Thus far, I've been articulating an understanding of the powers and principalities that hopes to reclaim living humanly as the heart of the NT vision. What drives my theology is theodicy -- the problem of suffering, the problem of death. Living Christianly, I've been trying to say, is nothing more than living humanly in the midst of death.
If Americans are dehumanized by the violence of babel and brutalized in the social chaos wrought by the demonic powers and principalities, how can a person live?
How can a person live? How can a person live in the midst of death, in the face of demonic, dehumanizing forces?
The answer, I think, comes in resistance to evil. Resistance toward death is the only human way to live. Resistance is what gives us hope. The biblical response -- again, an answer which also has empirical authority -- is that hope is known only in the midst of coping with death. It is a person's involvement in that crisis in itself -- whatever the apparent outcome -- which is the definitively humanizing experience. Engagement in specific and incessant struggle against death's rule renders us human. Resistance to death is the only way to live humanly in the midst of the Fall.
It's the incessant struggle against death that humanizes us. Resistance to death is the only human way to live.
In fact, it's this resistance to death and its clinging to hope -- the message of resurrection -- that is the true heart of Christian ethics.
Christian ethics, Bonhoeffer rightly insisted in his Ethics, is only and always sacramental in essence. The issue in Christian ethics, for Bonhoeffer, is less about adjudicating right vs. wrong. To be sure that's a vital and critical piece. You always have to do what you discern to be right. It's just that life in the Fall is so morally confused and complicated that you will never know that you were right. You try to do right. You just have no guarantees that you are right.
The issue of biblical ethics is not expressed in vain efforts to divine the will of God in this or that particular situation. On the contrary, biblical ethics asks how to live humanly in the midst of death's reign. And biblical politics, therefore, as it manifests resistance to the power of death, is, at once, celebration of human life in society. Or as I've said by parable here before, biblical politics means the practice of the vocation to live as Jerusalem, the holy nation, amidst Babylon.
Biblical living, Bonhoeffer rightly insisted in Ethics, discloses that the ethical is sacramental, not moralistic or pietistic or religious.
The best that you can strive for, according to Bonhoeffer, is to resist death, to live humanly in the midst of death. Thus, Christian ethics is less about being right than about being a sign of life -- a sacrament -- in the midst of death. Christian ethics is about being a human being in the face of dehumanizing forces, no more, no less.
Living humanly in the Fall is such a sacrament, a grace and sign of life in the midst of death. Because living humanly is to live Christologically -- as Christian in the world. It is sacramental because it is incarnational.
To be ethical is to live sacramentally. Only in resistance can we be such sacraments. As Barth rightly demanded in his commentary on Romans: No to death means Yes to live. God's No is always the Yes of Resurrection.