 Ibid. Bultmann continues by quoting David Hollaz: “Since this action [justification] takes place apart from man, in God, it cannot intrinsically change man.”

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have the character of the available past.”41 Righteousness does not become a predicate of the

human individual—who, in herself, is “always a sinner”—but remains solely the righteousness

of God.42 Bultmann never ceases to emphasize that justification is always justification of the

sinner and not of a person who is, in herself, actually righteous. We are righteous only in Christ,

who confronts us today in the word that judges our sin and so grants us freedom from sin through

God’s forgiving grace. Justification, as a divine event in Christ, is therefore “never possessed”

but instead is “always coming” here and now as a kerygmatic word-event.43 It liberates us from

our sinful past and thrusts us into the freedom of God’s future.

Bultmann summarizes his doctrine of justification in the following way:

The meaning of the Christian doctrine of the justification of the sinner is quite simply this: that the sinner is justified; that God takes human beings who are not as they should be for the persons that they are meant to be, and that, since God takes them as such, that is what they really [wirklich] are. It is in this way that the forgiving grace of God frees human beings from themselves, from their past, and from what they have made of themselves. And it is in this way that it makes them “new creatures.” We can only rightly understand this if we understand that the forgiving word is not a general or universal truth [allgemeine Wahrheit], but that it is a word spoken into [hineingesprochen] the historical life [geschichtliche Sein] of human beings, that is, that at any given time it is spoken to the moment and places this in the light of divine grace. . . . It is in this moment that the forgiving grace of God is concretized—the grace which now always brings me face to face with myself as a new creature, and so opens up the future for me.44

Here we see all the key elements in one concise statement. Against the confusion of the

ontological and the ontic, Bultmann states that “the sinner is justified,” and yet this does not

result in a “legal fiction” because the fact that God sees the sinner as righteous means that this is

“what they really are.” Similarly, against the confusion of Glaube and Weltanschauung, he

emphasizes that the word of forgiveness is not an abstract, universal word, but rather that it

41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 140. 43 Ibid. 44 Rudolf Bultmann, Essays, Philosophical and Theological (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 160-61; GuV,

2:141. Translation revised.

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encounters us in our contextual particularity as historical beings. We encounter God in the

concrete moment (Augenblick) that God addresses us. God’s word of address places this moment

in the new light of grace, thus making it possible for us to hear and respond to God in faith.

Combining both insights—ontic rather than ontological, concrete and particular rather

than abstract and universal—we can state that, for Bultmann, justification refers to who we are,

not what we are. It refers to the truth of our existence, not the knowledge of our existentiality.

The “what” is the ontological and abstract, while the “who” is the ontic and concrete. Or as

Bultmann more commonly puts it, justification changes our Wie (“how”), not our Was (“what”),

and the new “how” of our existence is what the church refers to as the Holy Spirit.45 To “live by

the Spirit” (Gal. 5.16, 25) is to live as the new creature constituted by the ontic-existentiell event

of God’s forgiving word of grace. To use the classical terminology of Maximus the Confessor,

Bultmann’s doctrine of justification concerns the tropos, not the logos, of humanity.46 That is to

say, it transforms our “mode of existence” or “way of being in the world”; it does not change the

material “stuff” that defines us as human. Justification is an eschatological event—it occurs on

the level of history (Geschichte), not nature.47

Having analyzed his doctrine of justification, we can now transition to Bultmann’s ethics

of justification by first clarifying the problem of law and gospel. Christophe Chalamet, in his

discussion of Bultmann and Barth, argues that the difference between them comes down to the

45 See Bultmann, Theology, 142: “The Spirit denotes a how [Wie] of our historical existence, makes clear that

since Christ it is possible for our existence to be determined by God’s grace, possible to belong to the new aeon.” Cf. Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, 133; GuV, 1:102: “The Spirit is the how [Wie] of the new historical existence of the Christian” (translation revised).

46 On this distinction in Maximus, see the Introduction by Andrew Louth and Ambigua 5 (PG 91:1052A-1060D) in Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (New York: Routledge, 1996), 57-59, 174-79.

47 Here we find a parallel to the distinction between fact and event as articulated by Alain Badiou, which corresponds to the distinction between ontological and ontic: “The distinction between a fact and an event is based, I the last instance, on the distinction between natural or neutral situations, the criteria of which are global, and historical situations, the criterion of which (the existence of a site) is local. . . . The event is attached, in its very definition, to the place, to the point, in which the historicity of the situation is concentrated.” Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 178-79.

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order of these two terms: for Bultmann, it is law then gospel; for Barth, it is gospel then law.48

Chalamet also sees law and gospel as parallel to the ontological and the ontic. Gospel thus

presupposes law, just as the ontic presupposes the ontological and theology presupposes

philosophy. Certainly, this analysis has much to commend it. Bultmann does indeed say these

things. “The gospel assumes the law,” he says, “which as such is given with my historical

existence.”49 And yet he goes on in this passage, where he critically discusses Wilhelm

Herrmann, to say that the law—the given experiences and realities in life—is rightly “disclosed

to us only in the proclamation,” that is, only in the light of the gospel. The kerygma “does not

produce a magical change in our life” but rather “opens our eyes” to who we really are before

God in Christ; it “summons us . . . on the basis of forgiveness.” The proclamation of the gospel

“does not bring a new something or other, neither knowledge, gnōsis, nor moods, transports, and

mystical experiences. It proclaims justification of the sinner.”50 The point is that the law does not

have any significance for us independent of the gospel. The law does not prepare us for the

gospel; rather, the gospel is what then illuminates the law as something existentially significant.

In an absolutely crucial sense, then, the law presupposes the gospel for Bultmann.51

48 Cf. Chalamet, Dialectical Theologians, 11-15, 250-52, 283-87. 49 Bultmann, Theology, 152. 50 Ibid. 51 This holds true for the entire debate over natural theology. Bultmann is often, and quite wrongly, charged

with holding to a kind of natural theology. Barth saw in Bultmann’s concept of Vorverständnis (preunderstanding) a confirmation of this. In a way that could only confound Barth, Bultmann speaks of having a “preunderstanding of revelation” and a “preunderstanding of God.” What these statements actually mean cannot be addressed here, but if these statements are the epistemological counterparts to the statement that “gospel presupposes law,” then we must acknowledge that there is an entirely different set of statements that form the epistemological counterpart to the claim that “law presupposes gospel.” Contrary to the notion that humanity has a natural understanding of sin, Bultmann insists that sinfulness is known “only from the standpoint of faith” (Bultmann, Essays, 40) and is only “apparent from the standpoint of the grace which has actually appeared in Christ” (ibid., 46). Moreover, in his exegesis of Romans, he argues that the famous passage in Rom. 7 describes humanity without Christ “from the standpoint of faith” (ibid., 50). According to Paul, “natural man hates God without knowing it,” and “this is revealed when the grace of God appears in Christ and is preached” (ibid., 53). If unbelievers do not know their own sinfulness, they also have no true knowledge of God. For this reason, in 1933, Bultmann writes: “For God is accessible only to faith responsive to revelation. . . . It therefore remains true that all human speaking of God, outside faith, speaks not of God but of the devil” (Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, 322). And later, in 1941:

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All of this goes back to the earlier point about our ontic existence-in-faith being a

sublation of our ontological existence-before-faith.52 In order to understand Bultmann, we must

therefore hold together two axioms: on the one hand, gospel presupposes law, but on the other

hand, Christ is the end of the law.53 The “end” in view here—telos in Greek—functions like the

German concept of Aufhebung: it is both negation and preservation. Christ is “the end of the law

as the end of sin, self-glorying, and reliance on the flesh: he is the end of the law as the way of

salvation.”54 But this “does not mean that the demands of the Law are no longer valid.”55 Instead,

in light of Romans 13.8-10, “the agape demanded of [the human being] is nothing else than the

fulfillment of the Law.”56 We have arrived, finally, at the decisive point of connection between

justification and ethics in Bultmann’s theology. In the kerygmatic event of justification, the

decision of faith that responds to God’s word of forgiveness is paradoxically identical with the

act of love demonstrated towards the neighbor. The moment of divine imputation is

simultaneously the moment of ethical responsibility toward another human being. For Bultmann,

the Pauline axiom that faith always works through love (Gal. 5.6) must be disentangled from

Protestant-Catholic polemics. It is part of a consistent New Testament witness—from the dual

commandment of Jesus in the Synoptics to the Johannine thesis that “God is love”—to the fact

that love-of-God (or faith) coincides with love-of-neighbor. Faith simply is obedience: both to

the justifying-commanding word of God and to the concrete needs of the other, and both

paradoxically concur as two aspects of one and the same event.

“[Christian faith] asserts that all answers [to the question about God] apart from the Christian answer are illusions” (Bultmann, Essays, 98).

52 Cf. my critique of Chalamet in n. 33. 53 See, in particular, the 1940 essay, “Christ the End of the Law,” in Bultmann, Essays, 36-66; GuV, 2:32-58. 54 Ibid., 54. 55 Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, 1:262. 56 Ibid.

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Radical Obedience: The Eschatological Ethics of Justification

I have endeavored thus far to explicate the theological underpinnings of Bultmann’s

ethics. Turning now to his ethical position, we can summarize it in the following way: the ethical

act is an event of radical obedience to God’s demand of love, in which we respond to the

concrete needs of the neighbor in our midst. The notion of “radical obedience”57 comes from

Bultmann’s 1926 book, Jesus (ET Jesus and the Word),58 which is his “dialogue” with and

“interrogation” of the Jesus of history.59 What we find in this book is neither the so-called

“historical Jesus” nor the “kerygmatic Christ” of Bultmann’s later theological essays. A better

distinction, explicated well by Chalamet, is that this book identifies the “Jesus of the law” (the

one who proclaims) in distinction from the “Christ of the gospel” (the one proclaimed).60 I make

this point because the ethical position that he outlines in the book is essentially identical with his

kerygmatic position, except that here it is grounded in Jesus’ own teachings as recorded in the

synoptic tradition, whereas in his explicitly theological writings it is grounded in the church’s

doctrine of justification by faith and grace alone.61 This confronts us with another example of the

distinction between law and gospel. On the one hand, the gospel presupposes the law, which in

57 For a thorough analysis of Bultmann’s ethics of radical obedience, see Thomas C. Oden, Radical Obedience:

The Ethics of Rudolf Bultmann (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964). Oden’s discussion of the topic is one of the best available, but even though he speaks about the significance of the Christ event for Christian ethics, he fails to explicitly connect obedience to Bultmann’s doctrine of justification.

58 Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, trans. Louise Pettibone Smith and Erminie Huntress Lantero (New York: Scribner, 1958).

59 Ibid., 4. This book is Bultmann’s direct response to both orthodoxy and liberalism: against orthodoxy, Bultmann refuses to allow a metaphysical substructure to predetermine the critical encounter with history; against liberalism—by far his more immediate target—Bultmann rejects the historicist reductionism of the “quest for the historical Jesus” as well as the appeal to psychological givens characteristic of people like his teacher, Wilhelm Herrmann. In a way, then, this book puts into practice what Bultmann argues theoretically in his famous essay, “Ist voraussetzungslose Exegese möglich?” in GuV, 3:142-50; ET Rudolf Bultmann, “Is Exegesis Without Presuppositions Possible? [1957],” in New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 145-53.

60 Chalamet, Dialectical Theologians, 193. 61 The relation between Jesus and the (Pauline-Johannine) kerygma is a prominent theme throughout

Bultmann’s writings. Cf. Rudolf Bultmann, “Jesus and Paul,” in Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), 183-201.

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this context means that the kerygma of God’s justification of sinners presupposes the ethical

teaching of Jesus. On the other hand, the gospel is the end of the law, which here means that

God’s justification is rooted in the crucified-and-risen Jesus. A properly Christian ethics is not a

mere extension of Jesus’ own ethical and eschatological message; it must pass through the

sublating event of his death-and-resurrection, wherein alone we hear the scandalous gospel of

God’s forgiveness of sin. In this section on Bultmann’s ethics of justification, I will first explore

the law that the gospel presupposes (viz. Jesus’ teaching of radical obedience), but because the

law can only be seen rightly from the perspective of the gospel, I will return at the end to the

kerygma of God’s justifying grace as the telos of the law that makes it possible to fulfill this

demand of obedience. In this way, it will become clear that Bultmann’s ethical position is

christologically grounded. For Bultmann, the church’s faith in God’s justification of sinners

thrusts us back to Jesus with fresh eyes for the sake of opening us up to God’s coming future.

1. The Law of Radical Obedience. Bultmann identifies the ethic of Jesus as an ethic of

“radical obedience.” This is in sharp distinction from both Jewish legalistic ethics and Greek

humanistic ethics. The former is a purely formal, blind obedience to the authority of God, in

which “not what was commanded determined the will of the person acting, but the fact that such

and such was commanded.”62 The latter, by contrast, is an idealistic ethic of autonomy based on

“the Greek ideal of the harmonious, independent man, complete in himself like a work of art.”63

The Jewish ethic is “an ethic of obedience,” whereas the Greek ethic is “the highest possibility of

conduct, to be attained by gradual improvement.”64 Bultmann identifies Jesus as “exactly like the

Jewish [ethic]” with one decisive difference: viz. “that Jesus has conceived radically the idea of

62 Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, 66. 63 Ibid., 101; cf. ibid., 72. 64 Ibid., 73, 120.

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obedience.”65 What makes it radical? Quite simply, because it is no longer a formal, blind

obedience, but now a material, intelligible command:

What God’s will is, is not stated by an external authority, so that the content of the command is a matter of indifference, but man is trusted and expected to see for himself what God commands. God’s requirements are intrinsically intelligible. And here the idea of obedience is first radically conceived. For so long as obedience is only subjection to an authority which man does not understand, it is no true obedience; something in man still remains outside and does not submit, is not bound by the command of God. . . . In this kind of decision a man stands outside of his action, he is not completely obedient. Radical obedience exists only when a man inwardly assents to what is required of him, when the thing commanded is seen as intrinsically God’s command; when the whole man stands behind what he does; or better, when the whole man is in what he does, when he is not doing something obediently, but is essentially obedient.66

Against Greek autonomy and Jewish heteronomy, Bultmann finds in Jesus an eschatological-

existential form of theonomy,67 in which the whole person responds to the command of God that

claims us in the crisis of the moment. To be truly human, according to the ethic of Jesus as

expounded by Bultmann, is to become a being-in-obedience. It is to be ontically (not

ontologically, of course) defined by one’s submission to the commanding will of God. As he

succinctly states, “The person is in the doing.”68

It is easy to misunderstand Bultmann at this point. When he says that the Jewish ethic is

formal, he does not mean it lacks content; the law is, of course, replete with content. What he

means is rather that the law’s content is abstract and universal in nature and thus lacks any

intrinsic authority; only the arbitrary divine command is binding: “the commandments were kept

65 Ibid., 73. 66 Ibid., 76-77. 67 The notion of “theonomy” is not a term that Bultmann uses but is meant to indicate the similarity between the

ethic described here and Paul Tillich’s distinctions between autonomy, heteronomy, and theonomy. I have qualified this comparison by referring to Bultmann’s theonomous ethic as “eschatological-existential,” to be distinguished from Tillich’s highly ontological version. For Tillich, the divine law is theonomous because God is the “ground of being” or “being-itself” that unites autonomy and heteronomy through revelation and so enables “autonomous reason [to be] united with its own depth.” See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951-63), 1:83-85, 147-48.

68 Bultmann, Theology, 145.

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because they were commanded.”69 The ethic taught by Jesus does not presuppose a universal,

abstract ethical code or humanistic ideal. It does not have a predefined telos to which all persons

must conform. What unites both the Jewish and Greek ethics is the notion that what a person

must do is already defined for him or her prior to any particular ethical situation. That is to say,

both presuppose an ethical Weltanschauung, i.e., an all-encompassing casuistic system of

morality that tells us what to do in advance and in the abstract.

Jesus, however, stands against all ethical worldviews: “Jesus teaches no ethics at all in

the sense of an intelligible theory valid for all men concerning what should be done and left

undone. . . . Such a theory makes man—even though it be the ideal man—the measure of human

action; and it looks upon man as essentially secure, controlling all the possibilities of action.

Jesus sees man and his life very differently—as absolutely insecure before what confronts

him.”70 The ethical person in Jewish or Greek thought is secure because she has a universal

template for how to live, whether rooted in the legal code of Torah or in the ideals of Greek

philosophy. For the one who follows Jesus, the demands of God are not given in advance but

rather arise “from the crisis of decision in which man stands before God.”71 There is thus no

ethical Weltanschauung in the same way there is no theological Weltanschauung. Just as we only

know God in the moment of revelation, we also only know what to do ethically in the moment of

confrontation between self and neighbor, between I and You: “Now must man know what to do

and leave undone, and no standard whatsoever from the past or from the universal is available.

That is the meaning of decision.”72

The present moment, in which we confront the ethical crisis of decision, is what Walter

69 Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, 67; italics removed. 70 Ibid., 84-85. 71 Ibid., 87. 72 Ibid., 88.

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Benjamin calls the messianic Jetztzeit (now-time) that “blast[s] open the continuum of history”

and subtracts itself from the immanent-historical causal nexus.73 In Bultmann’s words, “the

continuity of the past is accordingly abrogated” in the present moment of decision.74 But this

means that the decision is not “a matter of choosing this or that from the variegated bundle of

future possibilities,” as if our ethical possibilities are simply givens that we can survey from a

position of neutrality. On the contrary, Bultmann is quite clear: “there is . . . no neutral

position.”75 The crisis of decision is therefore a decision about the nature of possibility itself.76 In

this moment of encounter, we are faced with the decision of radical obedience, and insofar as we

recognize it as a decision, we have already decided in favor of obedience. There is no abstract

freedom to resolve between choices; our very acknowledgement of this momentous occasion is

already our obedient response to it. Not to acknowledge the crisis is already to live in

disobedience. Here we see that the decision of obedience is identical to the decision of faith:

there is no free resolve (Entschluss), no liberum arbitrium, but only the existential decision

constituted by the disruptive encounter between the individual and God that takes the concrete

form of an encounter between the individual and the neighbor.

In addition to opposing Jewish and Greek ethics, Bultmann opposes modern liberal and

conservative ethics, insofar as they either (1) turn Jesus into an example to be imitated or (2) turn

Jesus’ words (or the apostolic testimony) into a new Torah that is universally binding. Bultmann

rejects any imitatio Christi (understood as the attempt to pattern our lives after the actions of

Jesus as recorded in scripture) for the simple reason that it turns Jesus into an abstract template

that one can then overlay, so to speak, any particular situation. Our own concrete historicity is

73 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940, ed. Howard

Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 395-97. 74 Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, 87. 75 Ibid., 78. 76 Ibid., 87.

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replaced by the example of Jesus’ lived history—except that, in attempting to apply it to the

present day, it becomes a dead history, a mere human ideal to which we seek to conform

ourselves.77 Bultmann rejects even more strenuously the attempt to view Jesus as a new Moses

who gives his followers a new legal code. If that were the case, the ethic of Jesus would be

identical to the legalistic ethic of Judaism; it be obedience, but not radical obedience. It is “a

complete misunderstanding to take these ‘But I tell you’ passages as formal legal precepts of an

external authority, which can be fulfilled by outward behavior.” To do something “because Jesus

said so” would be to miss the point of Jesus’ call to radical discipleship.78 The teachings of Jesus

are not “universally valid ethical precepts by which a man can once for all order his life.”79 Just

as faith is not a once-for-all fact, so too God’s command is not a once-for-all demand that applies

to humanity in general. For both imitatio Christi and the external obedience of Jesus’ word, the

result is that one exchanges radical obedience to God’s will for a Weltanschauung that frees us

from the risk of hearing and responding to God’s demand upon us here and now. The one is an

idealistic worldview, while the other is legalistic—but both remain just as abstract.

If radical obedience opposes all ethical Weltanschauungen, it establishes in their place an

ethic of neighbor-love (die Nächstenliebe). If love resists every worldview, then it is not a

universal value, a highest human ideal, or an ethical principle from which the moral action could

77 In his more specifically theological essays—those which argue on the basis of the kerygmatic Christ (gospel)

rather than the textual-historical Jesus (law)—Bultmann argues against imitatio Christi strictly on the basis of justification by faith alone. So, for example, in his 1933 essay on “The Christology of the New Testament,” Bultmann writes: “Faith is certainly following Christ—but by accepting his cross, not at all in the sense of imitation, but as grasping the forgiveness and the possibility of life created by the cross” (Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, 277). And in his 1929 essay, “Church and Teaching in the New Testament,” Bultmann says that to share in the “sufferings of Christ” (2 Cor. 1.5) has nothing to do with “an imitatio Christi,” nor does “carrying in the body the death of Jesus” or manifesting “the life of Jesus” in our bodies (2 Cor. 4.10-11) “consist in any imitatio, but rather in the fact that Paul willingly subjected himself to the sufferings which befall him in the service of Jesus” (ibid., 201-2; translation revised). The problem with every imitatio Christi is that it remains concerned with “Christ according to the flesh” (Christos kata sarka; 2 Cor. 5.16), “who is dead” (ibid., 277). It is the living, kerygmatic Christ—the Christus praesens who confronts us in the word of our justification—that grounds our ethical life. Cf. GuV, 1:259, 170.

78 Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, 92. 79 Ibid., 93.

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be derived. The love commandment is “an overcoming of self-will in the concrete situation of

life in which a man encounters other men” and it “cannot be more nearly defined in content.”80

The command to love is not a command to do this or that specific action; it is rather a command

to submit one’s will radically and wholly to the will of God.81 “What a man must do in order to

love his neighbor or his enemy is not stated,”82 a point made abundantly clear by the fact that

theologians over the centuries have argued that war is not forbidden by Jesus’ statements because

it might be that one best loves one’s neighbor by exacting violent justice.83

What Jesus commands is not a specific ethical principle but rather an eschatological

message of God’s coming kingdom. Over against the many biblical scholars who pit the ethical

teachings of Jesus against his apocalyptic-prophetic statements—on the basis that the former

presupposes a world in which to act ethically, while the other proclaims the annihilation of the

world—Bultmann shows convincingly that the two are in fact a unity.84 The apocalyptic

proclamation of God’s future is precisely what governs his ethical message: “So long as we

speak of an ethic of Jesus in the usual sense, we cannot understand how the teacher of a system

of ethics can at the same time preach the imminent end of everything in the world.”85 The

80 Ibid., 112. 81 This is the reason for the twofold commandment of love of God and love of neighbor: “in loving my neighbor

I prove my obedience to God. There is no obedience to God in a vacuum so to speak, no obedience separate from the concrete situation in which I stand as a man among men, no obedience which is directed immediately toward God.” This does not mean the neighbor becomes an instrument for loving God. “Rather, as I can love my neighbor only when I surrender my will completely to God’s will, so I can love God only while I will what he wills, while I really love my neighbor.” Ibid., 114-15. Bonhoeffer uses this passage to criticize Barth in his Romans commentary, where the latter does indeed make the neighbor a cipher or tool for the love of God. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 169-70n28.

82 Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, 113. 83 Whether such an interpretation makes any sense is another question entirely and cannot be addressed in this

paper. The point here is not to render a verdict on the question of pacifism but simply to recognize that the New Testament commands do not themselves determine the content of one’s actions.

84 According to Christopher Asprey’s recent work, in Jesus, Bultmann draws “a tight connection between Jesus’ eschatological preaching and a Christian ethic . . . so that eschatology specifies precisely the moral and religious existence Jesus envisaged.” Christopher Asprey, Eschatological Presence in Karl Barth’s Göttingen Theology (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 31.

85 Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, 130.

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eschatological reality of God’s kingdom is what precludes all ethical worldviews, replacing them

with a message of total obedience and submission before the sovereignty of God. Against an

ethical theory that places the future under the control of a universal worldview, the love-

command places us within the eschatological space of God’s coming future that meets us in our

immediate concrete situation. The command of love forces us to confront the fact that each

person “now stands under the necessity of decision, that his ‘Now’ is always for him the last

hour.”86 For this reason, “the real future stands before man in decision, not the false future over

which he already has control, but the future which will give him a character which he does not

yet have. This is the meaning of the present instant, that it involves the necessity of decision

because it leads into the future.”87

2. The Gospel of a New Future. We arrive then at the threshold between what Bultmann

is able to say in Jesus and what he can and must say as a Christian theologian in his other

writings—that is, the threshold between the law and the gospel, as I am using these terms.

Whereas the law—understood here as the eschatological ethic of Jesus that commands a radical

obedience to God’s will—proclaims to us what it means to be a new creature before God, the

gospel proclaims the good news of God’s justifying grace that makes it possible for us to actually

live a life of radical obedience, or at least to hear this command as divine possibility (thus filled

with hope) and not as human impossibility (filled with despair). To put it another way, radical

obedience is only possible sola fide. This is the thesis of Bultmann’s 1930 essay, “The Christian

Command of Neighbor-Love” (Das christliche Gebot der Nächstenliebe).88 Comparing this

essay to the book on Jesus shows that Bultmann sees the kerygma as being in complete

86 Ibid., 131. 87 Ibid., 132. 88 See GuV, 1:229-44; ET Rudolf Bultmann, “To Love Your Neighbour,” Scottish Periodical 1, no. 1 (1947):

42-56.

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continuity with the historical Jesus. The decisive difference is that, being on this side of the

cross-resurrection occurrence, the church does not simply repeat the ethical and eschatological

message of Jesus. Instead, it refracts this message through the interpretive lens of God’s

justification of the ungodly, the message of God’s forgiveness of sin in and through the crucified

Christ who meets us in faith. What changes in the gospel is not the law’s demand of radical

obedience but rather the ground of possibility for such obedience: viz. the kerygmatic presence

of Christ with us in the Spirit.89

The continuity between law and gospel—i.e., Jesus and kerygma—is demonstrated by the

fact that a Christian ethic does not say what a person should do but instead, through the

command of love, proclaims how to do it and that one should do it radically. The new how of our

existence is what the New Testament calls agape:

Every ethic, then, which tries to give an answer to the question, What ought I to do? and thereby to deprive the individual of the answer, must be characterised as a misunderstanding of human existence, as a misunderstanding of the original relation between I and You. Greek ethics has succumbed to this misunderstanding in so far as it regards the human person, or humanity, as the stuff that is to be formed in accordance with an ideal. . . . The question, then, What I ought to do? is left to the individual, that is, to his understanding in each situation of his connexion with the Thou. Does the Christian command to love your neighbour mean an answer to the question What ought I to do? Yes and no. No, in so far as love does not denote the result of an action, not an end or ideal. By love is denoted not a what but a how of action. But for this very reason yes is also true, for the how of action which is denoted by love surpasses those formal demands of righteousness, truthfulness, and so on, in that each time it uncovers the what of the action.90

Or as he concisely puts it later: “Love is not . . . a ‘what’ to man, but a ‘how’ of his togetherness

with others.”91 It is crucial, however, to see that, for Bultmann, it is not the case that the

Christian commandment of neighbor-love is merely a formal category that has no ethical content.

89 Bultmann summarizes the distinction between Jesus and the Pauline kerygma in the following way: “Jesus

looks to the future, to the coming kingdom of God—which is coming or dawning now. But Paul looks back; the turning point of the ages has already come.” Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, 233; GuV, 1:200.

90 Bultmann, “To Love Your Neighbour,” 47; GuV, 1:234-35. Translation slightly revised. 91 Ibid., 49.

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Rather, the commandment is a formal demand that fills itself with content in each concrete

situation. As we have already seen, Bultmann protests against the notion that the ethical demand

brings the content into the situation as an already-established answer, in which case the content

would be purely abstract and have no specific connection to the neighbor whom we encounter. It

could be a Jewish or Greek or modern Enlightenment ethic, but it would not be a Christian ethic

rooted in the message of Jesus and God’s gracious justification of sinners. So while it is indeed

the case that Bultmann makes the controversial claim that “there is, therefore, no Christian ethic

in the sense of an intellectual theory about what the Christian has to do and not to do,”92 by now

it should be quite clear that this does not nullify the possibility of a “special Christian ethics.”

Instead, it relocates the uniqueness of Christian ethics from the Was to the Wie, from the “what”

to the “how.”

The difference the gospel makes is that the doctrine of justification makes this relocation

of ethics possible; it is the decisive theological basis for the rejection of every ethical

Weltanschauung in favor of God’s radical demand of love for the neighbor. The rejection of an

ethical worldview follows directly from the fact that justification is an ontic-existentiell

occurrence and not a once-for-all supernatural act of ontological-existential transformation. In

the same way that God’s forgiving grace is an event in the moment and not a stable possession of

the human being, so too the call to radical obedience is an event in the moment and not a stable

possession of the ethical individual that could tell her what to do in every conceivable situation.

Justification allows the “what” to become evident in each concrete ethical encounter by

transforming the “how” of our existence; it makes the love of the neighbor a real possibility. And

this is because it is only the justifying grace of God that breaks a person out of the immanent

confines of a sinful past in order to open that person up to the excessive, transcendent freedom of

92 Ibid., 51.

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a new future: “There is only one possible way to become free from the past, free for a pure

hearing of the claim [Anspruch] which comes to us in the present now [Jetzt]: that freedom is

given to us through forgiveness. . . . If the sin is forgiven, that means that we have freedom for

the future; that we are really hearing God’s claim and can place ourselves under his command

[zur Verfügung] (Rom. 6.12ff.).”93 Without the eschatological event of justification, the

eschatological ethic of Jesus would remain on the level of the ontological; it would be a message

about the future but not a proclamation that frees us for the future. But the teaching of Jesus is

not in itself capable of bestowing a new ontic Wie of human existence, of making one into a new

creature; such a miracle, in the true sense (i.e., as Wunder, not as Mirakel), is possible only

through the kerygmatic event of word and faith.94

To return to the theme of law and gospel: the gospel presupposes the law (as the general

ontological condition, the Was) in the sense that it presupposes the concrete fact of the neighbor

and the knowledge of what to do for the neighbor; but the gospel (as the new ontic reality, the

Wie) is the end of the law in the sense that “the Christian demand of love demands . . . the

reversal of the direction of natural man’s life.”95 That is to say, the gospel involves a complete

death to the old self and the resurrection of a new self in radical obedience to the will of God—

i.e., a death to every legalistic Weltanschauung that seeks to control, and thus foreclose, our

future possibilities and a new openness through faith to our ethical responsibility to the neighbor-

within-reach.

We can frame the movement from the what to the how in terms of the relation between

love and faith: if love did determine the content (Was) of our action, then it would be possible to

93 Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, 257; GuV, 1:224. Translation revised. 94 Cf. ibid., 257, 259: “It has now become fully clear why forgiveness must be understood as wonder – that is,

as God’s action in contradiction to the world process”; “The reality of all wonder, therefore, depends on the relation of faith to the one wonder of forgiveness in Christ.”

95 Bultmann, “To Love Your Neighbour,” 50.

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define our new existence before God apart from faith. In other words, our new identity would not

be an eschatological gift but would instead be something derivable from the natural state of our

being-in-the-world. Bultmann rejects this naturalization of God’s eschatological reality by

insisting that love and faith are correlative, that each requires the other. A person “can only

receive love in faith. Love is only visible to faith in it.”96 The problem for ethical worldviews is

that this faith cannot come from other persons but from God alone. It does not derive from the

immanent matrix of relations within the world, that is, from our past. Otherwise it would be a

creaturely given (datum), when faith is rather always and only a divine giving (dans), a promise

of the future that is always to-be-given (dandum) ever anew. For this reason, “a faith in love

would only be possible as faith . . . in a love which is infinite, that is, in the love of God.” More

concretely, because God’s love is no static concept or idea but rather an event of grace, love is

“only possible on the basis of faith which seizes the forgiveness of sins offered in the Word of

God and in this forgiveness knows itself to be loved and freed for love.”97 To be loved by God is

to be freed from sin and for a future of new possibilities in radical obedience to God. We are able

to love others only because our ontic existence has been “established, or re-established, by Christ

in God” in the form of “an eschatological fact, as the happening of a new history.”98 For this

reason, “faith means to exist eschatologically, freed from the world, and to have passed from

death to life.”99 In the dialectical event of love and faith, we are made new.

The gospel of justification thus accomplishes two primary tasks: (1) on the one hand, it

makes the love of others possible on the basis of God’s love for us, but (2) on the other hand, it

also determines the love of others because it recognizes that God loves others in the same way

96 Ibid., 53. 97 Ibid., 54. 98 Ibid., 55. 99 Bultmann, “On the Problem of Demythologizing,” 120.

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that God loves us. This is an essential point often overlooked in Bultmann’s ethics. The word of

judgment against sin that we hear in the kerygma informs us that “we are in the same situation as

our ‘neighbors,’ that we are sinners as they are, and blessed as they are. For them too forgiveness

is already present in Christ, and we have to see them as those who have been forgiven.”100 The

event of justification concerns not only our own ethical possibilities, but it shapes the way these

possibilities are actualized in our concrete encounters with others. Here is where we might put

forward a response to Sölle’s critique of Bultmann’s lack of a political ethic. While it is certainly

true that Bultmann rejects the view that the kerygma provides us with a sociopolitical

worldview,101 this does not mean his ethic has no sociopolitical potential. The recognition that

God loves and forgives others just as we are loved and forgiven has far-reaching consequences

for social engagement. It would mean that we treat others not according to their past but instead

according to their future; that is, we must view others not in terms of what they have done in the

past, but in terms of what God is doing and will do in Jesus Christ. As Paul puts it, “we regard no

one according to the flesh” (2 Cor. 5.16). We are commanded to treat others, therefore, as

participants already in the new aeon of God’s coming kingdom; we are to live as if this

eschatological reign is present here and now—because, through Word and Spirit, it actually is.

To conclude, the eschatological event of love is the unifying center of Bultmann’s entire

theology, wherein the many dialectical antinomies that define his theology are simultaneously

differentiated and paradoxically identified. This contingent ethical event is the eschatological

turning point that both distinguishes and conjoins the historical Jesus and the kerygmatic Christ,

the law and the gospel, the divine command to love and the justifying word of grace that makes

possible the fulfillment of this command. It is eschatological in that the event of neighbor-love,

100 Bultmann, “To Love Your Neighbour,” 55-56. 101 Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, 104: “No program for world-reformation is derived from the will of God.”

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since it is grounded in the christic-pneumatic irruption of God’s future into the present moment,

transcends and disrupts the immanent causal logic of the worldly situation in which it occurs. For

this reason, insofar as this event happens, it only does so because God confronts us again and

again in the justifying word of the cross that frees us from the past, the old person of sin, and

frees us for the future, the new person who lives in radical obedience to God’s command.

Radical Delegalizing: An Ethic of Translation

In 1952, Bultmann rightly said that “radical demythologizing is the parallel to the

Pauline-Lutheran doctrine of justification through faith alone without the works of the law. Or,

rather, it is the consistent application of this doctrine to the field of knowledge.”102 I want to

argue here that Bultmann’s ethics can be understood as an ethics of radical delegalizing. In the

same way that demythologizing is not the elimination of myth but rather its interpretation,103 so

too an ethic of delegalizing is not the elimination of law but rather its proper interpretation. As

we have seen, this means both presupposing the law’s demand of radical obedience (as

proclaimed by Jesus), but it is also the sublative “end of the law” in that the gospel kills the law

as a way of salvation that engenders pride and self-glory. Also, then, just as demythologizing

frees theology from the cultural-philosophical categories of mythology and metaphysics that

confine speech about God to a past Weltbild, so too delegalizing frees ethics from the cultural-

moral categories of Jewish legalism, Greek idealism, or any other theoretical worldview that

would confine ethical responsibility to a past Weltbild. The result of delegalizing is that ethical

102 Bultmann, “On the Problem of Demythologizing,” 122; Bultmann, “Zum Problem der

Entmythologisierung,” 207. 103 Cf. Rudolf Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology: The Problem of Demythologizing the New

Testament Proclamation [1941],” in New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings, ed. Schubert M. Ogden (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 12: “If we may say schematically that during the epoch of critical research the mythology of the New Testament was simply eliminate, the task today—also to speak schematically—is to interpret New Testament mythology.”

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action is inherently translatable from one culture to another. We are not confined to any

particular moral theory, because the proclamation of our justification in Christ liberates us from

every abstract Weltanschauung. What it means to be radically obedient to God can and must look

different at different times and places. God’s will meets us in each concrete moment as a specific

command to love our neighbor and does not provide us with a universal template for ethical

action. In short, delegalizing as an ethic of justification that resists every moral Weltanschauung

corresponds to demythologizing as a hermeneutic of justification that resists every

epistemological Weltanschauung.

Bonhoeffer: The Ethics of God’s Apocalyptic Reality

Over the past couple decades, theologians have come to the consensus that Bonhoeffer’s

unfinished Ethics is his greatest work. In these manuscripts we see the culmination and synthesis

of the central questions and concerns that guided his life’s work. In what follows, I will explicate

and assess his understanding of the ethical responsibility of the Christian in the light of his

doctrine of justification. It is well-known that Bonhoeffer learned much from Barth, and while

the affinities between the two are strong, the important relation between Bonhoeffer and

Bultmann is often overlooked or dismissed—as if the similarities are only apparent. I will begin,

therefore, by situating Bonhoeffer between Barth and Bultmann on the question of the ontic and

the ontological; at times he sides with one over the other, and at other points he charts a middle

way. His Ethics is an example of just such a via media, though it isn’t explicitly presented as

such. Through a close reading of his Ethics manuscripts, I will then present his theology of

justification as an apocalyptic occurrence of cosmic rectification in Jesus Christ. The

corresponding ethics involves, like Bultmann, a rejection of ethical worldviews or casuistry, but

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it also involves the material task of preparing the penultimate for the ultimate within the context

of the four mandates attested to in scripture. I will conclude by critically analyzing Bonhoeffer’s

notion of Stellvertretung (“vicarious substitution”). It should become evident that, while

Bonhoeffer is not nearly as opposed to Bultmann’s ethics as is often assumed, there are clear

differences between them that merit close scrutiny. Bultmann can learn from Bonhoeffer

regarding the latter’s more robust understanding of the social context for revelation and ethical

action, but Bultmann rightly remains critical of Bonhoeffer insofar as the latter preserves certain

metaphysical-ontological categories that lie in tension with his consistent rejection of ethical

Weltanschauungen.

Ontological and Ontic: Bonhoeffer between Barth and Bultmann

It is instructive to see Bonhoeffer’s work as an attempt to mediate between the

theological tendencies of Barth and Bonhoeffer, and this aspect of his work can be interpreted

using the heuristic device of the ontic-ontological distinction already employed above with

respect to Bultmann. For Bultmann, this distinction maps onto the relation between law and

gospel; for Bonhoeffer, it provides a framework for thinking through the relation between Christ

and humanity, between the cosmic-apocalyptic event of justification and the existential moment

of ethical responsibility. So while the gospel-law polarity is still important for Bonhoeffer, he

subordinates it to the more important differentiation between the ultimate and penultimate, which

I will treat in the next section. In order to understand Bonhoeffer’s ultimate-penultimate

distinction, it is first necessary to see how he understands Barth and Bultmann and what he

thinks theology must do to uphold the correct insights of both.

In his Habilitationsschrift, Act and Being, Bonhoeffer assesses, as the subtitle indicates,

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the role of “transcendental philosophy and ontology in systematic theology.” This necessarily

involves him in a sustained dialogue with Kant, Heidegger, and the entire school of dialectical

theology. Within this conversation, Bonhoeffer addresses what he sees to be the key difference

between Barth and Bultmann. He frames his analysis in terms of the question: what defines the

truth of human existence, and what is the nature of this truth? If revelation determines the truth

of being, then how can we think the historicity and continuity of human existence before and

after the event of revelation? It is in this context that Bonhoeffer then puts forward the claims

that Barth “preserve[s] the continuity of the new existence at the expense of the continuity of the

total I,” while Bultmann “assert[s] the continuity of the total I at the expense of the continuity of

the new existence.”104 Barth, as Bonhoeffer reads him, emphasizes the apocalyptic Aufhebung of

the old I; the new person exists only on the basis of the “nonbeing” of the old person.105

Bultmann, by contrast, understands both the old and new I to occur within the historicity of the

total I. This then translates into two contrary approaches to the appropriation of philosophy (as

discourse about the old I) by theology (discourse about the new I): for Barth, revelation nullifies

the contributions of philosophy as having no relevance for faith; for Bultmann, revelation

presupposes philosophy’s description of our existential-ontological possibilities.106

We can restate this contrast in terms of the relation between the ontological and the ontic,

which Bonhoeffer himself suggests in a key footnote where he critically distances himself from

Tillich and Bultmann. He interprets Bultmann’s position in “Die Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins

104 Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, 98. 105 According to Bonhoeffer, even though “Barth is quite aware that he has to define the total I as historical . . .

his concepts are already overdefined before he even takes up the concept of the historical.” As a result, the continuity of the total I is “supratemporal” in character, rather than historical. Cf. ibid., 99.

106 While it goes almost without saying, Bonhoeffer’s position does not stand or fall on whether or not his analysis of Barth and Bultmann is correct. For my part, his reading of Barth is understandable given his access only to the works written in the 1920s. His reading of Bultmann is less acceptable and misses the decisive and transformative function of revelation in the latter’s theology. There is an Aufhebung in Bultmann as well, and not simply in Barth. But Bultmann often failed to clarify his thinking on such matters, tending in certain cases to downplay these themes.

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und der Glaube” to mean that, because “the theme of philosophy is existentiality [Existentialität],

whereas the theme of theology is concrete (believing) existence [Existenz],” it follows that “the

event-character of revelation and the event-character of faith can be thought within the

existential-ontological possibilities of Dasein.”107 In other words, belief and unbelief are simply

two concretizations of the general ontological possibilities given with existence itself. This

secures the unity and continuity of the whole I at the expense of properly identifying the nature

of revelation and the change that it entails. Bonhoeffer criticizes Bultmann’s appropriation of

Heidegger on the basis that revelation

no longer has the essential character of an event, one that comes from God’s freedom. Only where forgiveness of sins is an event do I know of revelation as a believer. . . . But if revelation is essentially an event of God’s free activity, then it supersedes and challenges also the existential-ontological possibilities of Dasein. Then Dasein is no longer essentially identical with itself on account of itself, whether revelation is event or not. Then revelation claims to be the initiator of the unity of Dasein and have the sole right to do so; then the deepest root of philosophy, the one from which it derives its claims, is cut. The letting go of the ontic by retreat into the ontological [unity of Dasein] is considered futile by revelation. In the existentiell event of revelation, the existential structure of Dasein is touched and changed. . . . For revelation, the ontic-existentiell and ontological-existential structures coincide.108 While Bonhoeffer is consistently appreciative of Bultmann throughout his life—from

Sanctorum Communio to the prison letters109—here we see his sharpest critique of the

107 Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, 77n89. 108 Ibid., 78n89. Elsewhere in this footnote, Bonhoeffer claims that, for Bultmann, “believers do in fact know

nothing ‘more’ about revelation than unbelievers,” whereas the correct position, he claims, is that “believers know everything about revelation and unbelievers know nothing.” This is the epistemological corollary of his claim that “in the existentiell event of revelation, the existential structure of Dasein is touched and changed.” It is unclear, however, what it would mean to say that the ontological structure is “changed.” Do believers gain some new phenomenological capacity? Do we gain some set of propositional knowledge that is impossible for unbelievers to possess? What does Bonhoeffer mean by “know” here? Bultmann would deny a new ontological capacity for knowledge in general, but he strongly affirms that we gain a new ontic-existential knowledge of ourselves in revelation: viz. the knowledge that God is our heavenly Father and Lord and that we are now children of God. This is what it means to say that faith is a self-understanding: not that faith is merely knowledge of what we already are ontologically, but rather knowledge of who we have become existentially in relation to Jesus Christ.

109 In addition to numerous points of affinity with Bultmann’s theology, Bonhoeffer was also a strong supporter of Bultmann when the latter came under fire for his controversial Alpirsbach lecture on demythologizing in 1941. In a letter to Ernst Wolf—who published Bultmann’s essay and was caught in a dispute with Hans Asmussen—Bonhoeffer writes: “I take great pleasure in the new Bultmann volume. The intellectual honesty of his work never

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Marburger’s theology.110 Bonhoeffer’s point is apparently that the event of revelation does not

remain within a stable, given ontological structure that theology can simply appropriate from

philosophy. On the contrary, the event of divine justification has ontological, and not merely

ontic, consequences; the ontic and the ontological are equally determined by revelation. Though

problematic as a reading of Bultmann, this position nevertheless highlights Bonhoeffer’s

insistence on the cosmic and ontological nature of God’s saving act in Jesus Christ. What

happens in Christ is constitutive of the truth of all reality. If, in Bultmann, the possibility of faith

is present already in our ontological-existential being—a notion, it’s worth noting, that Bultmann

himself consistently rejects—Bonhoeffer argues that this possibility must come to the individual

from outside itself (extra nos). In a statement directed squarely against Bultmann’s conception of

faith as self-understanding (Selbstverständnis),111 Bonhoeffer writes: “only those who have been

ceases to impress me.” He goes on to harshly criticize the disparagement of Bultmann by leaders in the Confessing Church. In addition to questioning whether any of them have worked through Bultmann’s writings, he says: “This arrogance, which flourishes here—under the influence of several blowhards, I think—is a real scandal for the Confessing Church.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment: 1940-1945, ed. Mark S. Brocker, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 16 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 260-61. In a later letter to Winfried Krause, Bonhoeffer says, “Many brothers oppose [Bultmann] with a hypocritical faith [Glaubenspharisäismus] that I find deadly. . . . I would like to speak with Bultmann about this and open myself to the fresh air that comes from him” (ibid., 347). Later, in another letter to Wolf, Bonhoeffer notes that “the Council of Brethren there [in Marburg] is presently in the midst of deciding about the expulsion of Bultmann from the Confessing Church! These theological hypocrites, so works-righteous!” He says that, were this to happen, “I think I would have to have myself expelled as well” (ibid., 359). These problems in the Confessing Church would lead Bonhoeffer to distance himself from that community, and by 1944, he could state: “even in the Confessing Church the breezes are blowing less than freely.” See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John W. De Gruchy, trans. Isabel Best, et al., Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 8 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 502.

110 The accuracy of Bonhoeffer’s interpretation is another question entirely. As should be clear by now, Bultmann’s theology does not threaten in the least the event-character of revelation as a transformative act of God, but on the contrary insists on revelation’s eventfulness without relying on any metaphysical or mythological Weltanschauung that would attempt to abstract from the contingency of God’s word of justifying grace. Moreover, what exactly would it mean for the ontic and the ontological to coincide? If we’re using these terms in the way Bultmann employs them, that would mean justification is something empirically verifiable and visible apart from faith. Certainly Bonhoeffer intends no such thing. In the end, I would say that Bonhoeffer makes the same mistake in criticizing Bultmann that Barth makes: viz. thinking that the word “ontological” serves essentially the same purpose that it served in classical metaphysical theology. But in the absence of substantial modes of thought, a phenomenological ontology has a completely different meaning. For this reason, insofar as Barth and Bonhoeffer wish to speak about the being of humanity as a totality, they rely on substance ontological categories even if they reject classical metaphysics.

111 Bultmann’s notion of faith as “self-understanding” is widely misunderstood, as if he meant to turn theology into anthropology or to locate the possibility of faith in our own given creatureliness. Based on his earlier critique,

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placed into the truth can understand themselves in truth [in Wahrheit zu verstehen]. Having been

placed into the truth, they may now come to understand themselves in that fashion . . . . That is to

say, they may now recognize themselves as having been created anew from untruth to truth.”112

All of this quite naturally gives the impression that Bonhoeffer takes Barth’s side over

against Bultmann. Certainly we hear traditionally “Barthian” themes in these criticisms,

especially in the pitting of revelation against philosophy and the emphasis on divine freedom.113

But, as always, the truth is more complicated. According to Bonhoeffer, the problem with

Barth—and here we are speaking of the “early” Barth as understood by Bonhoeffer at the

time114—is that “even though Barth readily uses temporal categories . . . God’s freedom and the

act of faith are essentially supratemporal,” because “no historical moment is capax infiniti.”115 If

Bultmann overemphasizes the historicity of revelation, Barth overemphasizes its ahistoricity;

where Bultmann stresses revelation’s concrete immanence, Barth stresses its apocalyptic

transcendence. Bultmann articulates the event of revelation through the distinction between ontic

Bonhoeffer almost certainly has Bultmann in mind, then, when he states that “it is not possible for Dasein to place itself into the truth” and that this truth is “not among the possibilities open to Dasein.” Instead, human existence requires something extra nos, a “genuine ‘from outside,’” to place us in the truth. See Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, 110. Bultmann, however, consistently rejects the notion that faith is a possibility that we have the power to actualize. In 1927, he writes: “Faith is in reality directed towards something which confronts me; that is, something which does not lie within those possibilities of life under my control. Faith makes it manifest that the existence of man does not in fact stand under man’s control” (Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, 142). And in his programmatic essay on demythologizing, he writes: “This, then, is the decisive point that distinguishes the New Testament from philosophy, Christian faith from ‘natural’ self-understanding: the New Testament talks and Christian faith knows about an act of God that first makes possible our submission, our faith, our love, our authentic life” (Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology,” 31). For an excellent discussion of this point, see Benjamin Myers, “Faith as Self-Understanding: Towards a Post-Barthian Appreciation of Rudolf Bultmann,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 10, no. 1 (2008): 21-35.

112 Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, 81. Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Akt und Sein: Transzendentalphilosophie und Ontologie in der systematischen Theologie, ed. Hans-Richard Reuter, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke 2 (München: Chr. Kaiser, 1988), 75. Future German citations in parentheses.

113 Cf. Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, 82: “Revelation, which places the I into truth, which gives understanding of God and the self, is a contingent event that is to be affirmed or denied only in its positivity—that is to say, received as reality; it cannot be extracted from speculations about human existence as such. Revelation is an event that has its basis in the freedom of God, positively as the self-giving or, negatively, as the self-withholding of God.”

114 Bonhoeffer primarily references Der Römerbrief (1922), Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf (1927), and “Schicksal und Idee in der Theologie” (1929).

115 Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, 84.

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and ontological, thus emphasizing continuity; Barth articulates this event in terms of old and

new, thus emphasizing discontinuity. While appreciative of both, Bonhoeffer chooses to forge an

alternative way forward that retains the concrete historicity of Bultmann and the ontological

newness of Barth.

Bonhoeffer’s “third way” sublates the differentiation between the ontic and the

ontological by appealing instead to the sociological. The tension between ontic and ontological,

between continuity and discontinuity, finds its resolution in the christologically-constituted

Gemeinde (“community of faith”) or Gemeinschaft (“community of persons”):

[R]evelation happens in the community of faith [Gemeinde]; it requires primarily a specific Christian sociology. . . . All that we have examined so far in this study was individualistically oriented. The transcendental attempt of pure actualism [i.e., Barth] as well as that of ontology [i.e., Bultmann] . . . pointed to the individual human being and for that reason failed. In searching for ‘reality’ it overlooked the fact that in reality human beings are never individuals only, not even those ‘addressed by the You’. Human beings, rather, are always part of a community [Gemeinschaft], in ‘Adam’ or in ‘Christ’. The word of God is given to humanity, the gospel to Christ’s community of faith [Gemeinde Christi]. By introducing the sociological category, the problematic of act and being . . . is stated for theology in an entirely new manner. . . . The being of revelation ‘is’ . . . the being of the community of persons [Gemeinschaft von Personen] that is constituted and formed by the person of Christ and in which individuals already find themselves in their new existence.116

The historicity and continuity of revelation is secured, in Bultmann’s alternative position,

through the “corporate person” (Gesamtperson) or “collective person” (Kollektivperson) of the

church-community, whose acting subject is Jesus Christ, that is, the Christus praesens or “Christ

existing as community” (Christus als Gemeinde existierend).117 The continuity therefore “does

not lie in human beings, but rather it is guaranteed suprapersonally [überpersönlich] through a

community of persons.”118 At the same time, though, this community is concretely visible within

history and not at all supratemporal. In addition to continuity, however, there is a real

116 Ibid., 113 (109-10). 117 Ibid., 111 (108). 118 Ibid., 114 (110).

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discontinuity that occurs in the sociological interpretation of revelation: to belong to the

community of faith is to “be encountered, placed into truth, and transposed into a new manner of

existence.”119 The truth of one’s being occurs neither on the level of one’s ontological

existentiality, nor on the level of one’s ontic existence; instead “the kind of being that pertains to

revelation is definable only in reference to persons.” It is a socio-theological ontology which is

neither a static, past-tense “there is”120 nor a pure nonobjectivity [Nichtgegenständlichen], but

rather it is a “genuine objectivity” [echter Gegenständlichkeit],121 grounded in the fact that the

new I is concretely situated in the socio-historical context of a community founded ever anew

upon the self-proclamation of Jesus Christ in the kerygmatic word of forgiveness. Bonhoeffer’s

sociological definition of revelation is the underlying basis for his ethics of justification, which

supplants the antinomies of ontological and ontic, law and grace, old and new, replacing them

instead with the apocalyptic antinomy of the ultimate and penultimate. Instead of continuity or

discontinuity, Bonhoeffer’s alternative fosters an ethical responsibility.122

Ultimate and Penultimate: The Apocalyptic Event of Justification

119 Ibid. 120 Ibid., 115 (112): “It is essentially different from the category of ‘there is’. That category is indifferent to

existence. It belongs with individualistic, thing-related epistemology [das individualistisch-dinglich-erkenntnistheoretische Denken]. The kind of being that pertains to revelation is definable only in reference to persons. ‘There is’ only what exists [Seiendes], the given [Gegebenes]. . . . In the social relation of persons the static concept of being that pertains to the ‘there is’ begins to move. There is no God who ‘is there’ [Einen Gott, den ‘es gibt’, gibt es nicht]; God ‘is’ in the relation of persons, and being is God’s being person [das Sein ist sein Personsein].”

121 Ibid., 114-15 (111). 122 My reading intentionally brings Bonhoeffer into closer proximity with Bultmann—much closer than the

literature on Bonhoeffer has been willing to acknowledge, due to what I regard as a gross misreading of Bultmann. While Bonhoeffer is a better reader than most, even he is not blameless in this regard. Scholars of both Barth and Bultmann are quick to point out the problems in Bonhoeffer’s interpretation, though it’s important to recognize the advantages we have in hindsight. In the “Afterword” to the German edition of Act and Being, Hans-Richard Reuter makes the very good point that in his criticisms of Barth and Bultmann, Bonhoeffer “was aiming at a moving target,” to borrow a statement from Franklin Sherman. Cf. Franklin Sherman, “Act and Being,” in The Place of Bonhoeffer: Problems and Possibilities in his Thought, ed. Martin E. Marty (New York: Association Press, 1962), 105; Hans-Richard Reuter, “Editor’s Afterword to the German Edition,” in Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, 168.

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The transition from Act and Being to Ethics comes across like a transition from Bultmann

to Barth, and there is certainly some justification for this. Bonhoeffer’s early works are, at key

places, in agreement with Bultmann over against Barth,123 and while he never lost this

appreciation and affinity for Bultmann’s perspective, he certainly comes under Barth’s influence

much more strongly in his later works. Nowhere is this influence more strongly felt than in the

christology of Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. Whereas his early works emphasized the Christus praesens

who meets us in the concrete moment,124 his later Ethics follows Barth in shifting the

christological emphasis to the Christus praeteritus, to the Christ who has already assumed

humanity in his becoming-human (Menschwerdung) and thereby redeemed the whole cosmos.125

123 For example, in Sanctorum Communio, Bonhoeffer sides with Bultmann (from the work, Jesus) over Barth

on the question of what it means to love the neighbor. See Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, 169-70n28. Joachim von Soosten’s “Afterword to the German Edition” makes an interesting point along these lines: “In his very approach [in Sanctorum Communio] Bonhoeffer already seeks to correct Barth’s fundamental decisions, though out of basic sympathy for those decisions. It can be safely assumed, moreover, that Bonhoeffer consciously intends this controversy with Barth. Barth, as he specifically states, returns the doctrine of God to being a prolegomenon to theology. Bonhoeffer’s argument, however, runs strictly opposite. Only when one frees the doctrine of God from the constraint which confined it to the prolegomenon of theology can one escape the danger of failing to do justice theologically to the concept of the church. Bonhoeffer’s proposal for the overall design of systematic theology can be understood as a direct criticism of Barth: ‘In order to establish clarity about the inner logic of theological construction, it would be good for once if a presentation of doctrinal theology were to start not with the doctrine of God but with the doctrine of the church.’ We can presume that, at the time, Bonhoeffer’s view of the church as a revelational reality established in Christ could only have been interpreted by Barth as ‘being homesick’ for Roman Catholicism.” Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, 292-93; for the quote by Bonhoeffer, see ibid., 134.

124 This concrete moment is both the proclaimed word in which Christ confronts us with the truth of our forgiveness and the situation of ethical responsibility in which we are confronted by the needs of the neighbor. Thus, in Sanctorum Communio, we read a passage that is highly reminiscent of Bultmann: “At the moment of being addressed, the person enters a state of responsibility or, in other words, of decision. By person I do not mean at this point the idealists’ person of mind or reason, but the person in concrete, living individuality. This is not the person internally divided, but the one addressed as a whole person . . . . The ‘moment’ is the time of responsibility, value-related time, or, let us say, time related to God; and, most essentially, it is concrete time. Only in concrete time is the real claim of ethics effectual; and only when I am responsible am I fully conscious of being bound to time. . . . I enter the reality of time by relating my concrete person in time and all its particularities to this imperative—by making myself ethically responsible.” See Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, 48.

125 The so-called “logic of assumption,” in which God assumes universal humankind in the incarnation, is a unifying theme in the Ethics. Throughout these manuscripts, Bonhoeffer grounds Christian ethics in the fact that all humanity has been reconciled and redeemed in the person of Christ, resulting in a new humanity. In the manuscript, “Ethics as Formation,” Bonhoeffer states: “The church may be called the body of Christ because in the body of Jesus Christ human being per se, and therefore all human beings, have really been taken on [angenommen]” (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 96-97 [84]). As Clifford Green notes, Bonhoeffer here “presupposes the christological doctrine of anhypostasia from patristic theology” (ibid., 97n90). Along these lines, he writes a little earlier: “A new human being, a new life, a new creature has been created by God’s miracle. . . . In Jesus Christ, the one who became human was crucified and is risen; humanity has become new. What happened to Christ has happened for all, for he was the

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Where Sanctorum Communio and Act and Being focus on “Christ existing as community” here

and now, Ethics looks at the process by which “the form [Gestalt] of Jesus Christ takes form in

human beings.”126 That is to say, we take on the form of Christ because Christ has already taken

on the form of humanity in the event of incarnation. Ethics is a matter of being conformed to

Christ, that is, of participating in the reality that Christ has already established in his becoming-

human, dying, and rising.127 It is within this christological context that Bonhoeffer presents his

apocalyptic doctrine of justification.

First, a preliminary word about the meaning of “apocalyptic.” Scholars have only very

recently begun to recognize the apocalyptic elements in Bonhoeffer’s theology,128 and this is no

doubt due to the fact that there has been clarity about and interest in the idea of apocalyptic itself

only in recent years as more biblical and theological scholars have examined it. The

contemporary understanding of apocalyptic has its roots in Ernst Käsemann,129 but was only

human being. The new human being has been created. . . . The human being, accepted, judged, and awakened to new life by God—this is Jesus Christ, this is the whole of humanity in Christ, this is us” (ibid., 91-92). On the “logic of assumption,” see Edwin Chr. van Driel, “The Logic of Assumption,” in Exploring Kenotic Christology: The Self-Emptying of God, ed. C. Stephen Evans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 265-90.

126 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 95. Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethik, ed. Ilse Tödt, et al., Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke 6 (München: Chr. Kaiser, 1992), 83. Future German references will be in parentheses following the English reference.

127 Cf. ibid., 93-96. 128 For example, see the very fine essay by Philip G. Ziegler, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer—An Ethics of God’s

Apocalypse?,” Modern Theology 23, no. 4 (2007): 579-94. 129 In his 1960 essay on “The Beginnings of Christian Theology,” Käsemann argues, against Bultmann, that

“apocalyptic was the mother of all Christian theology.” See Ernst Käsemann, New Testament Questions of Today, trans. W. J. Montague (London: SCM Press, 1969), 102. Bultmann responded in 1964 by arguing that “eschatology is the mother of early Christian theology, not apocalyptic.” See Rudolf Bultmann, “Ist die Apokalyptik die Mutter der christlichen Theologie? Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Ernst Käsemann,” in Exegetica: Aufsätze zur Erforschung des Neuen Testaments, ed. Erich Dinkler (Tübingen: Mohr, 1967), 482. Bultmann opposes apocalyptic because, as he understands it, the term refers to the imminent expectation of an end to world history, in accordance with the writings from the period of Second Temple Judaism. Bultmann, however, finds both Paul and John moving toward a demythologized, or existentialized, conception of the eschaton, so that the future is not an extension of world history but a present reality here and now in the event of word and faith. This debate has since been rendered more or less obsolete with the work of Martyn and others, who argue that it is the disruptive and cosmic-historical scope of the Christ-event that defines it as apocalyptic, not the belief in a particular future occurrence within the immanent continuum of history.

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really developed by J. Christiaan Beker130 and J. Louis Martyn.131 Nathan Kerr provides a list of

the key themes of the current apocalyptic theology: (1) a stress on “the otherness and the priority

of God’s action”; (2) the location of the “center of gravity” in “the history of Jesus Christ”; and

(3) a soteriology that is “cosmic and historical in scope.”132 Apocalyptic theology thus speaks of

God’s redemptive action in Jesus Christ as a radical in-breaking of a new reality that nullifies the

old cosmic order and inaugurates God’s new reign of grace. The apocalyptic event is

distinguished from Bultmann’s eschatological event through the cosmic-historical, rather than

existential, character of the new reality.

Turning then to Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, we find that he begins his treatment of the topic by

framing it in terms of a new cosmic reality. Beginning in the first manuscript, “Christ, Reality,

and Good,” Bonhoeffer argues that the problem of a Christian ethic, because it concerns the will

of God, “presupposes a decision about ultimate reality, that is, a decision of faith.”133 And

because God alone is the ultimate reality, the ground of possibility for a Christian ethic is found

only where God’s reality has been revealed, viz. in Jesus Christ. God reveals and establishes this

ultimate reality “by taking on and bearing bodily the nature, essence, guilt, and suffering of

human beings.” Jesus is thus “not a human being but the human being. What happens to him

happens to human beings. It happens to all and therefore to us.”134 For this reason, “the subject

matter of a Christian ethic is God’s reality revealed in Christ becoming real [Wirklichwerden]

130 Cf., in particular, J. Christiaan Beker, Paul’s Apocalyptic Gospel: The Coming Triumph of God

(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982). 131 Cf. J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York:

Doubleday, 1997); J. Louis Martyn, “The Apocalyptic Gospel in Galatians,” Interpretation 54, no. 3 (2000): 246-66. 132 Nathan Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Eugene, OR: Cascade

Books, 2009), 12-13. Original emphasis removed. Kerr actually lists five themes, but the last two are unique to his use of the term apocalyptic, namely: (4) “apocalyptic is constitutive of the meaning and shape of Christ’s lordship” and (5) it is “doxological and missionary” (ibid., 14-15).

133 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 47. 134 Ibid., 84-85.

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among God’s creatures.”135 The relation between “ought” and “is” is replaced by Bonhoeffer

with the relation between the past reality already accomplished in Christ and the present

becoming-real in the Spirit. Put differently, a Christian ethic concerns the ultimate reality of

Jesus Christ breaking-into and transforming the penultimate realities of our concrete social

existence. The will of God is therefore “nothing other than the realization of the Christ-reality

among us and in our world,” and this reality “wills to become real ever anew in what exists and

against what exists.”136 Bonhoeffer’s central claim is that the justification of the sinner is the

singular event that realizes the will of God; justification is what binds together the Christ-reality

and our contingent realities. As Bonhoeffer thus states: “This justification of the church and the

individual consists in their becoming participants in the form of Christ.”137 For this reason, the

doctrine of justification is the definitive basis for a properly Christian ethic.

In the manuscripts “Guilt, Justification, Renewal” and “Ultimate [letzten] and

Penultimate [vorletzten] Things”—both written in what the German editors refer to as Phase 2

during the years 1940-41138—Bonhoeffer presents a thoroughly apocalyptic understanding of

justification. According to Bonhoeffer, justification is an event in which the totality of one’s

existence is “concentrated in one moment, one point [in einem Augenblick, einem Punkt].” In this

decisive moment, the confining abyss of sin and death “is powerfully torn open [aufgerissen];

the word of God bursts in.”139 This divine word is “God’s final word,” the “qualitatively ultimate

word. There is no word of God that goes beyond God’s grace . . . . [T]herefore it is the

135 Ibid., 49. Emphasis mine; original emphasis removed. 136 Ibid., 74. 137 Ibid., 142. 138 The German editors identify five stages in the writing of the Ethics, ranging from the summer of 1940 to the

day of his arrest on April 5, 1943. While the more explicitly Barthian themes only appear in the final stage, after Bonhoeffer has read §36-39 of Church Dogmatics II/2, there are signs of Barth’s dogmatic work throughout the stages. See Ilse Tödt, “Appendix 2: Preparing the German Edition of Ethics,” in Ibid., 471-72.

139 Ibid., 146 (137).

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irreversibly ultimate word, the ultimate reality.”140 At the same time, God’s word is “the

temporally ultimate word,” since it presupposes a penultimate period which it brings to an end.141

God’s ultimate word is the telos of the penultimate, but in a way that the penultimate could never

bring about by itself. The time of God’s grace is thus the eschaton made present here and now in

a way that shatters the old order of things. The ultimate word of God is “not a crowning but a

complete break with the penultimate,”142 by which Bonhoeffer means that justification does not

develop out of the matrix of possibilities already inherent in the given cosmos. It renders a

cosmic apocalyptic judgment upon the world imprisoned within its immanent historical

processes, thus reversing the world’s being-curved-in-upon-itself (incurvatus in se). The

justifying encounter with Christ therefore opens us up to others in an eschatologically new way;

it casts the world in an entirely new light, so that “in this saving light, people recognize God and

their neighbors for the first time.”143 This means that we are “captivated by the gaze [Blick] of

Jesus Christ” in a way that illumines our vision and makes us “free for God and for one

another.”144 In short, the event of justification means that “heaven is torn open [zerreißt] above

us humans, and the joyful message of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ rings out.”145

Even though the apocalyptic occurrence of justification is a disruptive break with the

world-as-such, i.e. the old cosmos, the in-breaking of God’s grace occurs as a sublation

(Aufhebung) of the penultimate and not its total eradication: “The penultimate remains in

existence, even though it is completely superseded [aufgehoben] by the ultimate and is no longer

in force.”146 The ultimate event of justification not only presupposes a penultimate reality of sin

140 Ibid., 149. 141 Ibid., 150. 142 Ibid., 151. 143 Ibid., 146. 144 Ibid., 147, 146. 145 Ibid., 148 (139). 146 Ibid., 151.

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and death; it also preserves the penultimate in existence while at the same time rendering it null

and void. It is this element of sublation—as the simultaneous occurrence of preservation and

negation—that enables an apocalyptic theology to fund a this-worldly ethic. Here we see yet

another point of affinity with Bultmann—at least as I have interpreted Bultmann’s theology in

light of his sublation of the ontological-law by the ontic-gospel—but one which also constitutes a

departure from Bultmann insofar as the sublating event also changes the ontological reality itself.

Whereas Bultmann locates the eschatological event of justification within the realm of our ontic

existence, thus leaving the ontological structures of our existentiality untouched, for Bonhoeffer,

by contrast, “the ontic-existentiell and ontological-existential structures coincide”147 within the

apocalyptic in-breaking of the ultimate reality in Christ. Bonhoeffer can thus state that “the

penultimate becomes what it is only through the ultimate,” and “the ultimate determines the

penultimate.”148 Despite the fact that Christ’s advent renders an apocalyptic “judgment on all that

is penultimate,” “the resurrection does not abolish the penultimate as long as the earth remains;

but eternal life, the new life, breaks ever more powerfully into earthly life and creates space for

itself within it.”149

In a way that perfectly parallels Bonhoeffer’s “third way” between Barth and Bultmann

on the question of human continuity in revelation, Bonhoeffer here seeks a “third way” between

radicalism and compromise, between a complete discontinuity (ultimate against the penultimate)

and a complete continuity (penultimate as the ultimate). Both views “make the penultimate and

147 Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, 78n89. 148 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 159. The response from someone like Bultmann would be that Bonhoeffer’s contrast

between ultimate and penultimate occurs entirely within the sphere of the ontic. That is to say, the ultimate-penultimate binary pair does not actually map onto the ontic-ontological pair, even though Bonhoeffer implies that it does when he speaks about the penultimate as our general being-human and the ultimate as that which qualifies and redefines what it means to be human. Bultmann would affirm all this, but he would insist that it makes no sense to say that the ontic occurrence of revelation changes our ontology, unless we understand our “being” to consist not in the biological-phenomenological sphere of worldly materiality but in the metaphysical-Platonic sphere of ideas. This raises the issue of metaphysics, to which I will return at the end of this paper.

149 Ibid., 158.

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the ultimate mutually exclusive”: radicalism “by destroying the penultimate through the

ultimate,” and compromise “by banishing the ultimate from the domain of the penultimate,” thus

rendering the ultimate irrelevant to the concrete concerns of daily life.150 The two positions thus

presuppose a competitive relation between the penultimate and the ultimate—compromise by

appealing to God the creator and preserver, radicalism by appealing to God the redeemer.

Earlier, Bonhoeffer found a via media between Barth and Bultmann by sublating ontology in a

concrete theo-onto-sociology grounded in the corporate person of Christ; now Bonhoeffer

sublates radicalism and compromise in the concrete reality of Jesus Christ as the one who

embodies “a double judgment on human beings—the absolute condemnation of sin and the

relative condemnation of existing human orders.”151 That is, Christ concretizes in himself the

double movement of negation and preservation; he is the apocalyptic event that both crucifies the

old order of things and resurrects a new reality in its midst, thus preserving this world for the

sake of the realization of God’s new world. Both radicalism and compromise fail to take Christ

with proper seriousness as the apocalyptically paradoxical identity of ontological and ontic,

creation and redemption, time and eternity, world and kingdom.

Divine Authorization and Human Participation: The Apocalyptic Ethics of Justification

If justification is indeed an apocalyptic event in Jesus Christ, what kind of Christian ethic

follows from this? What form of obedience does justification authorize, and how do we come to

participate in ultimate reality here and now? As Philip Ziegler puts the question: “In Christian

life and thought, just what exactly does penultimate worldly justice have to do with the ultimate

150 Ibid., 154. 151 Ibid., 157.

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justification of sinners which comes from above?”152 In what follows, I will identify four basic

aspects to Bonhoeffer’s apocalyptic ethics: (1) the rejection of ethical worldviews, (2) the task of

penultimate preparation, (3) worldly participation in the four mandates, and (4) love as the form

of genuine worldliness.

1. Despite disagreeing with Bultmann on the relation of revelation to the ontic and

ontological, Bonhoeffer is able to fully affirm Bultmann’s opposition to ethical casuistry, i.e., the

attempt to establish universal Weltanschauungen. This becomes clear both in his early discussion

of the Gestalt of Christ and in the later, Barthian discussion of God’s command. In both contexts

he pits Christ or the Christian against the ethicist, who represents the attempt to develop an

abstract moral system. In the 1940 manuscript, “Ethics as Formation,” wherein he defines

Christian ethics as conformitas Christi, Bonhoeffer argues that the form of Christ is not a

universal ethical idea or program:

Christ is not a principle according to which the whole world must be formed. Christ does not proclaim a system of that which would be good today, here, and at all times. Christ does not teach an abstract ethic that must be carried out, cost what it may. Christ was not essentially a teacher, a lawgiver, but a human being, a real human being like us. . . . Christ did not, like an ethicist, love a theory about the good; he loved real people. Christ was not interested, like a philosopher, in what is “generally valid,” but in that which serves real concrete human beings. Christ was not concerned about whether “the maxim of an action” could become “a principle of universal law,” but whether my action now helps my neighbor to be a human being before God. God did not become an idea, a principle, a program, a universally valid belief, or a law; God became human. That means that the form of Christ, though it certainly is and remains one and the same, intends to take form in real human beings, and thus in quite different ways.153

Bonhoeffer here makes the paradoxical claim that the form of Christ is simultaneously singular

and multiple. The form of Christ is one and the same not as a general idea that gets applied to

any number of ethical situations, but rather as the form of this singular individual, Jesus Christ.

There is no form that can be abstracted from his concrete singularity. And yet it is also multiple,

152 Ziegler, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” 580. 153 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 98-99.

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because this form is able to “take form among us today and here.”154 In other words, Christ

concretizes himself by the Spirit within the infinite multiplicity of our particular worldly

contexts. To put it in more Bultmannian terms, Christ translates himself into new situations. The

form of Christ is an inherently translatable reality.

Bonhoeffer develops this idea further in the 1943 manuscript, “The ‘Ethical’ and the

‘Christian’ as a Topic.” In a well-known passage later quoted by Barth,155 he clarifies what an

ethic or ethicist cannot be according to the Christian faith:

An ethic cannot be a book in which is written out how everything in the world really ought to be, but unfortunately is not. Likewise, an ethicist cannot be a person who always knows better than others what is to be done and how it is to be done. An ethic cannot be a reference manual that guarantees flawless moral behavior, and an ethicist cannot be the competent appraiser and judge of every human action. An ethic cannot be a chemist’s laboratory for producing the ethical and Christian person, and the ethicist cannot be the embodiment and the ideal type of a fundamentally moral life.156

The ethicist, as described by Bonhoeffer, is the quintessential legalist who attempts to describe

what to do in every conceivable situation. The ethicist speaks about ethical responsibility the

way a scientist speaks about a specimen in the laboratory, always seeking to erase all traces of

her subjectivity so that the analysis is completely objective, timeless, and universal in nature. But

the Christian cannot speak or act in this way, because “timeless and placeless ethical discourse

lacks the concrete authorization [Ermächtigung] that any genuine ethical discourse requires.”157

Authorization does not come from an abstract worldview but from a specific encounter with the

ultimate reality of Jesus Christ within our concrete historicity.158 Ethical authorization is an event

154 Ibid., 99. 155 See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: T & T

Clark, 1956-75), III/4, 10. 156 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 369-70. 157 Ibid., 371. 158 According to Bonhoeffer, “It is not possible to speak ethically in a vacuum, that is, in the abstract, but only

within a concrete bond of mutual relationship [Bindung]. Thus ethical discourse is not a system of statements that are true as such, and which would be at the disposal of everyone, at every time, and everywhere. Instead it is intrinsically bound to persons, times, and places” (ibid., 372).

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within our socio-historical situation, and this event takes the form of a word spoken to our

existence. God’s commanding word is “the sole authorization for ethical discourse,” because the

commandment “is concrete speech to concrete human beings.”159 We are not authorized by an

abstract, timeless what but by a concrete, historical who.160

Moreover, this authorizing word is God’s justifying word of grace. The word of God that

frees us from our abyss of sin and death is also the word that commands our obedience. The

commandment of God is an apocalyptic word of new life that conscripts the hearer into service

for the ultimate reality. This is why, according to Bonhoeffer, a Christian ethic “draw[s] attention

to the disturbance and disruption”161 that comes to us from without, that is, from God. The

authorizing-commanding word of God is a radical interruption of our historical existence. It

confronts us with the full apocalyptic force of God’s justification of the sinner in Jesus Christ.

Like Bultmann, therefore, Bonhoeffer understands the Christian ethic as the enemy of

every Weltanschauung. Bonhoeffer also agrees with Bultmann in the rejection of an “ethic of

Jesus” which would attempt to see Jesus as “the founder of a new ethical ideology.”162 This does

not mean Bonhoeffer cannot speak concretely about how to respond to specific ethical problems;

it only means that his response to, say, suicide or war cannot be construed as the correct

Christian response. They are contextually-situated answers within a specific time and place. True

ethical responsibility discovers what is good “within the ambiguity of a historical situation.”163

Responsible action seeks “to understand and do what is necessary or ‘commanded’ in a given

159 Ibid., 378; emphasis added. A little earlier he writes: “The commandment of God is not, in distinction from

the ethical, the most general summation of all ethical rules. It is not timeless and generally valid as opposed to being historical and temporal. It is not the principle as opposed to its application, not the abstract as opposed to the concrete, not the indeterminate as opposed to the determinate” (ibid.).

160 Cf. ibid., 371: “Ethical discourse does not merely depend on the correct content of what is said, but also on the speaker being authorized to say it. Its validity depends not only on what is said, but also on who says it.”

161 Ibid., 370. 162 Ibid., 229. 163 Ibid., 248.

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situation.”164 Against ethical systems, such as legalism or idealism, the commandment of God is

not an immutable law that is timelessly valid but instead a malleable, translatable message of

forgiving grace in Christ that frees us for joyful obedience. Furthermore, the conflict between a

Christian ethic and abstract ethical systems is grounded in the doctrine of justification. Despite

their differences, both Bultmann and Bonhoeffer emphasize the radically eschatological

character of this doctrine, with the result that all worldviews are nullified as faithless attempts on

the part of sinful human beings to be the master of their own future.

2. Unlike Bultmann, however, Bonhoeffer is able to say quite a bit more regarding the

Christian’s ethical responsibility beyond the rejection of casuistry and the freedom for hearing

God’s commanding word. In a way analogous to the relations between law-gospel and

ontological-ontic, though in a somewhat more radical sense, the relation between the ultimate

and the penultimate is fundamentally dialectical. Like the law-gospel binary, the penultimate

temporally precedes the ultimate and, likewise, the ultimate presupposes the penultimate.165 But

like Barth’s gospel-law reversal, the ultimate determines the penultimate; the ultimate crucifies

and resurrects the penultimate and thus governs our ethical life within the penultimate.

Bonhoeffer derives from this an ethical thesis: “the penultimate must be preserved for the sake of

the ultimate. . . . [I]t is necessary to care for the penultimate in order that the ultimate not be

hindered by the penultimate’s destruction. . . . The way for the word must be prepared. The word

itself demands it.”166 For Bonhoeffer, the life of the Christian corresponds to the apocalyptic

disruption of Jesus Christ by refusing the extremes of radical destruction or compromising

164 Ibid., 261. 165 Bonhoeffer explicitly references the movement from law to gospel by appealing to Paul and Luther:

“Justification presupposes that the creature became guilty. . . . In order to hear the ultimate word, Luther had to go through the monastery; Paul had to go through his piety toward the law; even the thief ‘had to’ go through conviction and the cross” (ibid., 151).

166 Ibid., 160.

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sanction of the penultimate. Instead, “Christian life is participation in Christ’s encounter with the

world,”167 and we participate in this encounter by preparing the penultimate for the always-

imminent advent of the ultimate in each new moment. The importance of preparation in

Bonhoeffer’s Christian ethic is made clear by the fact that in 1940 he intended to title this book,

“Preparing the Way and Entering In,” corresponding to the penultimate and the ultimate.168

The task of “preparing the way” (Wegbereitung) is the mission of the church—it is “a

commission of immeasurable responsibility given to all who know about the coming of Jesus

Christ”169—and it involves both witness and participatory embodiment, both personal faith and

corporate action. As witness, the community of believers is called to the task of proclaiming the

news of God’s coming in Christ, but as participation, it calls believers to the work of freely

bringing the penultimate order into conformity with the in-breaking of the God’s reign. “This

preparation is not only an inward process,” Bonhoeffer states, “but a visible, creative activity on

the greatest scale.”170 To use Bonhoeffer’s own terminology, we can refer to these two aspects of

preparation as “being human” (Menschsein) and “being good” (Gutsein)—which are simply two

ways of speaking about the same reality. In contrast to the patristic axiom that God became

human so that humanity could become like God (i.e., deified), Bonhoeffer argues that God

became human so that humanity might become truly human.171 The apocalyptic event of

justification frees the penultimate to be truly penultimate, which primarily involves being open to

167 Ibid., 159. 168 See his letter to Eberhard Bethge on Nov. 27, 1940 in Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment, 92. 169 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 163. 170 Ibid., 161. 171 See ibid., 96: “Human beings become human because God became human. But human beings do not become

God. They could not and do not accomplish a change in form; God changes God’s form into human form in order that human beings can become, not God, but human before God.” This notion of God become human so that humanity may become truly human is the central ethical thesis of Eberhard Jüngel’s theology. Cf. Eberhard Jüngel, “Humanity in Correspondence to God,” in Theological Essays I, ed. J. B. Webster (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989), 124-53; Eberhard Jüngel, “On Becoming Truly Human,” in Theological Essays II, ed. J. B. Webster (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995), 216-40; Eberhard Jüngel, “Anfechtung und Gewißheit des Glaubens,” in Ganz werden (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 89-114, esp. 113-14.

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and oriented toward the coming ultimate reality. To be human thus means to participate in God’s

mission of bringing the world into conformity to Jesus Christ. Menschsein and Gutsein occur,

therefore, as the single act of repentance (die Buße): “Preparation of the way means repentance

(Matt. 3:1ff.). But repentance means concrete changing of one’s ways. Repentance demands

deeds.”172 To use New Testament language, faith always takes the concrete form of love.

What does it mean specifically to prepare the way for the ultimate? What does it mean to

remove the hindrances to God’s gracious advent, as Bonhoeffer puts it? Personally, or

“inwardly,” he refers to the removal of those “conditions of the heart” that hinder the hearing of

God’s justifying and commanding word.173 But on the corporate scale, he refers to the whole

scope of social justice. This includes entering “the depths of human misery”; addressing the

problems of slavery, poverty, and ignorance; feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, freeing

the slave, and restoring the rights of the oppressed.174 While Bonhoeffer does not mention it

himself, today we would also want to add that care for creation also falls into the category of

preparation for the ultimate. If it is indeed the case that God’s apocalyptic invasion of the world

is cosmic in scope, then it cannot on Bonhoeffer’s own terms be restricted to the anthropological.

The penultimate is not only sociological but environmental; we are shaped as persons not merely

by other human beings, but also by our natural environs and numerous physical-biological

factors. Caring for the natural world can be an act of witness and participation in God’s kingdom.

Bonhoeffer thus provides us with the christocentric resources for the paradoxical notion of an

apocalyptic ecotheology.

Finally, it is important to note that these tasks are by no means unique to the church-

community. One does not require the commandment of God to know these are necessary and

172 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 164-65. 173 Ibid., 162. 174 Ibid., 161-63.

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important works. Instead, Christian faith recognizes that in performing such deeds, we are

involved in the work of preparing the penultimate for the ultimate. Like Bultmann, then, it is not

the what or content of our ethical responsibility which is new, but rather the how or mode in

which we do it. For Bultmann, this mode is the way of love that sees the neighbor the way God

sees us in light of Christ’s forgiving grace. For Bonhoeffer, the “how” of a Christian ethic means

that we do these actions “for the sake of the ultimate,” and when we act in this way, “this

penultimate thing is related to the ultimate.”175 By making this observation I intend to further

substantiate my argument (over against the German editors of Bonhoeffer’s Ethics) that

Bultmann’s emphasis on the Wie makes his ethics no less uniquely “Christian.” In fact, on the

two ethical points already noted—opposition to casuistic worldviews and emphasis on a new

“how”—Bonhoeffer and Bultmann stand in complete agreement. The following two points do

not change this consensus but rather work within it.

3. So far in the analysis of Bonhoeffer’s ethics of justification, we have seen that a

Christian ethic is essentially a concern for the penultimate in light of the ultimate. But this

remains far too general, and potentially too individualistic as well. If the event of justification

does not merely transform our personal ontic existence, but in fact establishes a new ontological-

sociological reality, what implications does this have for ethics? Here Bonhoeffer introduces his

doctrine of the divine mandate, which is his actualistic alternative to the static language of

“order” or “estate.”176 Because this paper is attempting to explore how justification informs

175 Ibid., 163. 176 Bonhoeffer first uses the language of mandate in his contemporaneous 1941 essay, “State and Church”—the

German editors of Ethics argue that the mandate material in the 1940 manuscript, “Christ, Reality, and Good” was inserted after writing the 1941 essay—which supports the view among scholars that his doctrine is meant primarily as a critique of the Lutheran two-kingdoms doctrine, a minor idea that was appropriated by the German Christians (Glaubensbewegung Deutsche Christen) as a theological justification for keeping the church silent and impotent with respect to the Nazi regime. The doctrine of divine mandates (mandata dei) is traditional ethical-legal terminology in both the medieval and Lutheran churches, but it always stood alongside of and subordinate to the notion of the three “orders” (Ordnungen) or “estates” (Stände), defined variously as ordo (or status) oeconomicus

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ethics, I will not provide an exhaustive analysis of this feature in Bonhoeffer’s theology. Instead,

the focus will be on how this doctrine relates to and develops Bonhoeffer’s apocalyptic ethics of

justification.

Simply put, the four divine mandates that Bonhoeffer identifies on the basis of

scripture—viz. work or culture, marriage, government, and church177—concretely identify the

sociological dimensions of human participation in God’s mission of preparing the penultimate

for the ultimate: “The mandates are divine in that they have a concrete divine mission, grounded

and testified to in revelation . . . to preserve the world for the sake of Christ and upon Christ.”178

It is important, however, to see what the mandates are not. Even though the word mandate (das

Mandat) comes from the Latin mandatum, used as the Vulgate translation for the word

“commandment” in scripture, this does not mean that God has four different commandments.

Nor does it mean that God gives us principles for work, marriage, government, and church, in

(or parentum), politicus, ecclesiasticus (or hierarchicus). Green points out that “in Luther’s time and up till the Industrial Revolution, economic life was centered in the household; therefore oeconomicus encompassed both family and work. In the twentieth century Bonhoeffer recognized the distinction of the domestic and work worlds and so the three categories of Luther become four mandates” (ibid., 19n73). In his 1942 essay, “A Study on ‘Personal’ and ‘Objective’ Ethics,” Bonhoeffer says that “in my view the Lutheran doctrine of the three estates (oeconomicus, politicus, hierarchicus)—whose decisive characteristic and enduring significance [is] its ranking of these estates alongside one another rather than in any sort of hierarchical arrangement, i.e., the preservation of the worldly order from imposed ecclesial control and vice versa!—must be replaced by a doctrine—created from the Bible—of the four divine mandates” (Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment, 549).

In his early work, including Creation and Fall, Bonhoeffer spoke of “orders of preservation” in contrast to “orders of creation.” See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1-3, ed. John W. De Gruchy, trans. Douglas S. Bax, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 3 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 140. But he later replaces “order” with “mandate” so that “their character as divinely imposed tasks [Auftrag], as opposed to determinate forms of being, becomes clearer” (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 69). He clarifies this further in the final manuscript, where he writes: “Understood properly, one could also use the term ‘order’ [Ordnung] here, if only the concept did not contain the inherent danger of focusing more strongly on the static element of order rather than on the divine authorizing, legitimizing, and sanctioning, which are its sole foundation. This then leads all too easily to a divine sanctioning of all existing orders per se, and thus to a romantic conservatism that no longer has anything to do with the Christian doctrine of the four mandates” (ibid., 389). An editorial note on “State and Church” rightly states: “Bonhoeffer does not wish here to defend a certain quality of being of marriage, work, government, and church” (Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment, 519n85).

177 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 68. Between the first and last manuscripts, Bonhoeffer changes the mandate of work to that of culture. Cf. ibid., 388.

178 Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment, 549-50. Cf. also Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 389: “By ‘mandate’ we understand the concrete divine commission grounded in the revelation of Christ and the testimony of scripture . . . . A mandate is to be understood simultaneously as the laying claim to, commandeering of, and formation of a certain earthly domain by the divine command.”

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order to distinguish a “Christian” version of each from their “secular” counterparts. The four

mandates do not constitute a “Christian culture” over against the world. If they did, then these

divine mandates would be a new Weltanschauung, directly contradicting Bonhoeffer’s other

statements against an ethical theory. Instead, the mandates identify the sociological contexts for

the carrying out of “God’s one commandment as it is revealed in Jesus Christ.”179 If the

commandment concerns the unique how of our life in Christ, then the mandates identify the

concrete where—that is, they specify the locations where God’s commandment is to be lived out,

where the what of our action must be faithfully discovered anew. That does not mean these

contexts or tasks are in themselves divine or require God’s command in order for them to be

carried out. Just as the work of social justice has a kind of autonomy, so too do these tasks of

work, marriage, government, and church. What makes any of these tasks a divine mandate is

solely the fact that one fulfills it “for the sake of Jesus Christ.”180 In themselves, none of these

contexts is directly or self-evidently a commandment of God. It is only the new ethical Wie of

our justified being-in-Christ that constitutes this action as divine.

What then is the significance of these divine mandates? They “do not mean subjection to

a human ideal of ‘natural law’ or to the church”—in short, to any ethical Weltanschauung—“but

rather liberation for genuine worldliness.”181 This liberation does not occur through the

conversion of individuals in each context to faith or through the heteronomous imposition of a

“foreign law”;182 rather, genuine worldliness occurs when these mandates exist “in their being

179 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 390. 180 Ibid., 69. 181 Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment, 548. 182 Like Bultmann, Bonhoeffer rejects both pure autonomy and pure heteronomy. He sublates this binary

opposition in what he calls “Christonomy”: “Jesus Christ does not impose a foreign law on created being, but neither does Christ permit created being to have an autonomy apart from Christ’s commandment. The commandment of Jesus Christ, the living Lord, sets created being free to fulfill its own law; that is the law inherent in it from its origin, essence, and goal in Jesus Christ. . . . Here the antagonism between heteronomy and autonomy is overcome and taken up into a higher unity, which we could call Christonomy” (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 402). The parallels

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with-one-another [Miteinander], for-one-another [Füreinander], and over-against-one-another

[Gegeneinander].”183 In other words, Bonhoeffer envisages a true freedom-in-relation in which

each context of worldly human existence has a relative autonomy vis-à-vis the other mandates.

Genuine worldliness occurs when no particular life-context or mandate seeks to be in a

hierarchical relation toward another context or mandate. If the whole cosmos is judged and

redeemed in Christ, such that he alone is lord of creation, then creation is freed for true social

equality: “The cross of reconciliation sets us free to live before God in the midst of the godless

world, sets us free to live in genuine worldliness.” The proclamation of the crucified Christ alone

provides “the freedom and courage for a genuine and full-blown worldliness, that is, the freedom

and courage to let the world be what it really is before God, namely, a world that in its

godlessness is reconciled with God.”184

The apocalyptic reality of Jesus Christ—which paradoxically identifies the ultimate and

the penultimate—nullifies the divisions between the “Christian” and the “worldly,” the sacred

and the secular. Because Christ is the apocalyptic center of the cosmos, all reality coheres in him

as the reconciliation of all things with God.185 This means there is no longer any compulsion to

deify the world or impose any Christian law upon society, but likewise it means the church no

between Bonhoeffer and Tillich on this point are quite interesting. The difference would be that Tillich identifies God as the “ground of being” independent of what is revealed concretely in Jesus Christ; for Bonhoeffer it is the incarnate Christ himself who constitutes the “ground of being.” For more on the rejection of heteronomy in Bonhoeffer, see ibid., 230-31.

183 Ibid., 393. This is a refinement of his position in the paper on “‘Personal’ and ‘Objective’ Ethics,” where he says that “the dominion of Christ becomes concrete . . . through the concrete encounter of the worldly orders with the church of Jesus Christ,” so that genuine worldliness occurs when “the worldly orders allow this church of Jesus Christ to exist.” Thus, “a false stance toward the church will always result in a failure of genuine worldliness.” See Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment, 549. As much as Bonhoeffer still agrees with these statements, in his final ethical manuscript, he is careful not to give the empirical church a special place within the world. Each of the mandates exists in an equal, mutually-reinforcing position vis-à-vis the others.

184 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 400-1. 185 On Christ as the center of human existence, history, and nature, see the 1933 “Lectures on Christology” in

Bonhoeffer, Berlin, 324-27. Cf. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 266: “What is ‘Christian’ and what is ‘worldly’ are now no longer defined from the outset. Instead, both are understood in their respective uniqueness and their unity only within the concrete responsibility of action that is based on the unity of the reconciliation accomplished in Jesus Christ.”

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longer needs to define itself as a religious enclave set apart from the world. The church is free to

be truly “religionless.”186 The church is thus distinguished by faith, not by sight: “The church-

community is separated from the world only by this: it believes in the reality of being accepted

by God—a reality that belongs to the whole world—and in affirming this as valid for itself it

witnesses that it is valid for the entire world.”187 If it is true that we are given no new ethical

code or worldview, then there is nothing visibly or objectifiably “Christian” about the

community of believers in their worldly existence. There is nothing special about the church-

community over against the world, nor do they have any sociopolitical program to reform

society.188 The church is commissioned for no other task than to live in solidarity with others. To

be a Christian thus means nothing more than to be truly human in the world, to be fully and

properly secular: “Because in Jesus Christ God and humanity became one, so through Christ

what is ‘Christian’ and what is ‘worldly’ become one in the action of the Christian. . . . In Christ

life regains its unity.”189 The authorizing commandment of Jesus Christ therefore mandates that

we be more worldly than the world itself could ever be.

4. Finally, and very briefly, the commandment of Christ is the commandment of love.

The topic of love is not nearly as prominent in Bonhoeffer’s ethics as it is in Bultmann’s, but it is

no less central. Also, like Bultmann, Bonhoeffer differentiates the concrete commandment of

love from all ethical principles. Jesus Christ is not the “proclaimer of abstract ethical ideologies”

186 See Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 362-67, 372-73, 425-31, 475-82. 187 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 67-68. 188 In his 1932 essay, “Thy Kingdom Come!” Bonhoeffer says that this petition “is the prayer only of the

church-community of children of the Earth, who do not set themselves apart, who have no special proposals for reforming the world to offer, who are no better than the world, but who persevere together in the midst of the world, in its depths, in the daily life and subjugation of the world.” See Bonhoeffer, Berlin, 290. Cf. n. 101 above.

189 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 253. As Bonhoeffer will later famously state in one of his final letters from prison in 1944: “Our lives must be ‘worldly,’ so that we can share precisely so in God’s suffering; our lives are allowed to be ‘worldly,’ that is, we are delivered from false religious obligations and inhibitions. Being a Christian does not mean being religious in a certain way, making oneself into something or other (a sinner, penitent, or saint) according to some method or other. Instead it means being human, not a certain type of human being, but the human being Christ creates in us. It is not a religious act that makes someone a Christian, but rather sharing in God’s suffering in the worldly life.” Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 480.

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but rather the concrete embodiment of God’s love in the world. For this reason, human beings

“are not called to realize ethical ideals, but are called into a life that is lived in God’s love.”190

Bonhoeffer’s point is that love is not a law to regulate life in the world, nor does it know in

advance what a person should do. Love instead attends to “what is real” [das Wirkliche]; it

discovers God’s will and command in the bond of solidarity with the real, concrete world. Love

is thus the form of genuine worldliness. It is the mode of being-together-with-others, of living in

concrete relations with other human beings. In short, it is the new Wie of the corporate body of

believers made possible by the apocalyptic event of their ultimate justification in Jesus Christ.

Love—as understood by the gospel in contrast to all philosophy—is not a method for dealing with people. Instead, it is the reality of being drawn and drawing others into an event, namely, into God’s community with the world, which has already been accomplished in Jesus Christ. “Love” does not exist as an abstract attribute of God but only in God’s actual loving of human beings and the world. Again, “love” does not exist as a human attribute but only as a real belonging-together and being-together [ein reales Zueinandergehören, Miteinandersein] of people with other human beings and with the world, based on God’s love that is extended to me and to them. Just as God’s love entered the world, thereby submitting to the misunderstanding and ambiguity that characterize everything worldly, so also Christian love does not exist anywhere but in the worldly, in the infinite variety of concrete worldly action, and subject to misunderstanding and condemnation. . . . The purity of love, therefore, will not consist in keeping itself apart from the world, but will prove itself precisely in its worldly form [Weltgestalt]. . . . God’s love liberates human perception, which has been clouded and led astray by love of self, for the clear recognition of reality, the neighbor, and the world; thus, and only thus, is one readied to perceive and undertake genuine responsibility.191

The Problem of Stellvertretung: Bonhoeffer against Bonhoeffer

Attentive readers will notice that I have studiously avoided all reference to Bonhoeffer’s

widely-noted concept of Stellvertretung or “vicarious representative action.” The reason for this

is simply that I do not think this concept coherently follows from his apocalyptic doctrine of

justification. The emphasis on vicarious responsibility is, I argue, a misstep in Bonhoeffer’s

190 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 232. 191 Ibid., 241-42 (240-41).

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theology that warrants greater critical attention than it has received. As scholars have long noted,

the concept of Stellvertretung is a consistent theme throughout all of Bonhoeffer’s major works,

even though his christology changes over the years.192 The idea serves as a systematic bridge in

his works between christology-soteriology and ecclesiology-ethics. The claim I make here is

that, while it certainly grounds ethical responsibility in Christ, it does so at the expense of

theological clarity: either it ends up undermining Bonhoeffer’s soteriology through a watered-

down notion of vicarious substitution, or it vastly overstates the ethical responsibility of

believers.

Bonhoeffer first defines Stellvertretung in Sanctorum Communio as the unique and

definitive work of Christ by which “humanity has been brought once and for all . . . into

community with God.”193 Jesus Christ fulfills this work in that “he takes the punishment [for sin]

upon himself” and thereby “accomplishes forgiveness of sin.”194 In his dissertation, Bonhoeffer

follows the work of his Doktorvater, Reinhold Seeberg, not only in making Stellvertretung the

entirety of his christology in nuce, but also in restricting it to sin and punishment. That is to say,

it serves a specifically soteriological purpose, and only as the basis for our salvation does it then

define the church-community, which is Christ himself existing in the form of a socio-historical

Gesamtperson through the actualizing power of the Holy Spirit. For this reason, Bonhoeffer

argues that this vicarious action is not an ethical action on our part but rather the gift of God’s

love: “It is not an ethical possibility or standard, but solely the reality of the divine love for the

192 In his afterword to Sanctorum Communio, von Soosten calls this concept a leitmotif that “provided

[Bonhoeffer] with the theological foundation for connecting Christology, ecclesiology, and ethics” (Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, 303). Similarly, Heinz Tödt claims, “From his dissertation to his latest manuscript for an ethics, Bonhoeffer lives with the theme of vicarious representation. This shows the strong continuity in his theology.” See Heinz Eduard Tödt, Authentic Faith: Bonhoeffer's Theological Ethics in Context, ed. Ernst-Albert Scharffenorth and Glen Harold Stassen, trans. David Stassen and Ilse Tödt (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 7.

193 Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, 146. 194 Ibid., 155.

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church-community; it is not an ethical, but a theological concept.”195 We can thus speak of

Stellvertretung as “the life-principle of the new humanity”196 only if it is clear that this is not an

ethical principle to be applied in specific situations. It is instead a way of specifying Christ in his

socio-historical mode of existence. Stellvertretung thus defines the being of the church-

community as the christologically-grounded community of Spirit (Geistgemeinschaft) that is

simultaneously the community of love (Liebesgemeinschaft).

Over a decade later,197 in Ethics, the concept comes to have a robust ethical significance

in addition to its christological function, but the result is a lack of theological clarity and

consistency. Bonhoeffer here makes Stellvertretung definitive for what it means to be an

ethically responsible agent. Jesus Christ is “the very embodiment of the person who lives

responsibly,” because “his entire life, action, and suffering is Stellvertretung.”198 What does it

mean for Jesus to live as a vicarious representative? Bonhoeffer seems to identify two aspects,

though he does not conceptually and logically differentiate them. First, in light of his

christological development already noted, Bonhoeffer defines representative action in terms of

the assumptio carnis. Christ “has taken on and bears the selves of all human beings,”199 and thus

what occurs in him is effective for all. Second, as with his early work, Bonhoeffer defines

Christ’s representative action more specifically as his bearing the sin of humanity. Jesus

195 Ibid., 156. Original emphasis removed. This does not mean Stellvertretung cannot also be an ethical action.

In a footnote, Bonhoeffer notes that “there is, however, also an ethical concept of vicarious representative action; it signifies the voluntary assumption of an evil in another person’s stead” (ibid., 156n17). As an ethical action, we are relatively representative of other persons; but as a soteriological action, Christ is absolutely representative of us in our sinfulness before the judgment of God. For this reason, we have to keep the two concepts strictly differentiated. The ethical concept has its place in legal-ethical discourse, but the theological concept is wholly sui generis.

196 Ibid., 147. 197 Bonhoeffer does not abandon the concept in the intervening years. In Act and Being, for example, he writes:

“In ‘taking on’ the ‘claim of the other’, I exist in reality, I act ethically” (Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, 87; cf. ibid., 120). And in Discipleship, he says that “Christ suffers as vicarious representative for the world. Only his suffering brings salvation.” See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey, trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 4 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 90.

198 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 231. 199 Ibid., 258.

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identifies with humanity’s guilt before God and thus “becomes guilty” himself in order to carry

the burden that humanity cannot carry.200

From these two points—which we might specify as pertaining to the “person” and

“work” of Christ—Bonhoeffer then draws two ethical consequences. The first is that we are

responsible ethical agents not as “isolated individuals” but only as those who “incorporate the

selves of several people” in our own selves.201 This means identifying ourselves with others and

acting on behalf of others. Stellvertretung takes place therefore “in completely devoting one’s

own life to another person”; it is “essentially a relation from one human being to another” in

which we attend “to concrete neighbors in their concrete reality.”202 This much is relatively

acceptable, even if the connection to Christ is rather strained, since there is no proper analogia

relationis between Christ’s assumptio carnis and our devotion to other persons. The second

consequence, however, is much more problematic and confusing. Here Bonhoeffer attempts to

derive an ethical analogue to Christ’s salvific bearing of our sin and guilt.

Because Jesus took the guilt of all human beings upon himself, everyone who acts responsibly becomes guilty. Those who, in acting responsibly, seek to avoid becoming guilty, divorce themselves from the ultimate reality of history . . . and have no part in the divine justification that attends this event[!]. . . . They are also blind to the fact that genuine guiltlessness is demonstrated precisely by entering into community with the guilt of other human beings for their sake. Because of Jesus Christ, the essence of responsible action intrinsically involves the sinless becoming guilty.203

Bonhoeffer continues by affirming the qualitative difference between Christ’s action and our

own, but he nevertheless insists that our bearing the guilt of others “participates indirectly in the

200 Ibid., 234. 201 Ibid., 258. 202 Ibid., 259, 261. 203 Ibid., 234. Cf. ibid., 275-76: “As one who acts responsibly within the historical existence of human beings,

Jesus becomes guilty. It is his love alone, mind you, that leads him to become guilty. . . . In him, sinlessness and bearing guilt are inextricably linked. . . . Now in this sinless-guilty Jesus Christ all vicarious representative action [stellvertretend verantwortliches Handeln] has its origin. . . . Because Jesus took the guilt of all human beings upon himself, everyone who acts responsibly becomes guilty. . . . Because of Jesus Christ, the essence of responsible action intrinsically involves the sinless, those who act out of selfless love, becoming guilty.”

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action of Jesus Christ.”

The question to put to Bonhoeffer is this: how is it at all possible for human beings to

participate in the very soteriological action that frees them for such participation? That is to say,

it is precisely this justifying work of bearing the sin and guilt of humanity that liberates humanity

for responsible action on behalf of others. If that is indeed the case, how is our own responsible

action a participation in the divine work that liberates us? On this point, I stand in agreement

with Eberhard Jüngel who states in his essay on “Das Geheimnis der Stellvertretung” that

“Bonhoeffer’s anthropological version of the idea of substitution [Stellvertretung] seems to

[Heinrich Vogel, but also to Jüngel himself] not only theologically unacceptable, but also

dogmatically reprehensible.”204 And this is, quite simply, due to the fact that “existing as a

substitute is something human beings cannot do.” The concept of Stellvertretung “is only

meaningful as a dogmatic recollection of an event” in the person of Jesus Christ.205 We are

excluded from this substitutionary event for the sake of our own life and salvation. To speak of

our ethical responsibility as vicarious action in analogy with Jesus Christ’s own action is either

to reduce the saving work of Christ to the level of mere ethical solidarity or to elevate our own

ethical action to the level of self-salvation. Neither option will suffice—and on Bonhoeffer’s

own grounds! The apocalyptic new reality in Jesus Christ is a radical event of justification and

new life. It is a reality that we receive as a superabundant gift of grace. It confronts us as an

interruption of our existence that frees us to live in responsible solidarity with other human

beings. But it simultaneously frees us from any need to bear the guilt of others, for we know that

in Christ all our guilt has already been borne and borne away.

204 Eberhard Jüngel, “The Mystery of Substitution: A Dogmatic Conversation with Heinrich Vogel,” in

Theological Essays II, ed. J. B. Webster (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995), 153. 205 Ibid., 155.

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Conclusion: Toward a Postmetaphysical Missionary Ethic of Justification

The primary purpose of this paper has been to explicate and analyze the theological ethics

of Bultmann and Bonhoeffer in light of their respective doctrines of justification. For both

theologians, the knowledge of God—and so also the knowledge of human existence—“can never

be isolated from the practical character of this knowledge, but just as little can it be absorbed by

it.”206 Theoretical and practical truth coincide dialectically in the moment of revelation and

justification. Theological indicatives are never without ethical imperatives, and vice versa. We

come to know God only as we come to know ourselves as those addressed and claimed by God.

To know the truth of God is at the same time to know that the truth has set us free to live in

joyful obedience before God.

How, then, are we to think ethically and theologically beyond Bultmann and Bonhoeffer?

While a major motivation of this paper has been to demonstrate the close affinity between these

two thinkers in a way that has often gone unacknowledged, it nevertheless remains true that there

are certain key differences which demand a theological decision. Amidst the numerous insights

of both theologians, I will identify a point from each that corrects a problem in the other and use

this as the basis for pointing the way forward. From Bonhoeffer, I take his sociological

correction of the individualism that threatens Bultmann’s project. From Bultmann, I take his

non-metaphysical and translatable ethic as a correction of certain aspects in Bonhoeffer’s later

christology.

1. Bonhoeffer’s criticism of Bultmann regarding the ontic and the ontological may not be

accurate—resting as it does on a confusion of ontological possibilities with ontic possibilities—

but his constructive point is a good one: viz. that revelation and the faithful response to

206 Eberhard Jüngel, “Glauben und Verstehen: Zum Theologiebegriff Rudolf Bultmanns,” in Wertlose

Wahrheit: Zur Identität und Relevanz des christlichen Glaubens – Theologische Erörterungen III (München: Chr. Kaiser, 1990), 77.

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revelation occur within a socio-historical, communal context. The justifying, authorizing, and

commanding word of God comes to us within our concrete historicity. God’s commandment is

historical action, just as our ethical response is historical, and thus ineluctably connected to other

human beings. Bultmann is certainly right in stressing that our faith and obedience is individual

in nature; no one, including the church, can have faith for us, contrary to the Roman Catholic

doctrine of fides implicita. And yet it is essential to realize that the truth of our existence is

embedded within a sociological and cultural (not to mention environmental) context. We are

dependent upon others for our faith and obedience, even if we are responsible before God as

individuals. Recognizing this point nuances our understanding of justification and ethical

obedience considerably. It also provides the basis for thinking more concretely about what the

gospel of Jesus Christ means on the level of communal existence. The community of believers—

while certainly composed of numerous individuals—is not reducible to a collection of various

monads. There is a collective unity encompassing the multiplicity. While there are certainly

reasons to resist Bonhoeffer’s early concept of the Gesamtperson or his later notion of the

assumption of all humanity in Christ, he was nevertheless right to see that Jesus Christ

establishes a corporate unity at the same time that he addresses the justifying and commanding

word of grace to each individual.

2. Bultmann provides Christian theology with a thoroughly non-metaphysical way of

conceptualizing God and humanity. By this, I mean he rigorously avoids all speculation and

abstraction from the event of revelation. Against the tradition, then, he rejects (1) the

ontotheological metaphysics that posits a being of God defined apart from God’s revelatory act

in Jesus Christ as well as (2) the idea of assumption that posits the universal category of

humanitas as a substance assumed by Christ in the incarnation. Bonhoeffer avoids the former but

Congdon 65


falls prey to the latter in his Ethics manuscripts. He presupposes a substance ontology—or at

least a certain kind of substantial logic—that unites humanity in the person of Christ, but at the

expense of the concrete historicity that he so strongly emphasized in his earliest works.

Bultmann rightly sees that theology cannot abstract from the concrete encounter with Christ in

which the word of God is heard and obeyed. We know God and ourselves in the contingent

relation between word and faith—or not at all. For Bultmann, this theological axiom is grounded

in the doctrine of justification as a forensic word-event that never becomes our secure

possession; it must instead be heard ever anew in each contingent moment as the justifying and

commanding word of God that simultaneously grants us knowledge of God and knowledge of

ourselves.

Bultmann’s non-metaphysical theology also facilitates a greater attention to the

missionary-hermeneutical dimension of Christian ethics.207 By this I mean that a Christian ethic

is necessarily translatable from one culture to another in the same way that the gospel kerygma

itself is translatable. I take it for granted here that a theology of mission is primarily concerned to

oppose the confusion between the gospel and propaganda: whereas propaganda involves the

conflation of the church’s proclamation with the cultural form of the proclaiming community, the

gospel radically transcends all cultural forms and thus cannot be turned into the ideological

message of a particular group identity.208 The gospel thus resists Constantinian imperialism. The

consistent motif of this paper has been that Bultmann and Bonhoeffer both reject the

establishment of universal ethical worldviews—though Bultmann’s ethics of radical delegalizing

207 My claim with respect to Bultmann is that his program of demythologizing is an attempt to articulate a

theological methodology which is radically missionary from beginning to end. In terms of the doctrine of God, demythologizing takes the form of demetaphysicizing; in ecclesiology, it becomes deconstantinizing; and in ethics, it becomes delegalizing.

208 Cf. John G. Flett, “Communion as Propaganda: Reinhard Hütter and the Missionary Witness of the ‘Church as Public,’” Scottish Journal of Theology 62, no. 4 (2009): 457-76.

Congdon 66


is far more rigorous in this regard. Put in missional terms, both theologians articulate a

translatable (or missionary) Christian ethic that allows the concrete situation to inform the

content (Was) of responsible action. The mode or how (Wie) of our action, on the other hand, is

always christologically-determined as neighbor-love (Bultmann) or as penultimate responsibility

and solidarity (Bonhoeffer). In other words, their respective modes of ethical obedience are

freely translatable from one cultural situation to another; they strictly preclude any

propagandistic Weltanschauung. More importantly, both Bultmann and Bonhoeffer reject ethical

worldviews for the same reason: God’s justification of sinners in Jesus Christ. Whether

understood in eschatological or apocalyptic terms, each emphasizes the radically disruptive

Christ-event as the origin and essence of all faithful obedience.

Finally, by following Bultmann’s postmetaphysical orientation, we can adjudicate the

issue of whether to go with a more eschatological or apocalyptic conception of Christian faith. If

Bultmann is right—as I believe he is—to jettison the metaphysical thinking that leads to the

abstract concept of a universal humanity (i.e., the notion that all humanity is united in the

humanity of Christ, even if this is construed along the lines of a “concrete universal”), then we

are forced to rethink what it means for the Christ-event to be cosmic and historical in scope. We

cannot develop an account of what that would mean here, except to suggest that we make room

for the work of the Spirit as the one who cosmically concretizes and existentializes the singular

historicity of Jesus in every specific time and place. This proposal would overcome the

dichotomies between past and present as well as objective and subjective, which tend to place a

stranglehold on the creative freedom of the gospel. By moving in this direction, we can still

retain the overall emphases in apocalyptic thinking while removing some of the metaphysical

props. The result is that the eschatological and the apocalyptic are able to come together in an

Congdon 67


unrestricted way. Future theological ethics would do well to follow Bultmann and Bonhoeffer by

developing a postmetaphysical missionary ethic of justification along these lines.

Congdon 68


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