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The Cost of Citizenship: Disciple and Citizen in Bonhoeffer's Political Ethics Stefan Heuser Studies in Christian Ethics 2005 18: 49 DOI: 10.1177/0953946805058797 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sce.sagepub.com/content/18/3/49

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THE COST OF CITIZENSHIP SCE 18.3 (2005) 49–69 DOI: 10.1177/0953946805058797 © 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks CA and New Delhi) http://SCE.sagepub.com

THE COST OF CITIZENSHIP: DISCIPLE AND CITIZEN IN BONHOEFFER’S POLITICAL ETHICS* Stefan Heuser Abstract The author suggests that a synchronic reading of Bonhoeffer’s major works yields a typology of the two main images around which Bonhoeffer’s political ethics orbit: disciple and citizen. Concentrating on the latter, the author shows the centrality of the question of power for Bonhoeffer’s political ethics, and how it relates to responsibility and vocation. He argues that Bonhoeffer’s ethics follows a christological grammar which constitutes its specific realism and provides its focus on institutions and good works. The essay concludes that the call to citizenship, the vocation of co-operative, representative and vicarious action, forms the central idea of Bonhoeffer’s political ethics, which is still highly relevant for political ethics today.

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onhoeffer’s political ethic is far from consistent. Ulrich Duchrow, disappointed by this fact, holds that the relationships between the body of Christ and the institutions, of ecclesiology and politics, remain underdeveloped in Bonhoeffer ’s works. 1 On Duchrow’s account, Bonhoeffer did not provide a sufficient role for countervailing political power, which he considers the decisive issue for a Christian political ethics today.2 No doubt the question of how political power * I would like to thank Stephanie and Brian Brock (Aberdeen) for comments and corrections. 1 Cf. Ulrich Duchrow, ‘Dem Rad in die Speichen fallen — aber wo und wie? Luthers und Bonhoeffers Ethik der Institutionen im Kontext des heutigen Weltwirtschaftssystems’, in Christian Gremmels (ed.), Bonhoeffer und Luther. Zur Sozialgestalt des Luthertums in der Moderne, Internationales Bonhoeffer Forum 6 (München: Kaiser Verlag, 1983), pp. 16–58, here p. 55, hereafter cited as IBF. 2 Cf. Duchrow, Dem Rad in die Speichen fallen, p. 54.

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is generated in the face of the forces of a globalised market economy, terror and the rule of elites is pressing. I think, however, that there are aspects of Bonhoeffer’s work that give us reason to reconsider his political ethics at precisely this point. However, one should not undertake this examination expecting Bonhoeffer to supply a general theory of political ethics. Instead, Bonhoeffer helps us to focus political ethics on two ‘characters’, in whom the political takes shape and becomes present: the disciple and the citizen. As I will point out in this essay, the lack of an overall theory that would enable us to summarise the relationship of disciple and citizen can be regarded as a decisive — and intrinsically Lutheran — theological stance in Bonhoeffer’s work. The point is instructive for political ethics. Bonhoeffer does not describe how the disciple transforms into the citizen, nor vice versa, for both may be regarded as different instruments by which God governs humanity. For Bonhoeffer, the disciple and the citizen are not two characters people make out of themselves, but two examples of how God’s love and justice take shape within the world. They depend on vocation, not on free-standing decisions. The echo of Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms and of Luther’s basic rule that it is not in man’s power to turn the inner man into the outer man (and vice versa) can be heard throughout Bonhoeffer’s works and witness. According to Bonhoeffer, it would deprive political ethics of an inspiring theological point to make the way from disciple to citizen or from citizen to disciple the subject of political theory — for both characters in their true forms must be understood as vocations. This recovery of Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran roots is built on a synchronic reading of his works over against merely diachronic or biographical approaches that tend to homogenise, criticise or hide Bonhoeffer’s productive discrepancies. It is striking that the term ‘citizen’ rarely appears in Bonhoeffer’s works, and when it does, most often denotes the classical figure of the Bourgeois over against the Citoyen. Whenever Bonhoeffer speaks about the Bürger, ‘citizen’, he tries to emancipate the term from the German protestant bourgeoisie from which he stemmed, and that he found described by Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch. However, a synchronic reading of Bonhoeffer’s works shows the political figure of the citizen taking shape in critical dialogue with the citizen of Prussian Protestantism. There are passages in Bonhoeffer in which he explicitly tries to rehabilitate citizenship alongside discipleship.3 If we Cf. Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, letter of 18 November 1943 in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke 8, eds. Christian Gremmels, Eberhard Bethge and Renate Bethge in co-operation with Ilse Tödt (1998), p. 189. In the following, I will quote Bonhoeffer from the latest German works edition, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke (hereafter cited as DBW), published in München/Gütersloh by Chr. Kaiser Verlag, which has not been completely translated into English yet, and I will

3

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resist the temptation to read Bonhoeffer’s works as mere witnesses to Bonhoeffer’s biographical development and learn to read them as witnesses to the Christian struggle for a political ethic, we find helpful features of a political ethics, in which the figures of disciple and citizen reciprocally communicate, contradict, provoke, learn and witness to one another. We might even eventually discover Bonhoeffer’s life as a paradigm case illustrating the impossibility of anticipating the way from disciple to citizen, and vice versa, and theologising without a homogeneous political theory to explain both. Bonhoeffer wrote about and felt himself called to be disciple and citizen, understood as two ways in which the Christian witness takes shape in the realm of politics. The call to offer the worldly witness of the disciple as a vocation to responsibility appears as a theme again and again in Bonhoeffer’s life and work. As a presupposed biographical development of Bonhoeffer, it is impossible to separate discipleship and citizenship phases. My aim, rather, is to regain both characters as ‘political’ characters by reading Bonhoeffer as protagonist in the discourse of Lutheran political ethics. In so doing Bonhoeffer’s political ethics is brought into a dialogue with the current issues under debate in the discourse of political ethics which Duchrow represents. Here we find, for example, questions about how political action and power may be acquired rather than through exerting mere force. No doubt a synchronic reading of Bonhoeffer’s writings will not consistently track the development of the ‘historical’ Bonhoeffer. In practice he was prone to lose the citizen when indulging in his witness to discipleship, and to lose the disciple when talking about citizenship. But, as I will show, a synchronic approach to his works reveals Bonhoeffer’s concern for both figures — a concern that can be used to develop a critical recovery of his work where Bonhoeffer has apparently lost the plot. Such a typological recovery of Bonhoeffer helps to describe elements of a political ethics beyond a dualistic interpretation of the doctrine of the two realms and beyond the monism of a merely ecclesiocentric political ethics. In the following I will first describe some of the difficulties in approaching Bonhoeffer (section 1). In a critical response to Hauerwas I will then ask how to enter into dialogue with Bonhoeffer without

paraphrase the contents in English. Cf. also Bonhoeffer’s Roman (novel) about a middle-class family, in Renate Bethge and Ilse Tödt (eds.), Fragmente aus Tegel, DBW 7 (1994), pp. 73–191. Cf. also the chapter‚ ‘Kirche und Welt’, in Bonhoffer, Ethik, eds. Ilse Tödt, Heinz Eduard Tödt, Ernst Feil and Clifford Green, DBW 6 (1998), pp. 342–53. Cf., however, Yorick Spiegel’s provocative article on Bonhoeffer’s indebtedness to Prussian conservatism, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer und die protestantisch-preußische Welt’, in Ernst Feil (ed.), Verspieltes Erbe? Dietrich Bonhoeffer und der deutsche Nachkriegsprotestantismus, in IBF 2 (1979), pp. 58–93.

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laying claim on him (section 2). Thirdly, I will show the centrality of the question of power for Bonhoeffer’s political ethics, and how he relates it to questions of responsibility and vocation (section 3). I will then outline the christological narrative in Bonhoeffer’s ethics which does not move from Church to world, as is generally assumed, but from Christ to Christ (section 4). Finally, I will show how the call to citizenship, the vocation to co-operative, representative and vicarious action, forms the central idea of Bonhoeffer’s political ethics and what this means for political ethics today (section 5). 1. Difficulties in Approaching Bonhoeffer Bonhoeffer remains a controversial figure in German theology. In addition to the incompleteness of his work, the unelaborated but influential prophecies of the Tegel period and his conspiratorial activities, this might also be due to the idiosyncratic development of his terminology and his impulsive thought.4 None of these facilitated the reception of Bonhoeffer among those of my generation of theologians who were ecclesially socialised in the Martin-Niemöller rooms of Dietrich-Bonhoeffer parish-centres, rooms stuffed with Bonhoeffer calendars and filled with the echoes of Bonhoeffer’s evergreen Von guten Mächten. Whatever the reasons, it is a fact that Bonhoeffer’s ethics is far more influential on the ecumenical and international level than in the German context. The west front of Westminster Abbey even boasts a Bonhoeffer statue. To my knowledge, there is no such thing to be found at the Berlin Cathedral. At best we have unconfirmed but trustworthy reports that a little Bonhoeffer bust resides on the desk of Wolfgang Huber, Ratsvorsitzender of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD). Although one has to admit that in terms of beauty and importance the Berlin Cathedral compares to Westminster Abbey like a shrunken head to a marble statue, German academic theology may at least take some pride in Huber and his group of theologians who have dedicated excellent and challenging scholarly work to Bonhoeffer’s theology. 5 If we were only to refer to the Bonhoeffer studies he and the other editors of the new Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke: Eberhard Bethge, Ernst Feil, Christian Gremmels, Hans Pfeifer, Albrecht Schönher, Heinz Eduard Karl Barth gave a very positive account of the Nachfolge in his Kirchliche Dogmatik IV/2, p. 604. However, he was right that Bonhoeffer in general was an ‘impulsiver, visionärer Denker, dem plötzlich etwas aufging, dem er dann lebhaft Form gab, um nach einiger Zeit doch auch wieder, man wußte nicht: endgültig oder nur bis auf weiteres, Halt zu machen bei irgend einer vorläufig letzten These’. Karl Barth, ‘Brief an Landessuperintendent P.W. Herrenbrück vom 21.12.1952’, in Die Mündige Welt. Dem Andenken Dietrich Bonhoeffers, 3rd edn (München: Kaiser Verlag, 1959), p. 121. 5 Cf., e.g., Wolfgang Huber, Konflikt und Konsens. Studien zur Ethik der Verantwortung (München: C. Kaiser Verlag, 1990). 4

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Tödt and Ilse Tödt have compiled, we could say that the state of the art in Bonhoeffer research is excellent.6 But even more impressive, the volumes of the Internationales Bonhoeffer Forum series chronicle the influence of Bonhoeffer’s various theological impulses on the theological thinking of our time. If only referring to these bodies of work, the intellectual power put into further development of his thought appears exceptional. Yet, despite the enormous scholarly effort that has been spent on historical and psychological Bonhoeffer exegesis, and despite of the sagacity Bonhoeffer scholars have applied to unravel the biographical dimensions of his different works on ethical issues and to contextualise his thought historically,7 despite — or maybe because of all that — the provocative potential of Bonhoeffer’s thought for our current discussion of political ethics still remains unexploited. As Bernd Wannenwetsch has shown, Bonhoeffer challenges some of the main and rather unquestioned paradigms of our current theological ethics, such as the ethics of Gestaltung (shaping) and Verwirklichung (realisation), of the ‘moral subject’ or of ‘motivation’.8 There are more than a few reasons, therefore, to embark on a new dialogue with Bonhoeffer and to carry on his ethics.9 2. About Laying Claim on Bonhoeffer The danger of entering into dialogue with Bonhoeffer is of claiming only those of his ideas that seem to fit one’s own position. This is exacerbated by the multitude of formulae and ideas Bonhoeffer’s enormously creative mind set into the world or freely took over from Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. In his work these ideas tended to float free of their original context and take on lives of their own. Examples are the metaphor of the ‘mündig gewordene Welt’ (world 6 For a fairly up-to-date literature overview on Bonhoeffer see Ernst Feil (ed.), in co-operation with Barbara E. Fink, Internationale Bibliographie zu Dietrich Bonhoeffer/ International Bibliography on Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Gütersloh: Christian Kaiser, Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998). Cf. also the helpful articles in the journal, Vorträge und Forschungen 46 (2001), hereafter cited as VuF. 7 Cf. Christian Gremmels and Hans Pfeifer, Theologie und Biographie. Zum Beispiel Dietrich Bonhoeffer (München: Kaiser Verlag, 1983). 8 Cf. Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘Gestaltwerdung und Wegbereitung. Zur Aktualität von Bonhoeffer’s Ethik’, VuF 46 (2001), pp. 56–64. 9 For a vivid dialogue with Bonhoeffer, particularly in the field of political ethics, see the works of Wolfgang Lienemann, Hans-Richard Reuter, and, in general, of the Forschungsstätte der Evangelischen Studiengemeinschaft (FEST) in Heidelberg. However, as for the reception of Bonhoeffer in German Protestantism some have spoken in terms of a lost heritage. Cf. Feil (ed.), Verspieltes Erbe? Cf. for the reception in the perspective of ecumenical ethics, Gunter M. Prüller-Jagenteufel, Befreit zur Verantwortung. Sünde und Versöhnung in der Ethik Dietrich Bonhoeffers in Ethik im Theologischen Diskurs, vol. 7 (Münster: Lit. Verlag, 2004).

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come of age),10 the formula ‘Religionsloses Christentum’ (Christianity without religion),11 or the ‘nicht-religiöse Interpretation der theologischen Begriffe’ (non-religious interpretation of theological terms).12 Along with these terms, different periods or motifs of Bonhoeffer’s work have been isolated from the whole, quite often only in order to support the respective theological position of the Bonhoeffer reader with reference to the heroic witness. Stanley Hauerwas’s book, Performing the Faith, is one recent attempt to claim Bonhoeffer and in which Bonhoeffer’s political ethics appears as a blueprint of Hauerwas’s political ethics with its focus on the relationship of Church and world.13 One may assume that for this reason Hauerwas’s picture of Bonhoeffer does not reflect, for example, Bonhoeffer’s disappointment with the Bekennende Kirche14 or his co-operation with a restorative and bourgeoisie group of conspirators against Hitler.15 Even more portentous is Hauerwas’s refusal to discuss the question of ‘power’,16 which has the effect of excising a decisive (although terminologically inexplicit) category of Bonhoeffer’s thought. In the light of much that Bonhoeffer has written, there is nothing wrong in Hauerwas claiming Bonhoeffer For contributions to the discussion of this metaphor, cf. the papers in Die Mündige Welt I–IV, 1959–1963. For a Marxist understanding of the world come of age, see Hanfried Müller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer — Christuszeuge in der Bekennenden Kirche für die mündige Welt in Albrecht Schönherr und Wolf Krötke (eds.), Bonhoeffer-Studien. Beiträge zur Theologie und Wirkungsgeschichte Dietrich Bonhoeffers. Im Auftrage des Bonhoeffer-Komitees beim Bund der Evangelischen Kirchen in der DDR (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1985), pp. 36–50. 11 Cf. Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung, pp. 401ff. 12 Cf. Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung, pp. 359, 509. Cf. Gerhard Ebeling, ‘Die nicht-religiöse Interpretation biblischer Begriffe’, in Die Mündige Welt II, 1956, pp. 12–73. Cf. in critique of Ebeling, Gerhard Sauter, ‘Zur Herkunft und Absicht der Formel “Nicht-religiöse Interpretation biblischer Begriffe” bei Dietrich Bonhoeffer’, Evangelische Theologie 25 (1965), pp. 283–97. For an overview on the discussion of both phrases, cf. Peter H A. Neumann (ed.), “Religionsloses Christentum” und “nichtreligiöse Interpretation” bei Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wege der Forschung 304 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990). 13 Cf. Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Non-violence (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004). 14 Cf. this aspect of Bonhoeffer’s biography, Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Theologe, Christ, Zeitgenosse (München: Kaiser Verlag, 1967), particularly the chapter on ‘Die Wendung des Christen zum Zeitgenossen’, pp. 760ff. Cf. also Reinhold Mokrosch, ‘Das Gewissensverständnis Dietrich Bonhoeffers. Reformatorische Herkunft und politische Funktion’, in Gremmels (ed.), Bonhoeffer und Luther, pp. 59–92, here p. 86: ‘Von der B(ekennenden) K(irche) hatte er (i.e. Bonhoeffer — S.H.) keine Unterstützung zu erwarten. Er erschien nach dem 5.4.43 nicht einmal auf ihrer Fürbittenliste. Der “Einfältige” stand unter dem Verdacht eines verirrten Gewissens.’ 15 Cf. Tiemo Rainer Peters, Die Präsenz des Politischen in der Theologie Dietrich Bonhoeffers. Eine historische Untersuchung in systematischer Absicht, Systematische Beiträge 18 (München: Kaiser Verlag, 1976), pp. 61ff. 16 Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, pp. 19f. 10

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statements such as, ‘There is no greater power than the power of a community of truth’.17 However, this statement is deployed in a radically different context than the one Bonhoeffer faced in his Church and in the protest against the Nazi regime, but Hauerwas also does so by disregarding that for Bonhoeffer the content of that truth was not the power of a community. Hauerwas does not answer to the christological dimension and the Lutheran grammar of Bonhoeffer’s political ethics.18 This is particularly true for its christological foundation and the distinction between Letztes and Vorletztes (‘ultimate’ and ‘penultimate’) with which Bonhoeffer reformulated the doctrine of the two kingdoms.19 For Bonhoeffer, this doctrine should not be interpreted in terms of the relationship of two realms, Church and world, or Church and state, but in terms of God’s rule in the world. Christian life is exercised within God’s four mandates (work, marriage/family, the authorities and the Church), in which the world finds itself already related to Christ.20 In Bonhoeffer’s thought there is a principled openness of God’s reality to the worldly reality and vice versa, mediated through Christ. He writes that the action of Christians does not result from a rupture between ‘World’ and ‘Christianity’, but from the joy in God’s reconciliation with the world in Jesus Christ: Because God and man became one in Jesus, it is through him that the worldly and the Christly become one in Christian action.21 It has impeded the reception of his work that Bonhoeffer often uses the terms ‘World’ and ‘Church’ as pithily as Hauerwas;22 but he does not build his political ethics of responsible, sachgemäße (‘appropriate’, in the sense of ‘in accord with salvation history’) action on this distinction. The decisive question of political ethics for Bonhoeffer is the very question of power as opposed to Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, p. 20. It remains, of course, highly controversial what ‘Lutheran grammar’ is. See, for example, Karen L. Bloomquist and John R. Stumme (eds.), The Promise of Lutheran Ethics (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998). For a Bonhoeffer critique from the standpoint of a liberal protestant virtue ethics, cf. Konrad Stock, ‘ “Teure Gnade?” Fragen an Bonhoeffers “Nachfolge” ’, VuF 46 (2001), pp. 33–39. 19 Cf. paradigmatically Bonhoeffer, Ethik, the chapter ‘Die letzten und die vorletzten Dinge’, pp. 137ff. 20 Bonhoeffer, Ethik, pp. 54f. 21 ‘Nicht aus der bitteren Resignation über den unheilbaren Riß zwischen Vitalität und Selbstverleugnung, zwischen “weltlich[em]” und “christlichem”, zwischen “autonomer Ethik” und “Ethik Jesu”, sondern aus der Freude über die vollzogene Versöhnung der Welt mit Gott, aus dem Frieden des vollbrachten Heilswerkes in Jesus Christus . . . kommt das Handeln der Christen. Weil in Jesus Christus Gott und Mensch eins wurde, wird durch ihn im Handeln der Christen das “Weltliche” und das “Christliche” eins.’ Bonhoeffer, Ethik, p. 252. 22 Cf. for example the chapter ‘Kirche und Welt’, in Bonhoeffer, Ethik, pp. 342–53. Cf. also the chapter, ‘Christus, die Wirklichkeit und das Gute’, in which Bonhoeffer develops the notion of ‘den einen Raum der Christuswirklichkeit’ (one realm of Christ’s reality) over against the dualism of a two realm’s doctrine (Ethik, p. 43). 17 18

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the question of force, namely, how responsible and powerful action becomes possible within history.23 For Bonhoeffer, the question of power is twofold: First, he asks how man becomes empowered to act vicariously and therefore responsibly.24 Second, he asks how powerful action remains bound to reality in order not be perverted into force. 3. Power, Responsibility and Vocation From his dissertation to his Tegel writings, Bonhoeffer frames the question of power and political ethics christologically. It would, of course, be senseless to claim Bonhoeffer for Lutheranism, but without his Lutheran Christology of Menschwerdung (incarnation) with its emphasis on the communicatio idiomatum and the real presence of God in Christ (finitum capax infiniti),25 and without Luther’s institutional reflections on the Beruf (vocation) as ‘Ort, an dem dem Ruf Christi geantwortet und so verantwortlich gelebt wird’,26 Bonhoeffer’s thought is cut off from its roots and rendered opaque. For the Bonhoeffer of the Nachfolge (Discipleship), the Ethik and of Widerstand und Ergebung (Letters and Papers from Prison), the question of how someone comes to be empowered — as opposed to arbitrarily having power or usurping power forcefully — is the central question of political ethics. In this, Bonhoeffer does not mix power with force. He refuses to understand power in terms of subjective or collective abilities. For Bonhoeffer, political ethics asks how people are called to act co-operatively and vicariously. His question is how political action becomes and remains possible. This leads him to the centrality of the category Stellvertretung (vicarious action) and Beruf (vocation) for his political ethics. The Prinzip der Stellvertretung on which the sanctorum communio is founded27 becomes one of the main categories of political, representative action. The idea of the call to vicarious action underlies Bonhoeffer’s ethics of obedience to God’s commandments in his Nachfolge, the doctrine of the mandates in his Ethik and the ethics of the Diesseitigkeit (immanence) ‘Politisches Handeln bedeutet Verantwortung wahrnehmen. Es kann nicht geschehen ohne Macht. Die Macht tritt in den Dienst der Verantwortung.’ Bonhoeffer, Ethik, p. 244. 24 Cf. Bonhoeffer, Ethik, pp. 257ff. 25 Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christologie, in Eberhard Bethge (ed.), Dietrich Bonhoeffer Gesammelte Schriften III (München: C. Kaiser Verlag, 1960), pp. 166–242, here p. 222, hereafter abbreviated GS. Cf. also Bonhoeffer’s critique of Barth in Akt und Sein. Tra nszendentalphilosophie und Ontologie in der systematischen Theologie, ed. Hans-Richard Reuter, DBW 2 (1988), pp. 78–79, 85. 26 ‘The place, where Christ’s vocation is heard and therefore responsibly lived.’ Bonhoeffer, Ethik, p. 291f. Cf. also Bonhoeffer, Nachfolge, eds. Martin Kuske and Ilse Tödt, DBW 4 (1989), pp. 35 and 253f. 27 Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio. Eine dogmatische Untersuchung zur Soziologie der Kirche, ed. Joachim von Soosten, DBW 1 (1986), p. 92. 23

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in his letters from Tegel. In German, the word Beruf that came to be simultaneously used as the civic equivalent for ‘job’ still conveys its etymological source Berufung, ‘vocation’ or ‘calling’. Both Luther’s and Bonhoeffer’s political ethics rest on the notion that Christians are not just called out of the world but within and into a reality full of vicarious relations, dependencies and responsibilities, to discern the presence and reality of God’s will in their place in the world. For Bonhoeffer, the stress on the ‘vocation’ by Christ prevents the Beruf from becoming independent from God’s claim on the whole of reality, while the category of vicarious action connects political ethics to Christology. Beruf is Jesus’ call to belong to him and to be occupied by him at the place where the call is received, including work and personal relationships.28 Central for Bonhoeffer is the metaphor of the actual Weltgestalt (present shape) that God’s love for humanity gains in the world. For him, God’s love and kingdom includes all parts of reality, including political action. The shape that God’s love assumes within the world may even include the shape of someone struggling for selfassertion, power and success.29 Instead of thinking in terms of the relationship of ‘Church’ and ‘world’, Bonhoeffer thinks in terms of the different worldly shapes of God’s love, the Weltgestalten der Liebe Gottes. Although God’s love is not from this world, it reaches into the world and gains shape within the world. However, there is no general theory of how this happens. Instead, there are places where people can trust that they are subject to God’s rule, as indicated by the mandates, and there are actions through which people train themselves in the expectation of God’s kingdom, such as prayer. For Bonhoeffer, the world’s institutions, the mandates, do not stay the same when confronted with God’s renewing kingdom, but are recreated to an extent that they do not hinder people in trusting in God, praying to him and following Christ. They are not thereby transformed into God’s eternal kingdom, but become the way God rules the world as world. It is important for understanding Bonhoeffer that this Weltgestalt is closely tied to the Beruf, the witness of the disciple at his place in the world. Every human being may take the shape of the Weltgestalt der christlichen Liebe. For Bonhoeffer, this Weltgestalt is always tied to someone who is called to responsible 28 Der Beruf ist ‘der Ruf Jesu Christi, ihm ganz zu gehören; er ist meine Inanspruchnahme durch Christus an dem Ort, an dem ich von diesem Ruf getroffen werde; er umfasst sachliche Arbeit und persönliche Beziehungen; er fordert “ein abgegrenztes Gebiet von Leistungen”, aber niemals als Wert an sich, sondern in der Verantwortung gegenüber Jesus Christus’. Bonhoeffer, Ethik, p. 293. 29 ‘Daß die Liebe Gottes zur Welt auch das politische Handeln umfaßt, daß die Weltgestalt der christlichen Liebe darum auch die Gestalt des um Selbstbehauptung, Macht, Erfolg, Sicherheit Kämpfenden annehmen kann, das kann nur dort begriffen werden, wo die Menschwerdung der Liebe Gottes ernst genommen wird.’ Bonhoeffer, Ethik, p. 244.

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action within his worldly relations. The question of political ethics is not how Christians relate to the world, but how man finds himself called by God within the bonds and relations he inhabits. Hence, the question of political ethics is how the Christ-reality becomes real within the world. To act politically does not mean for Bonhoeffer to realise political ideas within the world, but to answer a vocation. The externality of this vocation to the moral agent makes the worldly institutions, the publicity of God’s word in the Church, and frequent praying necessary within Bonhoeffer’s conception. Just as the disciple needs to hear God’s word to let his heart be ruled by God, the citizen needs the institutions to let his actions be ruled by God’s law. This has consequences for Bonhoeffer’s underlying ‘story’ of Christian ethics which will be pursued in the following section. 4. From Church to World or from Christ to Christ? Hanfried Müller’s classic study, Von der Kirche zur Welt,30 has served as a paradigm of Bonhoeffer exegesis in its claim that Bonhoeffer underwent a sort of secularisation process both biographically and systematically. The title of Müller’s book is programmatic for what eventually became a tradition in Bonhoeffer research. The claim is that Bonhoeffer made his way from the Church to the world, from the retreat in Finkenwalde to the conspiracy against Hitler. Clifford J. Green, for example, tried to reconstruct the biographical roots of Bonhoeffer’s radical picture of the disciple in his early works.31 According to Green, Bonhoeffer’s book The Cost of Discipleship is Bonhoeffer‘s own fight against narcissism and his bourgeois protestant heritage. Green thus claims that the counter-model of the Christian life depicted in The Cost of Discipleship slips toward an opposite extreme. Bonhoeffer’s disciple is called a highly artificial figure — and Christ a figure far too overwhelming to form a basis for political ethics. For Green, Bonhoeffer’s authoritative Christology in the Nachfolge reduces men to marionettes in order to come to grips with his own narcissistic ego.32 It has been widely assumed in accord with this thesis that as the Church fades from view in Bonhoeffer’s work, the more political ethics develops. In the line of this thought, The Cost of Discipleship was interpreted as an entirely ecclesiocentric, acosmic ethics.33 The Hanfried Müller, Von der Kirche zur Welt. Ein Beitrag zu der Beziehung des Wortes Gottes auf die societas in Dietrich Bonhoeffers theologischer Entwicklung (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1961 [1956]). 31 Cf. Clifford J. Green, The Sociality of Christ and Humanity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Early Theology, 1927–1933, Dissertation Series (American Academy of Religion), 6 (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1972). 32 Cf. Clifford J. Green, ‘Soteriologie und Sozialethik bei Bonhoeffer und Luther’, in Gremmels (ed.), Bonhoeffer und Luther, pp. 93–128. 33 Cf. Müller, Kirche (1961), ‘Die “Nachfolge” ist spezifisch kirchliche Ethik.’ 30

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philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizäcker interpreted Bonhoeffer’s life as ‘eine Reise zur Wirklichkeit’ (a journey to reality).34 This interpretation is either trite, if we take it for granted that any person will gain life experience throughout the course of his life, or it is wrong if it means that the less Church you find in Bonhoeffer’s ethics the more realistic they become. But does Bonhoeffer think at all about a ‘real’ as opposed to a ‘Christian’ world? Did he conceive political ethics as a move from the ‘inside’ of the Christian reality to the ‘outside’ of the worldly reality? The answer is clearly no. But what is the story that underlies and carries his political ethics? It has been rightly claimed that The Cost of Discipleship focuses on the individual moral subject in relation to the community of faith and is less focused on thematising the disciple’s worldly mission.35 However, a synchronic reading of Bonhoeffer’s works reveals that Bonhoeffer never lost the christological structure of political ethics he developed in The Cost of Discipleship. The moment of external vocation remains central to all of Bonhoeffer’s political ethics. Ernst Feil has convincingly shown that Bonhoeffer’s ethics always follows an underlying christological grammar. According to his analysis, The Cost of Discipleship is not an otherworldly ethics later replaced by a worldly ethics. By being called out of the world the disciple finds himself on the right way into the world.36 Ethics is the way to actively engage in a reality in which God’s will and the world’s reality communicate in Christ. For Bonhoeffer, the underlying story of ethics is not the way from Church to the world, but from Christ to Christ. Christian ethics is therefore the discernment of the reconciliation God has already achieved for humanity by handing on the gifts of reconciliation to each other through good works. It is about the ‘Wirklichwerden der Christuswirklichkeit in der von ihr schon umschlossenen, . . . gegenwärtigen Welt’.37 As Tiemo Rainer Peters has Carl Friedrich von Weizäcker, ‘Gedanken eines Nichttheologen zur theologischen Entwicklung Dietrich Bonhoeffers’, in Hans Pfeifer (ed.), Genf ‘76. Ein BonhoefferSymposion, in IBF 1 (1976), pp. 29–50. 35 Bonhoeffer ‘verhandelt das Problem der Nachfolge doch noch vorwiegend unter dem Gesichtspunkt des einzelnen in Richtung auf die Gemeinde und im Blick auf die Grenzen des innerweltlichen Daseins der Gemeinde. Die Verbindung der Nachfolge mit dem Gedanken der Sendung in die Welt erscheint nur ganz am Rande. In Bonhoeffers Ethik . . . spielt denn auch der Begriff der Nachfolge als solcher keine merkliche Rolle’. Ernst Wolf, Sozialethik. Theologische Grundfragen, 3rd edn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), p. 149. 36 Der Ruf in die Nachfolge ‘führt aus der Welt heraus und erst dadurch wirklich in sie hinein . . . Der Weg durch die Nachfolge zurück in die Welt ist kein Zurück auf einem falschen Weg, … sondern das Weitergehen des in der Nachfolge eingeschlagenen Weges’. Ernst Feil, Die Theologie Dietrich Bonhoeffers. Hermeneutik, Christologie, Weltverständnis, 3rd edn, Systematische Beiträge, 6 (München/Mainz: Kaiser, MatthiasGrünewald, 1971), pp. 288f. 37 Bonhoeffer, Ethik, p. 44. 34

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shown, this does not only apply to Bonhoeffer’s Ethik, but also to The Cost of Discipleship.38 For Bonhoeffer, the political ethics of the Christian community and of each Christian rests on the witness that the world rests in God’s hands.39 In illustration of this point, Bonhoeffer frequently refers to Luther’s return from the monastery to the world. According to Bonhoeffer, Luther’s movement does not signify a secularisation or enculturation of Reformation ethics, which then had to do rather with civic duties than with God’s will. On the contrary, Luther made this move to answer Christ’s vocation within the world as the place where God’s grace meets humankind and grants it its humanity.40 Living with God is discerned and practised within God’s mandates: creaturely institutions in which reality is ordered toward Christ.41 Bonhoeffer’s ethics is about meeting God’s will in the world, just as God’s and the world’s reality meet in Christ. This sounds to some extent like Hegel, and Oswald Bayer has indeed characterised Bonhoeffer’s ethics as Christology, and his Christology as ethics,42 thereby pointing towards Hegelian modes of thinking. What distinguishes Bonhoeffer from Hegel, however, is the externality of vocation. According to Bonhoeffer, the worldly institutions can only be regarded as divine insofar as they originate in God’s commandment.43 The dialectics and togetherness of divine and worldly reality in Christ that characterise Bonhoeffer’s ethical thinking are dangerous if anyone should want to give his authority divine legitimacy, but they are at the same time a sharp heuristic instrument for revealing the sources of countervailing power in political ethics. Bonhoeffer’s ethics walk on this edge. Whereas today’s mainstream ethics concentrate on the vita activa, Bonhoeffer has sought to hold together vita activa and passiva by reflecting ethics christologically, as a transformation of man into Peters, Die Präsenz des Politischen, pp. 58ff. For a different view and a critique of Bonhoeffer’s Nachfolge, cf. Klaus-M. Kodalle, who claims that only the late Bonhoeffer came to understand ‘das Leben als ein christologisch eröffnetes Daseinsexperiment’, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Zur Kritik seiner Theologie (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1991), p. 194. 39 ‘Weil die Gemeinde die von Gott selbst auf dieser Erde gegründete Stadt auf dem Berge — Polis (Mat 5,14) — ist, . . . darum gehört ihr “politischer” Charakter unabdingbar zu ihrer Heiligung. Ihre “politische Ethik” hat ihren einzigen Grund in ihrer Heiligung, daß Welt Welt sei und Gemeinde Gemeinde, und daß doch das Wort Gottes von der Gemeinde ausgehe über alle Welt als die Botschaft davon, daß die Erde und was darinnen ist, des Herrn ist; das ist der “politische” Charakter der Gemeinde.’ Bonhoeffer, Nachfolge, pp. 277f. 40 Bonhoffer, Ethik, p. 291. 41 Bonhoffer, Ethik, p. 56. 42 ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer hat die Christologie als Ethik und die Ethik als Christologie verstanden.’ Oswald Bayer, ‘Christus als Mitte. Bonhoeffers Ethik im Banne der Religionsphilosophie Hegels’, Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift 2 (1985), pp. 259–76, here p. 259. 43 Bonhoeffer, Ethik, p. 56. 38

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the image of Christ.44 According to Bonhoeffer, ethics starts with the revivification and suffering of God’s ethics and goes on to conceive of how humans may co-operate with God. His ethics is thoroughly christological through all periods of his work. Whenever Bonhoeffer comes along to do ethics, he arrives from somewhere in the story of Christ.45 This might be the reason why Bonhoeffer’s ethics have been so inspiring for those who began doing Christian ethics within situations of suffering, who searched for possibilities to act under oppressive circumstances. Daniel Beros, an Argentine pastor of the Lutheran Church of La Plata, and now lecturer of systematic theology in Buenos Aires, told me that Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison as well as The Cost of Discipleship have provided his Church and many of his fellow citizens with a political ethic up to the present generation. This is not only because Bonhoeffer promoted the Blick von unten (view from below) that made him influential in a South American setting.46 What really struck me in Daniel’s account is that the poor and oppressed read The Cost of Discipleship not as a radical but as a realistic account of political ethics. On such an interpretation, the ethics of the Sermon of the Mount is part of God’s realism for all humanity. The hermeneutical key for such a realistic interpretation of a book which is widely assumed to offer a radical ethics is Bonhoeffer’s Christology of Menschwerdung (incarnation). God’s ethics of Menschwerdung starts with the transformation and vocation of man, not with ethical ideals to be put into practice. According to Julio de Santa Ana, Bonhoeffer offers a theological framework that overcomes the dualism between God and world, Church and society, idea and reality, and helps to formulate an ethics of discerning God’s presence within the world, among the poor, the suffering and those who yearn for justice.47 Bonhoeffer’s decisive influence on liberation theology rests on his point that, in Christ, God has taken position within history.48 In the words of Bonhoeffer: ‘In Christus begegnet uns das Angebot, an der Gotteswirklichkeit und an der Weltwirklichkeit zugleich teil zu bekommen, eines nicht ohne das andere. Die Wirklichkeit Gottes erschließt sich nicht anders als indem sie mich ganz in die Weltwirklichkeit hineinstellt, die Weltwirklichkeit aber finde ich immer schon getragen, angenommen, versöhnt in der Wirklichkeit Gottes vor.’49 For Bonhoeffer, we discern the reality of God within the reality of the world whenever we undertake to reconcile, love, forgive, Cf. Bonhoeffer, Nachfolge, pp. 297ff. (with reference to Rom. 8:29) or Bonhoeffer, Ethik, pp. 62ff. 45 Cf. for the christological grammar of Bonhoeffer’s theology, John D. Godsey, The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1960), particularly pp. 264ff. 46 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Der Blick von unten, in Gesammelte Schriften II, p. 441. 47 Cf. Julio de Santa Ana, ‘Der Einfluß Bonhoeffers auf die Theologie der Befreiung’, in Hans Pfeifer (ed.), Genf ‘76, in IBF 1, pp. 151–63. 48 Santa Ana, Der Einfluß Bonhoeffers, p. 163. 49 Bonhoeffer, Ethik, p. 40. 44

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and make peace.50 The circularity of this argument is obvious at first glance. Ethics means to come from Christ and meet him again, ‘in der vollen Diesseitigkeit des Lebens’ (in the full immanence of life).51 However, praying, listening to God’s word, and hearing and becoming aware of the need of others open this circle — are all practices in which men are confronted with the viva vox Evangelii. Bonhoeffer’s Christology helps us to discern and reflect on the praxis of good works of reconciliation, forgiveness, help, consolation and justice. For Bonhoeffer, good works are the way in which men embark on God’s reality within the world, as revealed in Christ. They originate in God’s calling, and are performed at the places where people find themselves subject to God’s antecedent action in Christ.52 Hence, good works for Bonhoeffer are never conceived as separated from prayer.53 The pressing question of political ethics, of how one gains power to act politically, lies at the centre of Bonhoeffer’s ethics. The good works, which God has planted within the world in Christ, provide the impulse of political action. They are the paradigmatic political actions insofar as people do not use them to act for themselves but for others. This vicarious, mandatory and representative logic of political action, substantiated in the pro nobis-logic of Christ, serves as cantus firmus in Bonhoeffer’s works on ethics. As Christ became human being for humankind, the point of political ethics is how to become or discover oneself as human being for others. In doing so, people participate in and make present Christ’s very existence.54 As Christ was ‘der Mensch für andere’ (the man for others), the Church can only be regarded as the body of Christ insofar as she exists for others and serves others.55 For Bonhoeffer, the way from Christ to Christ is the way of political ethics. However, Christology does not become a homogenising political theory. The citizen remains a necessary counterpart of the disciple, and vice versa. 5. The Call to Citizenship Bonhoeffer’s thought is appropriately developed by calling the political Weltgestalt of God’s worldly kingdom ‘citizen’ — as the Along with Bonhoeffer, Wolf Krötke holds ‘daß die Theologie um so wirklichkeitsoffener ist, je strenger sie christologisch denkt’. ‘Weltlichkeit und Sünde. Zur Auseinandersetzung mit Denkformen Martin Luthers in der Theologie D. Bonhoeffers’, Zeitschrift für Evangelische Ethik 28 (1984), pp. 12–27, here p. 20. 51 Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung, p. 542. 52 Bonhoeffer, Nachfolge, pp. 294ff. 53 Cf. Heinz Eduard Tödt, ‘Glauben in einer religionslosen Welt. Muß man zwischen Barth und Bonhoeffer wählen?’ in Heinz Eduard Tödt, Theologische Perspektiven nach Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. Ernst-Albert Scharffenorth (Gütersloh: Kaiser Verlag, 1993), pp. 36–44, here p. 42. 54 Larry L. Rasmussen regards this participation in Christ, freed from the thought of imitatio Christi, as characteristic for Bonhoeffer’s ethics. See his ‘Ethik des Kreuzes am gegebenen Ort’, in Bonhoeffer und Luther, in IBF 6, pp. 129–66, here p. 150. 50

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disciple, for Bonhoeffer, is the Weltgestalt of God’s creative word. God calls the citizen within and through the institutions to discover the truly humane, that is: responsible and co-operative political action — even though the citizen might not himself know that he embarks on a reality provided and guided by God. One of the characteristic features of Bonhoeffer’s political thought is the claim that through Christ humanity is freed to be truly human. For Bonhoeffer, God grants law, truth, reason, humanism, virtue and reconciliation their true worldliness without letting them slip through his fingers. In the time of crises, all of these will seek the presence and protection of Christ. This line of thought, which becomes most prominent in the Ethik, with reference to Mark 9:40 (‘For he that is not against us is for us’),56 eventually led Bonhoeffer to talk about the mündige Welt, the world come of age, in his prison papers and letters. The world come of age is the world God grants to be the world through Christ. It is not a godless world. The notion of the permanent communication of God and world, the correspondence of God’s will and the world’s reality distinguishes Bonhoeffer’s ‘world come of age’ from conceptions such as Harvey Cox’s ‘age of the secular city’.57 For Bonhoeffer, it is the living and present God who lets man become man, virtue become virtue, law become law and truth become truth, over against Nietzschean ‘Übermensch’-fantasies or totalitarian ideologies such as Nazism.58 This vivid christological grammar makes Bonhoeffer’s ethics thoroughly political; political in the sense that humanity is never alone with itself but vis-à-vis God’s powerful will in Christ. Bonhoeffer’s political ethics rests on the idea of a communicative opposition and togetherness: the communicatio idiomatum of God and man living together in Christ. It is this opposition and togetherness of God and man from which all other oppositions in Bonhoeffer ’s political thought stem. In Bonhoeffer’s ethics there is always a vocation, a call that establishes power over against the naturally given forces. The disciple is called by God’s word to live his life in the presence of God. He is the one who gives witness to the foundation and final end of all reality in Christ59 — the reality of reconciliation the citizen embarks on whenever he does what is just, right and good for his society. The notion of Weltgestalt ‘Die Kirche ist nur Kirche, wenn sie für andere da ist . . . Sie muß an den weltlichen Aufgaben des menschlichen Gemeinschaftslebens teilnehmen, nicht herrschend, sondern helfend und dienend. Sie muß den Menschen aller Berufe sagen, was ein Leben mit Christus ist, was es heißt, “für andere dazusein”.’ Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung, p. 560. 56 Bonhoeffer, Ethik, pp. 344ff. 57 Harvey Cox, The Secular City: A Celebration of its Liberties and an Invitation to its Discipline. Secularisation and Urbanisation in Theological Perspective, 8th edn (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 3. 58 Cf. Bonhoeffer, Ethik, pp. 263f. 59 Cf. Bonhoeffer, Ethik, p. 49. 55

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may serve as point of contact to introduce a category of republican political theory into Bonhoeffer’s theology — precisely where he lacks a clear typology of the homo politicus and its form of life. This might have to do with a lack of explicit pneumatology in Bonhoeffer’s theology, although his refusal to describe ways from the inner to the outer man, his description of the ethical situation where humans find themselves called within the relations of his life, and his insistence on prayer somewhat mitigate the deficit and implicitly witness to the work of the Spirit. The missing link between the citizen of political republicanism and Bonhoeffer’s political ethics is not the procedural side of democratic legitimacy, but the contextualisation of each citizen’s political appearance through his or her Beruf (vocation, profession) within reality. The citizen undertakes humane responsible action in his vocation because it is the way God wants the world to be sustained through Christ. It is through Christ that civil society becomes truly human. For Bonhoeffer, the citizen is an exemplary human being in the sense that he dwells within the reality that God has humanised in Christ. The civil society is not godless, but the way in which God through Christ allows humanity to become humane.60 This is where Bonhoeffer’s account of responsible and vicarious political action becomes highly relevant for today’s political theory, which tends to reduce the public role of citizens to electors. The citizen that Bonhoeffer has in mind is not just a formal individual without substantial appearance in the political realm, but someone who enters the political realm with a specific contribution according to the reality he has encountered and met through his vocation. The citizen appears on the political forum because he was called to do so by those who ask him for vicarious action and aid at his place of vocation, and because he has heard and experienced that hatred, division, scarcity and poverty do not have the last word. He enters the political stage with both a message and a clear idea of the features of a reconciled reality, and also with a clear vision of what has to be kept out of the political realm. The freedom with which Bonhoeffer himself met and attacked the totalitarian state did not originate in the autonomy of a modern individual but in the call to political responsibility in the light of God’s reconciliation with the world in Christ. In his works, it is the reality of reconciliation that calls the Cf. the chapter ‘Christus, die Wirklichkeit und das Gute’ (Christ, reality and the Good) in Bonhoeffer, Ethik, pp. 31–61. Cf., for example, pp. 40f.: ‘Die Wirklichkeit Gottes erschließt sich nicht anders als indem sie mich ganz in die Weltwirklichkeit hineinstellt, die Weltwirklichkeit finde ich aber immer schon getragen, angenommen, versöhnt in der Wirklichkeit Gottes vor . . . Es geht also darum, an der Wirklichkeit Gottes und der Welt in Jesus Christus heute teilzuhaben und das so, daß ich die Wirklichkeit Gottes nie ohne die Wirklichkeit der Welt und die Wirklichkeit der Welt nie ohne die Wirklichkeit Gottes erfahre.’

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human being to civic action, through the voice of others and through a preceding experience of a reconciled world. The individual finds himself claimed by God’s reality to do something specific: to become a citizen by representing, helping and co-operating, and even fighting when people are kept from participating in a humane reality. Any theory of civic society should take such substantial sources of civic action into account, while at the same time distinguishing civil responsibilities from private, religious, patriotic or other duties,61 maybe more so than Bonhoeffer himself was able to do. The disciple helps to define the citizen, and vice versa. However, Bonhoeffer’s biography ought not serve as an example of the citizen that I try to suggest here. Nor do his works paint a clearer picture of what this might look like in practice. The reason for this is that the image of the citizen cannot be conceived and conceptualised within a state of political emergency. In this negative sense, Bonhoeffer’s life is quite helpful in illustrating and understanding his works. For example, Bonhoeffer’s motives in deciding to return to Germany from New York remain unclear.62 He was apparently not free to act politically. This is reflected in his ethics, when Bonhoeffer thinks about the ‘außerordentliche (extraordinary) Situation’, where the institutional bonds of political action are lost and the responsible actor finds him or herself delivered to God’s judgment alone.63 Citizenship remains bound to the rule of law; it cannot be drawn and developed from the state of emergency. The need of the extraordinary situation sets the responsible person free from his institutional affiliations — a freedom in which he finds himself exclusively under God’s mercy, as Bonhoeffer states.64 Such a radical freedom beyond politics can, for Bonhoeffer, only be legitimate if it serves to regain the political. It must envision the return to order. However, such an action can never claim to be justified.65 It emerges when someone grasps radical evangelical freedom and steps coram Deo without the mediation of law or institutions. Thus a detailed description of the citizen cannot be conceived from the point of view of the state of emergency, although one may find himself thrown into such a situation where he is called to retrieve the political order at the price of an irrevocable assumption of debt. For our account of the citizen in dialogue with Bonhoeffer, it is important to note that the characteristics of the citizen emerge by For the theory of a democratic civic society, cf. Hans G. Ulrich, Wie Geschöpfe leben. Konturen evangelischer Ethik, Ethics in Theological Discourse 2 (Münster: Lit. Verlag, 2005), pp. 624–47. 62 In his Bonhoeffer biography, Bethge shows that Bonhoeffer himself was fundamentally insecure what among the personal, nostalgic and ecclesial reasons actually made up a decision that should change his life completely (Bethge, Bonhoeffer, pp. 730ff). 63 Cf. Bonhoeffer, Ethik, pp. 272–75. 64 Bonhoeffer, Ethik, pp. 274f. 65 Bonhoeffer, Ethik, pp. 274f. 61

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distinguishing him from other vocations, such as the disciple. Not everything can and should be of public relevance. Bonhoeffer gives no universal criteria on how to distinguish a political from a private realm, for he holds that this distinction is made at the place where humans find themselves called to responsible action. The responsibility for the other might become limited by the call of conscience.66 But this conscience is not that of a moral subject who decides where to engage and where not, to stay at peace with itself. In Bonhoeffer, there is no evidence that the individual conscience becomes the ultimate resort for civic action. On the contrary, conscience is itself reliant on being freed by Christ, so that peace with oneself is found in dedicating one’s life to God and one’s neighbours.67 However, citizenship does not transform into a religion. There is no way from citizen to disciple. The citizen should not lose his heart to the res publica. According to Bonhoeffer, political action is not a full description of life with God; nor can living with God go without political action. One question Bonhoeffer poses to political ethics today is which specific civic responsibilities induce and mould the citizen’s contribution to the political realm. On the one hand, the citizen should not be absorbed by his task to substantiate politics and lose his freedom. On the other hand, the citizen should not be imagined as detached from all palpable responsibilities, as is the individual of liberalism that does not substantially contribute to politics and is threatened by his lack of influence in real politics. Bonhoeffer’s citizen has heard a political message and experienced a political life with which he enters the political arena: it is the vocation, Beruf, the place in which a human being is responsible for others and in which he acts with them, for them and on their behalf.68 The citizen is the shape of the human being that acts for the benefit of and in co-operation with others according to well-defined and exercised responsibilities. He finds himself called to exercise and train public responsibility at the place of his specific vocation — where he is bound to co-operate and serve, and where he is less in danger of being used or manipulated. The formation and limitation of political responsibility does not mean for Bonhoeffer that citizenship is restricted to the personal encounter or to small communitarian units. Bonhoeffer acknowledges a break through the boundaries of immediate civic responsibilities to a responsibility for the whole of reality, for which the vocation by Christ remains the only criterion. For the sake of the evangelical freedom of vocation, Bonhoeffer does not offer a law for the extension of responsibility to Bonhoeffer, Ethik, p. 276. Bonhoeffer, Ethik, pp. 278f. 68 Cf. Bonhoeffer, Ethik, p. 287, where Bonhoeffer sees the personal encounter with others as the paradigmatic situation and the birthplace of responsibility: ‘Wo immer, auch im beruflichen Leben, Mensch und Mensch einander begegnen, dort entsteht echte Verantwortlichkeit . . .’. 66 67

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the general public realm.69 One example he gives is of the doctor, whose responsibility reaches beyond its immediate focus, his patient’s bedside, and enters into the whole of medicine and human life whenever the doctor publicly advocates against aberrations of medicine, like in the case of the eugenic measures of the Third Reich.70 The perspective moves from interpersonal responsibilities to the responsibility for the whole of humanity, without losing contact with its starting point — and without losing the central structural moment: the external vocation as the origin of political action. Bonhoeffer’s political ethics is a set of variations on the Lutheran dialectics of Gesetz und Freiheit, law and freedom, in which the law can only be suspended by virtue of its fulfilment. The grammar of this political ethics is the witness to God’s claim on the whole of reality by virtue of the togetherness of God and man in Christ. Institutional responsibilities are not exempt from this claim. For Bonhoeffer, freedom is never absolute. This emphasis sometimes leads him to paint an authoritarian picture of the mandates.71 However, the notion of the external call to responsibility in its manifold sense remains highly relevant for today’s political ethics, for it remains a constant reminder of the origins of political power over against mere force. From Bonhoeffer, political ethics can draw the idea of opposing and countervailing powers, as exemplified in the central opposition and togetherness of God and man in Christ. Bonhoeffer sticks to this paradigm throughout the whole of his political ethics, be it within the place of life of the mandates, where human action is bound to a vocation which remains institutionally mediated, or be it at the place of radical freedom in the state of emergency, where responsible action happens directly before God, exposed to his judgment. It is characteristic for Bonhoeffer’s political ethics that human political action never happens without opposition or a wholesome limitation, whether through institutional mediation, through conscience, or through direct encounter with God’s will and judgment.72 The political actor always finds him or herself facing an external vocation within various forms of mediation, depending on the place within the world where action is taken. In Bonhoeffer ’s political ethics, citizenship always originates in a calling. The political act is not located within the force of the individual agent, but has external sources. In putting the case this way Bonhoeffer’s political ethics remains highly critical towards both selfempowerment and totalitarianism. It is not hard to see the relevance of this political ethics for today. On the one hand, politics is threatened by Bonhoeffer, Ethik, p. 297. Bonhoeffer, Ethik, p. 294. 71 For a critique of Bonhoeffer’s doctrine of the mandates, cf. Wolf Krötke, ‘Weltlichkeit und Sünde’, pp. 25f. 72 Bonhoeffer, Ethik, pp. 274f. 69 70

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a delimitation of its responsibilities, since almost everything is drawn into the public sphere, treated in the field of politics and made subject to legislation. On the other hand, it is threatened by loss of political, mandatory action. The economic globalisation, for example, has rendered national politics widely powerless. Bonhoeffer’s political ethics helps to draw attention to the question of how to regain power and win political co-operation in such a situation. With Bonhoeffer, the necessity of a balance between deliberative and a republican politics comes into view. For example, he is one of the first protestant German theologians to advocate the protection of universal human rights. However, he does not interpret human rights on the basis of the moral subject of liberal contract theory, but in terms of natural, creaturely rights which originate in substantial bonds, which are discerned at the places of civic life.73 His political ethics is about finding out in personal encounter with others, with the worldly reality, with law and with God’s will, what to do and how to co-operate. It cannot be included in an ideology, utopia or political programme. For Bonhoeffer, politics is about discovering what to do together and for each other in a reality understood by means of a christological hermeneutic. The citizen always has something specific and limited to do for and with others, like doing something good, forgiving, making peace, granting justice.74 The reconciliation of which his political action lives is already there, it only has to be embarked on. Political action is bound and limited to vocation, in which the citizen discovers the relation of the reality in which he lives to the will of God. And even when he exerts free, responsible action, his power is bound to serve. ‘Disciple’ is Bonhoeffer’s word for someone who finds his heart ruled by Christ. With the ‘citizen’, Bonhoeffer envisages someone who finds himself called to co-operate and help others at his place of life, in the institutions to which he is bound. In the footsteps of Bonhoeffer, political action means to reckon with the world in all its worldliness while at the same time seeing it in the light of its reconciliation with God in Christ.75 We might ask what would have happened if Bonhoeffer had survived 9 April 1945? Westminster Abbey would have had one less statue, for sure. And we probably would have more elaborate books on Christian ethics, one of which might well have thematised life in the Spirit (Gal. 5). Maybe Bonhoeffer would have turned to this topic, for it remains one of the central unresolved questions in his oeuvre. It might also be that Bonhoeffer had reflected on the public nature of 73 Cf. the chapter ‘Das natürliche Leben’, in Bonhoeffer, Ethik, pp. 163ff. For a discussion of Bonhoeffer’s understanding of human rights, cf. Heinz Eduard Tödt, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffers theologische Ethik und die Menschenrechte’, in Theologische Perspektiven, pp. 138–45. 74 Bonhoeffer, Ethik, p. 268. 75 Bonhoeffer, Ethik, p. 263.

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God’s Word, the Predigt des Gesetzes (preaching the law) of traditional Lutheran theology. In Bonhoeffer, Protestant Germany could have had the public preacher it has missed since Schleiermacher. But could we imagine where Bonhoeffer’s pulpit might have been? Wherever we may imagine Bonhoeffer — be it in the context of German Protestantism or maybe in the World Council of Churches — we may think of him as a citizen striving for countervailing power.

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