Someone asked recently why I chose Bonhoeffer to spend so much of my academic career studying.
To respond is part biography and part theology.
I came to Bonhoeffer through his Discipleship. But the story of being captivated by Bonhoeffer begins much earlier and in a different place.
It begins as a senior in high school, reading Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. Herr Fredrich's account if ethics as the attempt of others to control and lord over the weak explained a good deal of my world, in teen angst. As Nietzsche maintained, it is only in moving "beyond good and evil" -- beyond the ethics of Kant's "categorical imperative" and Mill's "utilitarian calculus" -- that true human flourishing happens.
In college, then, I discovered the existentialist psychology of Paul Tillich. Tillich's synthesis of Nietzschean ethic (what he calls "the courage to be") along with a very complex re-reading of Christian theology, made being Christian more palatable. Then I read a good bit of Reinhold and Richard H. Niebuhr, who introduced me to a neo-Augustian Christian faith that had a richer account for the problem of human suffering.
Why suffering? Because at the same time Nietzsche's grip was loosening and I was becoming a Christian realist, I watched Schindler's List. That movie was the first clear confrontation that showed the bankruptcy of Nietzsche's project. Neitzsche isn't responsible for Nazism, but Nazism drew heavily from a characterized reading of Frederich.
The same semester I saw the movie, I read Bonhoeffer's Discipleship. It was a challenge to my violent Christian realism, and brought me to see for the first time how genuinely radical following Jesus might be.
But it was Bonhoeffer's Ethics that really shook things up for me. In particular, it was one sentence in Ethics: "The knowledge of good and evil appears to be the goal of all ethical reflection. The first task of Christian ethics is to supercede [aufzuheben -- cancel, dissolve] that knowledge".
That sentence hit me like Newton's apple.
Here's the argument: The problem with ethics (a la Kant, Mill and Nietzsche) is that it puts everything in human hands. If you make everything we do or think or say subject to our determination of "right" and "wrong", you push God off the throne and establish something or someone else as the judge. Any abstract principle capable of substantial moral guidance is destructively deceptive because it promises the soothing self-sufficiency we have all been seeking since Adam and Eve strapped on fig leaves. We shelter ourselves by recruiting our own consciences to anticipate and obviate God's judgment. "Why wait for God to sort things out when we've got the knowledge of good and evil right here -- we'll just get started and do it for him, eh?" Modern ethics, as an autonomous enterprise cut loose from "metaphysics and superstition", is a wholehearted embrace of idolatry.
In other words, the problem of ethics is the problem of the Fall. Disobedience names "good and evil". The alternative, Bonhoeffer argued, is ethics-as-obedience. Ethics is the positive response to God's call in Jesus. In other words, ethics is theology.
This is what attracted me to Bonhoeffer. His account of ethics -- even more so than Barth's even -- is founded on the incarnation. Because, for Bonhoeffer, ethics is concrete obedience in Act and Being (to cite his doctoral dissertation). Subtlety outstrips platitude in Bonhoeffer, in a way that even Sunday School classes understand. Witness the popularity of Discipleship.
The concreteness of God's command in Jesus Christ is always a thorny issue. It launches a list of questions for how Christians do ethics theologically: How do we receive God's command? Where do we go to listen? Given that direct epiphanies are rare (at best), how do we discern God's voice from the multitude of other voices? Who speaks for God? How and when do I presume to speak God’s command? What ethical accountability do we have at hand when someone acts destructively with the conviction that they are following the command of God? Can there be any ethical conversation between Christians and those outside the church? On what common ground would such a conversation even begin?
Those are the questions that pervade his writing. And they became the fodder for my dissertation, Christ Becoming Church: Bonhoefferian Border-Crossings between Church and World.
Bonhoeffer held, thanks to his Lutheran heritage, a theological commitment that wasn't true for Barth: By grace, the finite can bear the infinite. That commitment pervades from his first Dissertation, Communio Sanctorum, that the church is Christ "existing as community", to his discussion of the 4 mandates in Ethics (marriage, culture, government and church) as the places we encounter Christ.
His redefinition of "natural" (grounded as it is in Christ the Center) provides a way of speaking theologically about human rights and the value of politico-economic ordo without resorting to abstract philosophical commitments.
Where there is hunger, pollution, injustice, oppression, or disregard for life, the gospel is thereby hindered and Jesus is rejected. The crucifixions of the world, according to Bonhoeffer, are the crucifixions of Jesus.
For Bonhoeffer, the obedience that is ethics is social; there's no prayer-closet to which we can withdraw.
This is why the ultimate goal for Bonhoeffer's ethics is the same as its center: The incarnation. Ethics means becoming conformed to the incarnate, crucified, and risen paradigm of real humanity; ethics is discipleship. Because God entered the complexity of human life in order to redeem and reconcile it, Christians cannot abandon any aspect of reality as irredeemable. In Christ, we can see God and the world clearly at the same time. Motives, principles, and consequences are all factors to be considered together in obedience (not isolated as single criteria). The "ultimate question" then is not one of moral justification -- "how am I to heroically extricate myself from this situation without blame" -- but of total responsibility -- "how is the coming generation to live?" (Letters and Papers).
As imago Christi, Christians are obedient to Jesus -- and unconcerned about "good and evil". Responsibility for others entails bearing guilt -- even if that bearing means refusing to fight and loving one's enemies, thereby ending up dangling from a gallows in a Nazi prison camp.
Bonhoeffer's response to Nazi genocide (like that of Schindler's List), isn't more violence. It's resistance as disciples. It's concreteness.
In his death, no less than his life, Bonhoeffer's conformity to the Crucified One witnesses to an ethic that is at once courageous and moved beyond "good and evil". Barth's witness took a less tragic shape for lots of reasons, but here it's clear to me: Both theologians help us think ethically without biting into the knowledge of good and evil.