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A Secular Theology For A World Come Of Age
By William Hamilton

THEOLOGICAL students seem to have laid aside their big black copies of Church Dogmatics these days and have found themselves mulling over the easier-to-carry but even more puzzling books of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Ministers recently out of seminary find that Bonhoeffer seems to make sense in their work. Undergraduate student conferences, chaplain's offices, even college dormitory rooms are now places where Bonhoeffer's works may be seen. Why is this the case? Bonhoeffer's theological views are not clear, nor do they obviously support either an orthodox or a liberal persuasion. Perhaps just because he does not offer us a neat and confident theological structure is the reason we are drawn to him. Nearly every other Protestant possibility is a confident one: Schleiermacher facing the Romantic movement; Ritschl's bourgeois man at home in culture, commerce, or family; Tillich and Bultmann knowing that one must take modern man seriously; Barth knowing that one must never take him so. Instead of all these we read: "Man is challenged to participate in the sufferings of God at the hands of a godless world."¹

It will be some time before too much will have been spoken and written about Bonhoeffer, and there is a great deal of work to be done on him. In this study I am concerned only with the prison writings, and only with a few themes therein.

I. THE FIRST FORMULATION OF THE IDEA OF WORLDLINESS

There are several extracts from the letters that can be seen as a kind of preliminary skirmish with the issues Bonhoeffer later formu-

¹ Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, July 18, 1944. Nearly all the Bonhoeffer references in this study arc to the above book. Since there are in use today at least four different published versions of this material (the English hard-cover publication with the above title, an English paper-backed version with the same title published by Fontana, the American edition Prisoner for God, and the German original entitled Widerstand und Ergebung), I shall cite the passages from the letters by date rather than by page.

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lated more carefully in his demand for a non-religious interpretation of Christianity and his description of the coming-of-age of the world. In these early passages the relation between this-worldliness and other-worldliness is set down in more traditional terms. The first is dated December 18, 1943; the second, January 23, 1944.

And on the Christian aspect of the matter, there are some lines which say:
... that we remember, what we would fain forget,
That this poor earth is not our home

-a very important sentiment, though one which can only come right at the end; for I am sure we ought to love God in our lives and in all the blessings he sends us. We should trust him in our lives, so that when our time comes, but not before, we may go to him in love and trust and joy. But, speaking frankly, to long for the transcendent when you are in your wife's arms is, to put it mildly, a lack of taste, and it is certainly not what God expects of us. We ought to find God and love him in the blessings he sends us. If lie pleases to grant us some overwhelming earthly bliss, we ought not to try and be more religious than God himself. For then we should spoil that bliss by our presumption and arrogance; we should be letting our religious fantasies run riot and refusing to be satisfied with what he gives. Once a man has found God in his earthly bliss and has thanked him for it, there will be plenty of opportunities for him to remind himself that these earthly pleasures are only transitory, and that it is good for him to accustom himself to the idea of eternity....

I am sure we honor God more if we gratefully accept the life lie gives us with all its blessings, loving it and drinking it to the full, grieving deeply and sincerely when we have belittled or thrown away any of the precious things of life (some people grumble at such behavior and say it is bourgeois to be so weak and sensitive) than we do if we are insensitive towards the blessings of life, and therefore equally insensitive towards pain.

In these passages, Bonhoeffer suggests that there is a time for thisworldliness and a time for other-worldliness. Both are necessary, but this-worldliness receives a special defense.²

A little later Bonhoeffer returns to this idea, but now there is less tension between this- and other-worldliness. Instead of there being a time for each, be suggests that both need to be in play always and at the same time. He draws on the musical analogy that meant so

² It may be useful to refer to two classical formulations of the relation between these two themes: Augustine, City of God, XXII, 22-24; and Calvin, Institutes, III, ix and x.

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much to him (lie once Suggested that the polyphonic form has special relevance for the Protestant precisely because of the analogical light it can throw on this problem). This item is from May 20, 1944.

What I mean is that God requires that we should love him eternally with our whole hearts, yet not so as to compromise or diminish our earthly affections, but as a kind of cantus firmus to which the other melodies of life provide the counterpoint. Earthly affection is one of these contrapuntal themes, a theme which enjoys an autonomy of its own.

We are on the way to the non-religious interpretation, but not quite there yet. And, I suspect, we are even further away from participating in the sufferings of God at the hands of a godless world." This-worldliness is the penultimate, other-worldliness or love of God with the whole heart is the ultimate. The first is the way to the second, the second is present but concealed in the first. There is no Christological. reflection springing from this formulation of the problem, and this is perhaps significant. Bonhoeffer largely draws from the Old Testament's hearty worldliness, and during this time we often hear him state that it is dangerous to want to rush to the New Testament too readily or too heedlessly. His reflections on "our theme" (as he often refers to this subject in his letters to Bethge) will become more complex and more Christological.

II. THE NON-RELIGIOUS INTERPRETATION

We should not be too confident about our ability to discover exact stages in the development of this theme. Indeed, the decisive exposition of what 1 am calling the second phase, the call for a nonreligious interpretation of Christianity, comes in point of time nearly a month before the last passage quoted above. But in spite of this overlapping, there are some new things here that we have not yet met, and we need to have before us the whole of this remarkable passage. The date is April 30, 1944.

The thing that keeps coming back to me is, what is Christianity, and indeed what is Christ for us today? The time when men could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or simply pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience, which is to say the time of religion as such. We are proceeding towards a time of no religion at all: men as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as

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"religious" do not in the least act up to it, and so when they say "religious" they evidently mean something quite different. Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old Christian preaching and theology rests upon the "religious premise" of man. What we call Christianity has always been a pattern-perhaps a true pattern-of religion. But if one day it becomes apparent that this a priori "premise" simply does not exist, but was a historical and temporary form of human self-expression, i.e. if we reach the stage of being radically without religion-and I think this is more or less the case already, else how is it, for instance, that this war, unlike any of those before it, is not calling forth any "religious" reaction?-what does that mean for "Christianity"?

It means that the linchpin is removed from the whole structure of our Christianity to date, and the only people left for us to light on in the way of "religion" are a few "last survivals of the age of chivalry," or else one or two who are intellectually dishonest. Would they be the chosen few? Is it on this dubious group and none other that we are to pounce, in fervor, pique, or indignation, in order to sell them the goods we have to offer? Are we to fall upon one or two unhappy people in their weakest moment and force upon them a sort of religious coercion?

If we do not want to do this, if we had finally to put down the Western pattern of Christianity as a mere preliminary stage to doing without religion altogether, what situation would result for us, for the Church? How can Christ become the Lord even of those with no religion? If religion is no more than the garment of Christianity-and even that garment has had very different aspects at different periods-then what is a religionless Christianity? Barth, who is the only one to have started on this line of thought, has still not proceeded to its logical conclusion, but has arrived at a positivism of revelation which has nevertheless remained essentially a restoration. For the religionless working man, or indeed, man generally, nothing that makes any real difference is gained by that. The questions needing answers would surely be: What is the significance of a Church (church, parish, preaching, Christian life) in a religionless world? How do we speak of God without religion, i.e. without the temporally-influenced presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak (but perhaps we are no longer capable of speaking of such things as we used to) in secular fashion of God? In what way are we in a religionless and secular sense Christians, in what way are we the Ekklesia, "those who are called forth," not conceiving of ourselves religiously as specially favored, but as wholly belonging to the world? Then Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, indeed and in truth the Lord of the world. Yet what does that signify? What is the place of worship and prayer in an entire absence of religion? Does the secret

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discipline, or, as the case may be, the distinction (which you have met with me before) between penultimate and ultimate, at this point acquire fresh importance? ...

The Pauline question whether circumcision is a condition of justification is today, I consider, the question whether religion is a condition of salvation. Freedom from circumcision is at the same time freedom from religion. I often ask myself why a Christian instinct frequently draws me more to the religionless than to the religious, by which I mean not with any intention of evangelizing them, but rather, I might almost say, in "brotherhood." While I often shrink with religious people from speaking of God by name-because that Name somehow seems to me here not to ring true, and I strike myself as rather dishonest (it is especially bad when others start talking in religious jargon: then I dry up almost completely and feel somehow oppressed and ill at ease)-with people who have no religion I am able on occasion to speak of God quite openly and as it were naturally. Religious people speak of God when human perception is (often just from laziness) at an end, or human resources fall: it is in fact always the Deus ex machina they call to their aid, either for the so-called solving of insoluble problems or as support in human failure-always, that is to say, helping out human weakness or on the borders of human existence. Of necessity, that can only go on until men can by their own strength, push those borders a little further, so that God becomes superfluous as a Deus ex machina. I have come to be doubtful even about talking of "borders of human existence." Is even death today, since men arc scarcely afraid of it any more, and sin, which they scarcely understand any more, still a genuine borderline? It always seems to me that in talking thus we are only seeking frantically to make room for God. I should like to speak of God not on the borders of life but at its center, not in weakness but in strength, not, therefore, in man's suffering and death but in his life and prosperity. On the borders it seems to me better to hold our peace and leave the problem unsolved. Belief in the Resurrection is not the solution of the problem of death. The "beyond" of God is not the beyond of our perceptive faculties. Epistemological theory has nothing to do with the transcendence of God. God is the "beyond" in the midst of our life. The Church stands not where human powers give out, on the borders, but in the center of the village. That is the way it is in the Old Testament and in this sense we still read the New Testament far too little on the basis of the Old. The outward aspect of this religionless Christianity, the form it takes, is something to which I am giving much thought.

Let us attempt to list some of the themes in this passage.

(1) Longing for the eternal, which formed a part of the Christian attitude in the previous stage, now seems to be part of what is meant

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by "religion," and is thus more decisively rejected than before. We belong wholly to this World. Two means are used to protect this from distortion: one is the penultimate-ultimate distinction that he had already dealt with in the Ethics. We do not live in two Worlds, we live in one world, this one, the world Without God. We live in the penultimate, and must not try to live anywhere else, though we believe in the ultimate. The other device is the "secret discipline," Which is a way of Witnessing to the ultimate Without attempting to call attention to it or to give it structure. Both faith and Church are thus utterly hidden, secret, unnoticed.³

(2) We see a decisive rejection of the religious a priori, and the affirmation that men can live, do live, and perhaps should live Without the God who is the answer to their problems. This is both a descriptive statement about the life of the World as Bonhoeffer saw it, and an attack on the theological position of his own professor of theology, Reinhold Seeberg.

What does religious a priori mean? It is the unspoken presupposition, carried through the centuries, that man needs the idea of God in order to develop himself, to solve his problems, and to understand the world. On this presupposition preaching was formed and texts Were interpreted religiously in accordance with it.⁴

While we will find Bonhoeffer returning to this, a question may be raised at this point. It is not clear just who it is that is radically without religion. Is it all men, or is it "modern man" in one sense or another? Is this a theological affirmation about all men or a piece of apologetic strategy? There may be a wavering back and

³ If the hiddenness of faith in the life of the world is a relatively new idea in Bonhoeffer, the idea of the hiddenness of the Church is one he has used before. This passage is from the 1933 Christology lectures at the University of Berlin: "With this humiliated one, the Church goes its own way of humiliation. It cannot reach out for a visible authorization of its way, since he, at every point, refused this. As the humiliated Church it must neither look with vain complacency to itself, as if its humility were a visible proof that Christ is present. Humiliation is not a proof to which one can draw attention. There is no law or principle which the Church must follow. There is only this fact of humility, which is God's way with the Church." Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. III, Kaiser Verlag, Munich, pp. 241-242. We can find this theme at the end of his life as well, in the following portion of the outline of a book included in the prison papers: "She must take her part in the social life of the world, not lording it over men, but helping and serving them. She must tell men, whatever their calling, what it means to live in Christ, to exist for others. And in particular, our own Church will have to take a strong line with the blasphemies of hybris, power-worship, envy and humbug, for these are the roots of evil. She will have to speak of moderation, purity, confidence, loyalty, steadfastness, patience, discipline, humility, content, and modesty. She must not underestimate the importance of human example, which has its origin in the humanity of Jesus, and which is so important in the teaching of St. Paul. It is not abstract argument, but concrete example which gives her word emphasis and power."
⁴ Albrecht Schoenherr, "Bonboeffer's Thoughts on the Church and Its Preaching in the World Which Has Come of Age," Die mündige Welt, Vol. I, p. 77.

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forth between these two positions. But if it is a theological statement, it suggests a very interesting and very odd type of theology-one that tries to do its work without a doctrine of God.

(3) Another theme, started here, and picked up later, is this: We can no longer begin with man in his weakness, in his despair, man who is going to die. Theology has no special interest in boundary-situations. We should speak to man in his life and prosperity, not in weakness. We are not interested in "the kind of faith that issues from despair." Death and the fear of death have no power to move man any closer to God. This is partly an attack on Luther's use of the law-gospel distinction and partly an attack on existentialism, perhaps especially on Heidegger. Was it Heidegger's politics that made Bonhoeffer reject the theological usefulness of his philosophical analysis? Again we should ask: Is this apologetic strategy, or the way to a specific theological stand? If it is the latter, it is an interesting theological position-one that tries to do its work without an eschatology. We can also note that one of the consequences of his attack on existentialism and psychotherapy as preparations for the Gospel is a rejection of religion as inwardness.

These three themes in the April 30 letter are really one theme, and I think it can be claimed that what we have is the earlier problem of worldliness put now in a slightly different way. Because of the necessary worldliness of the Christian, he is driven to a search for a nonreligious understanding of Christianity.

He turns, in the May 25, 1944 letter, to his attack on theologies of correlation, on Christianity as the answer to otherwise unanswerable human problems.

We should find God in what we do know, not in what we don't; not in outstanding problems, but in those we have already solved. This is true not only for the relation between Christianity and science, but also for wider human problems such as guilt, suffering, and death. It is possible nowadays to find answers to these problems which leave God right out of the picture. It just isn't true to say that Christianity alone has the answers. In fact the Christian answers are no more conclusive or compelling than any of the others. Once more, God cannot be used as a stop-gap. We must not wait until we are at the end of our tether: he must be found at the center of life: in life, and not only in death; in health and vigor, and not only in suffering; in activity, and not only in sin.

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Nowhere in his thought does Bonhoeffer approach Barth more closely than here. And nowhere in Bonhoeffer's work are we more closely questioned and challenged. Is it really possible to make a thorough rejection of Christianity as a need-fulfilling, problem-solving, answer-giving structure? Yet there is a sense in which Bonhoeffer is also to be seen as returning to a concern of liberal theology. Bonhoeffer himself sees this, and the following passage from the letter of June 8, 1944 describes what he takes his relation to the other theological currents to be. It cannot be claimed that this passage is either accurate or clear, though it is an important part of the evidence we are assembling.

Bultmann would seem to have felt Barth's limitations in sonic way, but he misconstrues them in the light of liberal theology, and hence goes off into the typical liberal process (the "mythological" elements of Christianity are dropped, and Christianity is reduced to its "essence"). I am of the view that the full content, including the mythological concepts, must be maintained. The New Testament is not a mythological garbing of the universal truth: this mythology (resurrection and so on) is the thing itself-but the concepts must be interpreted in such a way as not to make religion a pre-condition of faith (cf. circumcision in St. Paul). Not until that is achieved will, in my opinion, liberal theology be overcome (and even Barth is still dominated by it, though negatively), and, at the same time, the question it raises be genuinely taken up and answered-which is not the case in the positivism of revelation maintained by the Confessing Church.

The world's coming of age is then no longer an occasion for polemics and apologetics, but it is really better understood than it understands itself, namely on the basis of the Gospel, and in the light of Christ.

What we have noted as the first and the third themes in the April 30, 1944 letter return in a passage from June 27, 1944.

Salvation means salvation from cares and need, from fears and longing, from sin and death into a better world beyond the grave. But is this really the distinctive feature of Christianity as proclaimed in the Gospels and St. Paul? I am sure it is not. The difference between the Christian hope of resurrection and a mythological hope is that the Christian hope sends a man back to his life on earth in a wholly new way which is even more sharply defined than it is in tile Old Testament.

The Christian, unlike the devotes of the salvation myths, does not need a last refuge in the eternal from earthly tasks and difficulties.

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There is surely some Bultmann here, and the familiar rejection of Christianity as solution to problems. Note especially the "refuge in the eternal" phrase. This is certainly somewhat different from the idea of the eternal as the cantus firmus having its proper and appropriate place, that we saw in the letters of December 18, 1943 and May 20, 1944. This is also an important passage for anyone who wishes to maintain that Bonhoeffer's final theological vision is noneschatological. But because of its importance, the adequacy of the implied exegesis should certainly be questioned. It is doubtful whether he has done full justice to "Christianity as proclaimed in the Gospels and St. Paul." One wonders whether it is possible, wise, or necessary, to search for this kind of Biblical documentation for his position. As we shall shortly see, Bonhoeffer is on firmer ground when he gives up this kind of exegetical defense and returns to a more broadly Christological one.

One final passage needs to be recorded in this section devoted to the non-religious interpretation. In the July 8, 1944 letter, he returns to his attack on inwardness, and to his rejection of existentialism and psychotherapy.

When God was driven out of the world and from the public side of human life, an attempt was made to retain him at least in the sphere of the "personal," the "Inner life," the private life. And since every man still has a private sphere, it was thought that he was most vulnerable at this point.

From the theological point of view the error is twofold. First, it is thought that a man can be addressed as a sinner only after his weaknesses and meannesses have been spied out. Second, it is thought that man's essential nature consists of his inmost and most intimate background, and that is defined as his "Interior life"; and it is in these secret human places that God is now to have his domain!

On the first point it must be said that man is certainly a sinner, but by no means mean or common. To put the matter in the most banal way, are Goethe or Napoleon sinners because they were not always faithful husbands? It is not the sins of weakness, but the sins of strength, which matter here. It is not in the least necessary to spy out things. The Bible never does so.

On the second point it must be said that the Bible does not recognize our distinction of outer and inner. And why should it? It is always concerned with anthropos teleios, the whole man, even where, as in the Sermon on the Mount, the Decalogue is pressed home to refer to inward disposition. It is quite unbiblical to suppose that a "good intention" is enough. What matters is the whole good.

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The discovery of inwardness, so-called, derives from the Renaissance, from Petrarch perhaps. The "heart" in the Biblical sense is not the inward life, but the whole man in relation to God. The view that man lives just as much from outwards to inwards as from inwards to outwards is poles apart from the view that his essential nature is to be understood from his ultimate background.

This is why I am so anxious that God should not be relegated to some last secret place, but that we should frankly recognize that tile world and men have come of age, that we should not speak ill of man in his worldliness, but confront him with God at his strongest point, that we should give up all our clerical subterfuges and our regarding of psychotherapy and existentialism as precursors of God. The importunity of these people is far too unaristocratic for the Word of God to ally itself with them. The Word of God is -far removed from this revolt of mistrust, this revolt from below.

Here is the "aristocratic" Bonhoeffer we have already noted, with his deep respect for the inviolability of the inner life of another man. We have also suggested the possibility of Bonhoeffer's hostility to Heidegger's politics. Would it be irrelevant to add the reminder that Bonhoeffer's father was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Berlin, and that he was apparently an agnostic?

We are nearly finished with our collection of the relevant material for this second stage, the stage of the non-religious interpretation. One further question remains to be asked. just what is the theological foundation for this radical proposal? We have already observed that the foundation for the first stage, his general defense of Christian worldliness, is, more often than not, the Old Testament rather than the New. And we have also observed that where Bonhoeffer suggests specific exegetical grounds for the non-religious interpretation he is neither clear nor convincing. I think it can be claimed that he desired to found this general plea on Christological grounds. Some of the evidence for this should be noted. Here is a continuation of the passage from May 25, 1944, already cited.

The ground for this lies in the revelation of God in Christ. Christ is the center of life, and in no sense did he come to answer our unsolved problems. From the center of life certain questions are seen to be wholly irrelevant, and so are the answers commonly given to them-I am thinking for example of the judgment pronounced on the friends of job.

It is not clear just what "Christ" means in this context, and this rather generalized reference to Christ can also be seen in the last

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sentence of the June 8, 1944 passage, and in the reference to Christ's Lordship over the world in the April 30, 1944 letter, both quoted above. But the lines of this Christological foundation sharpen, and two quite different directions shortly emerge. In the June 27, 1944 letter lie writes:

The Christian, unlike the devotees of the salvation myths, does not need a last refuge in the eternal from earthly tasks and difficulties. But like Christ himself ("My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?") he must drink the earthly cup to the lees, and only in his doing that is the crucified and risen Lord with him, and he crucified and risen with Christ. This world must not be prematurely written off. In this the Old and New Testaments are at one. Myths of salvation arise from human experiences of the boundary situation. Christ takes hold of a mail in the center of his life.

Here we find that it is the suffering, the dereliction, and the cross that are the signs of the full acceptance of Jesus of the world. This passage reminds us of many passages in the much earlier 1933 Christology lectures delivered at the University of Berlin where the humiliation-Christology of Luther was very much to the fore. Note, for example, the very Lutheran statement on the atonement from these lectures:

But everything depends upon the fact that it is be who took on sarx with all its temptations and self-will. It is he who does this, and thus to the onlooker this must look like sin and trespassing. But because it is he, these statements appear in a different light. He really bears human sarx, but because it is he who bears it, this sarx has lost its rights. He makes decisions himself. He has anxiety as we have, and it is his own. He is tempted as we are, and it is his temptation. He is condemned as we are, but because it is he we are saved from condemnation. From the perspective of this "He" the harshest and most offensive statements about the humiliated God-man must be ventured and must be accepted. He really has been made sin for us and has been crucified as the worst of sinners. Luther says that lie is himself a robber, murderer, and adulterer, as we are, because he really bears sin. Thus he describes the ultimate depth of all Christological statements.⁵

But the cross is not the only element in the event of Jesus Christ that Bonhoeffer has in mind in defending the non-religious interpretation. Jesus as a man, as a teacher, is a man in the center of life, and not at all one who gives answers to ultimate questions arising on

⁵ Gesammelle Schriften, Vol. III, p. 237.

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the boundary of existence. Alongside the emphasis on the cross and suffering, then, we find at this stage an even stronger emphasis oil the life of Jesus and his way with men. Here is an important portion of his June 30, 1944 letter that shows this clearly:

Let me carry on a bit with the theological reflections I started a little while ago. I began by saying that God is being increasingly edged out of the world, now that it has come of age. Knowledge and life are thought to be perfectly possible without him. Ever since Kant, he has been relegated to the realm beyond experience.

Theology has endeavored to produce an apologetic to meet this development, engaging in futile rear-guard actions against Darwinism. At other times it has accommodated itself to this development by restricting God to the so-called last questions as a kind of Deus ex machina. God thus became the answer to life's problems, the solution of its distresses and conflicts. As a result, if anyone had no such difficulties, if he refused to identify himself in sympathy with those who had, it was no good trying to win him for God. The only way of getting at him was to show that he had all these problems, needs, and conflicts without being aware of it or owning up to it. Existentialist philosophy and psychotherapy have both been pretty clever at this sort of thing. It is then possible to talk to a man about God, and Methodism can celebrate its triumph. If however, it does not come off, if a man won't see that his happiness is really damnation, his health sickness, his vigor and vitality despair; if he won't call them what they really are, the theologian is at his wit's end. He must be a hardened sinner of a particularly vicious type. If not, he is a case of bourgeois complacency, and the one is as far from salvation as the other.

You see, this is the attitude I am contending against. When Jesus blessed sinners, they were real sinners, but Jesus did not make every man a sinner first. He called them out of their sin, not into their sin. Of course, encounter with Jesus meant the reversal of all human values. So it was in the conversion of St. Paul, though in his case the knowledge of sin preceded his encounter with Jesus. Of course Jesus took to himself the dregs of human society, harlots, and publicans, but never them alone, for he sought to take to himself man as such. Never did Jesus throw any doubt on a man's health, vigor, or fortune, regarded in themselves, or look upon them as evil fruits. Else why did he heal the sick and restore strength to the weak? Jesus claims for himself and the kingdom of God the whole of human life in all its manifestations.

This theme can be discovered in Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship, first published in German in 1937, which represented a deliberate attack on certain elements in traditional Lutheran the-

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ology. Bonhoeffer fimself was aware of the Christological shift that it represented. Even two years before the publication of that book, Bonhoeffer had written to his brother about a theological change he found himself compelled to make, and it can be assumed that the shift of emphasis from the cross to the life of Jesus is part of that change.

But I know that if I am to be "reasonable," I must in the next few days honorably shelve my whole theology (meine ganze Theologie an den Nagel hängen). When I began with theology, it looked to me like something else-perhaps a more academic affair. It has now become something else entirely. But I believe myself to be finally on the right track-for the first time in my life. And that pleases me very much. I am only worried that: I, out of great: anxiety over the opinions of men, will go no further, but remain stuck. I believe that I first became really inwardly clear and really candid when I just began by taking the Sermon on the Mount seriously.⁶

The date of this letter is January 14, 1935. We can assume that he felt that some of the Christological themes from the 1933 lectures needed to be altered, and that the criticism of Luther needed to be carried through at the center, on the point of Christology.⁷

Thus in searching for a genuine Christological basis for the nonreligious interpretation, Bonhoeffer in the letters draws oil both his traditional Lutheran humiliation, Christology and on the new perspectives to which he had come in The Cost of Discipleship. These two themes of the cross and the life are not, at this point, fully reconcled.

III. THE COMING-OF-AGE OF THE WORLD

Bonhoeffer seems to move on only one front at a time. In this third section, we will find no substantial clarification of the problem of the Christological foundation, but we can, I think, discern a new way of stating the demand for a non-religious interpretation. I refer to a phrase that we have already seen in the June 8, 1944 extract,

⁶ Ibid., pp. 24-25.
⁷ This criticism of the Reformers, however, is noticeable from the beginning. Referring to Bonhoeffer's 1930 thesis, Sanctorum Communio, Eberhard Bethge has recently written: "In insisting on the social character of the body of Christ, Bonhoeffer had to test the Reformers' strong rejection of faith as an habitus, to find out whether this really could mean that consequently faith must not be concerned for its earthly existence and that 'new creation' excluded any bodily appearance." Bethge, "The Challenge of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life and Theology," The Chicago Seminary Register, Vol. LI, No. 2, February 1961, p. 17. These admirable and indispensable lectures have been thoughtfully made available to students by Chicago Theological Seminary, and copies of this issue of the Register are available from that institution.

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a phrase now synonymous -with Bonhoeffer's name: "the coming of age of the world," or in another form, "the adulthood of the world" (die mündige Welt). Regin Prenter has remarked: "The nonreligious interpretation of revelation which Bonhoeffer seeks wants above all to express the relation of God's revelation to the world which has come of age."' If the non-religious interpretation is a demand based on a particular reading of the relation of God to the world, "coming-of-age" is Bonhoeffer's unique description of that relation. We must have before us the fragments in which Bonhoeffer tries to say what he means. The extracts which follow are from the June 8 and July 16, 1944 letters respectively.

The movement beginning about the thirteenth century (I am not going to get involved in any arguments about the exact date) towards the autonomy of man (under which head I place the discovery of the laws by which the world lives and manages in science, social and political affairs, art, ethics, and religion) has in our time reached a certain completion. Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis.... As in the scientific field, so in human affairs generally, what we call "God" is being more and more edged out of life, losing more and more ground.

Catholic and Protestant historians are agreed that it is in this development that the great defection from God, from Christ, is to be discerned, and the more they bring in and make use of God and Christ, in opposition to this trend, the more the trend itself considers itself to be anti-Christian. The world which has attained to a realization of itself and of the laws which govern its existence is so sure of itself that we become frightened. False starts and failures do not make the world deviate from the path and development it is following; they are accepted with fortitude and detachment as part of the bargain, and even an event like the present war is no exception. Christian apologetic has taken the most varying forms of opposition to this self-assurance. Efforts are made to prove to a world thus come of age that it cannot live without the tutelage of "God." Even though there has been surrender on all secular problems, there still remain the so-called ultimate questions-death, guilt-on which only "God" can furnish an answer, and which are the reason why God and the Church and the pastor are needed. Thus we live, to some extent, by these ultimate questions of humanity. But what if one day they no longer exist as such, if they too can be answered without "God"? ...

The attack by Christian apologetic upon the adulthood of the

⁸ "Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth's Revelation-Positivism," Die mündige Welt, Vol. III P. 15.

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world I consider to be in the first place pointless, in the second ignoble, and in the third un-Christian. Pointless, because it looks to me like an attempt to put a grown-up man back into adolescence, i.e. to make him dependent on things on which he is not in fact dependent any more, thrusting him back into the midst of problems which are in fact no problems for him any more. Ignoble, because this amounts to an effort to exploit the weakness of man for purposes alien to him and not freely subscribed to by him. Un-Christian, because for Christ himself is being substituted one particular stage In the religiousness of man, i.e. a human law....

[Barth] called the God of Jesus Christ into the lists against religion, "pneuma against sarx." That was and is his greatest service (the second edition of his Epistle to the Romans, in spite of all its neo-Kantian shavings). Through his later dogmatics, he enabled the Church to effect this distinction in principle all along the line. It was not that he subsequently, as is often claimed, failed in ethics, for his ethical observations-so far as he has made any-are just as significant as his dogmatic ones; it was that he gave no concrete guidance, either in dogmatics or in ethics, on the non-religious interpretation of theological concepts. There lies his limitation, and because of it his theology of revelation becomes positivist, a "positivism of revelation," as I put it.

There is no longer any need for God as a working hypothesis, whether in morals, politics, or science. Nor is there any need for such a God in religion or philosophy (Feuerbach). In the name of intellectual honesty these working hypotheses should be dropped or dispensed with as far as possible. A scientist or physician who seeks to provide edification is a hybrid.

At this point nervous souls start asking what room there is left for God now. And being ignorant of the answer they condemn the whole development which has brought them to this pass. As I said in an earlier letter, various emergency exits have been devised to deal with this situation. To them must be added the salto mortale back to the Middle Ages, the fundamental principle of which, however, is heteronomy in the form of clericalism. But that is a counsel of despair, which can be purchased only at the cost of intellectual sincerity. It reminds one of the song:

It's a long way back to the land of childhood

But if only I knew the way!

There isn't any such way, at any rate not at the cost of deliberately abandoning our intellectual sincerity. The only way is that of Matthew 18: 3, i.e. through repentance, through ultimate honesty. And the only way to be honest is to recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur. And this is just what we do see-

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before God! So our coming of age forces us to a true recognition of our situation vis à vis God. God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him, The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. (Mark 15: 34). The God who makes us live in this world without using him as a working hypothesis is the God before whom we are ever standing. Before God and with him we live without God. God allows himself to be edged out of the world and on to the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us. Matthew 8: 17 makes it crystal clear that it is not by his omnipotence that Christ helps us, but by his weakness and suffering.

This is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man's religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world; he uses God as a Deus ex machina. The Bible, however, directs him to the powerlessness and suffering of God; only a suffering God can help. To this extent we may say that the process we have described by which the world came of age was an abandonment of a false conception of God, and a clearing of the decks for the God of the Bible, who conquers power and space in the world by his weakness. This must be the starting point for our "worldly" interpretation.

We find in these two decisive passages some themes with which we are already familiar. There is the recurring rejection of Christianity as the answer to ultimate questions, and there are further reflections by Bonhoeffer on what he takes to be his relationship to other

theologians working in the same area.⁹

⁹ Some notice should be taken of Barth's present attitude to Bonhoeffer. Barth was apparently stung by Bonhoeffer's "revelation-positivism" remark. Incidentally, Prenter's analysis of this accusation, already referred to, is an admirable one. In Church Dogmatics, IV/3, pp. 18-40, there is a fairly extensive rejection of Bonhoeffer's final views, and the following extract from Barth's The Humanity of God (pp. 58-59) suggests, in spite of the debt Bonhoeffer owed to Barth, the great distance there is between the work of the two men: "The question of language, about which one must speak in reference to the so-called 'outsiders,' is not so burning today as is asserted in various quarters. This is true in the first place because, again thinking in terms of the humanity of God, we cannot at all reckon in a serious way with real 'outsiders,' with a 'world come of age,' but only with a world which regards itself as of age (and proves daily that it is precisely not that). Thus the so-called 'outsiders' are really only 'insiders' who have not yet understood and apprehended themselves as such. On the other hand, even the most persuaded Christian, in the final analysis, must and will recognize himself ever and again as an 'outsider.' So there must then be no particular language for insiders and outsiders. Both are contemporary men-of-the-world-all of us are. A little 'non-religious' language from the street, the newspaper, literature, and, if one is ambitious, from the philosopher may thus, for the sake of communication, occasionally be in order. However, we should not become particularly concerned about this. A little of the language of Canaan a little 'revelation-positivism,' can also be a good thing in addressing us all and, according to my experience, in which I am certainly not alone, will often, though not always. be still better understood even by the oddest strangers." This is excellent polemic, though one feels it tells us a good deal more about Barth than he intended it should. The decisive role his doctrine of election plays in this remark is important. It is this that makes it impossible for him to have any fundamental interest in the kind of thing that concerned Bonhoeffer at the end of his life.

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One important clue for our understanding of the world's coining of age is the historical interpretation. Bonhoeffer gives a particular reading of the intellectual history of the West since the Middle Ages that has rarely been characteristic of Christian theologians. The process of secularization has generally been treated as a calamity, or at least as a serious deviation that ought to be arrested. But in his historical survey Bonhoeffer really tries to reclaim the heritage of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as good, desirable, and necessary to the Christian. The process of secularizing is affirmed, not reluctantly, sadly, or for the sake of realism or relevance. The coming of age of the World means the secularization of all life, even the religious life of man, and thus the non-religious interpretation is not just a possible apologetic strategy, it is demanded by intellectual honesty.

The Church Will have to recognize the coming of age of modern man as his fundamental way of understanding himself. It must unshakeably affirm it, in spite of the great self-security in which modern man goes his way.¹⁰

Do we still have enough passion or imagination or strength or horror in us to feel this monstrous thing Which can only be expressed in this paradox: secularization and godlessness are historically necessary outcomes of Christianity, perhaps even the necessary consequence of the Gospel.¹¹

The meaning of this coming of age is underlined in these extracts by the use of a phrase that we find with increasing frequency from here on: etsi Deus non daretur, "as if God were not given." Modern men, Christians, indeed all men must learn to live as if God were not given.¹² The sharpest formulation of this idea that Bonhoeffer ever achieved is in the July 16 extract quoted above. Regin Prenter is quite right to sum up the situation thus:

The non-religious interpretation of theological concepts, Which Bonhoeffer misses in Barth, would ... not regard the encounter of God with the world as negation, but as Lordship. And the Lord-

¹⁰ Schoenherr, op. cit., pp. 79-8O.
¹¹ Oskar Hammelsbeck, "Concerning Bonhoeffer's Idea of the World Come of Age," ibid., pp. 50-51. The "horror" and paradoxical character of this affirmation is not quite so incomprehensible as ammelsbeck indicates when we call attention to the Christological foundation for Bonhoeffer's position.
¹² The use of this phrase can be observed in an extract from the East Berlin newspaper, Neue Zeit (December 3 and 12, 1957), which shows how Bonhoeffer's views are being interpreted today by Christians behind the Iron Curtain. The passage is quoted by Eberhard Bethge in "The Editing and Publishing of the Bonhoeffer Papers," The Andover Newton Bulletin, Vol. LII, No. 2, Dec. 1959, pp. 6-7.

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ship of God thoroughly excluded any unrelatedness between revelation and the world. On the other hand, it is quite clear that this very Lordship of God does not deny the coming of age of the world (to use Bonhoeffer's pregnant formula) but on the contrary it presupposes and affirms it.¹³

The meaning of "the Lordship of God" is partly hinted at in the lines from the July 16 letter, but it will be even more clearly indicated in the final stage of Bonhoeffer's thinking on these matters. The new thing in Bonhoeffer's thought is neither the open acknowledgment of the inevitability of secularization, nor the particular Christology, but the combination of these two factors. This combination gives Bonhoeffer both his uniqueness, his differences from the other theologians of our day, and partly explains his fascination for us all. As Bethge puts it: "Of course, secularization has been greeted before Bonhoeffer by many other sons of Christendom, but by none with this Christology as background or by doing it in the name of Christ. The new discovery seems to be the full and positive value to modern secularization accepted as our peculiar Christian heritage, not in spite of, but because of, our faith. Secularization is to be understood not just as defection and guilt but as the necessary business of Christianity. Its promises lie in throwing out all idolatries. Secularization might frighten the present Churches, because they have made it a terrible demon or devil. Yet with Bonhoeffer it is no longer the menacing giant but the necessary and positive counterpoint in God's symphony."¹⁴

IV. PARTICIPATION IN THE SUFFERINGS OR GOD

This is not quite all we have on these matters from Bonhoeffer's pen. We must conclude by setting down the decisive passages from the July 18 and 21, 1944 letters. These dates are significant for the first letter was written just before the July 20 plot against Hitler's life in which many of his comrades were involved, and the second was written after he had heard of the failure of that plot and when, presumably, he knew that his own execution was all but assured.

Man is challenged to participate in the sufferings of God at the hands of a godless world.

He must therefore plunge himself into the life of a godless world, without attempting to gloss over its ungodliness with a veneer of re-

¹³ Prenter, op. cit., p. 15.
¹⁴ Bethge, "The challenge of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life and Theology," p. 32.

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ligion or trying to transfigure it. He must live a "worldly" life and so participate in the suffering of God. He may live a worldly life as one emancipated from all false religions and obligations. To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to cultivate some particular form of asceticism (as a sinner, a penitent, or a saint), but to be a man. It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he is, but participation in the sufferings of God in the life of the world.

This is metanoia. It is not in the first instance bothering about one's own needs, problems, sins, and fears, but allowing oneself to be caught up in the way of Christ, into the Messianic event, and thus fulfilling Isaiah 53. Therefore, "believe in the Gospel," or in the words of St. John the Baptist, "Behold the lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world." (By the way, Jeremias has recently suggested that in Aramaic the word for "lamb" could also mean "servant"-very appropriate, in view of Isaiah 53.) This being caught up into the Messianic suffering of God in Jesus Christ takes a variety of forms in the New Testament. It appears in the call to discipleship, in Jesus' table fellowship with sinners, in conversions in the narrower sense of the word (e.g. Zacchaeus), in the act of the woman who was a sinner (Luke 7), an act which she performed without any specific confession of sin, in the healing of the sick (Matthew 8: 17), in Jesus' acceptance of the children. The shepherds, like the wise men from the cast, stand at the crib, not as converted sinners, but because they were drawn to the crib by the star just as they were. The centurion of Capernaum (who does not make any confession of sin) is held up by Jesus as a model of faith (cf. Jairus). Jesus loves the rich young man. The eunuch (Acts 8), Cornelius (Acts 10) arc anything but "existences over the abyss." Nathanael is an Israelite without guile (John 1: 47). Finally, Joseph of Arimathaea and the women at the tomb. All that is common between them is their participation in the sufferings of God in Christ. That is their faith. There is nothing of religious asceticism here. The religious act is always something partial, faith is always something whole, an act involving the whole life. Jesus does not call men to a new religion, but to life....

Later I discovered and am still discovering up to this moment that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, a converted sinner, a churchman (the priestly type, so-called!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy man. This is what I mean by worldliness-taking life in one's stride, with all its duties and problems, its successes and failures, its experiences and helplessness. It is in such a life that we throw ourselves utterly into the arms of God and par-

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ticipate in his sufferings in the world and watch with Christ in Gethsemane. That is faith, that is metanoia, and that is what makes a man and a Christian (cf. Jeremiah 45). How can success make us arrogant or failure lead us astray, when we participate in the sufferings of God by living in the world?

These two pieces bring to an end the evidence we have at hand for estimating the significance of Bonhoeffer's final vision of the relation of God, Christ, man, and the world. We read here many of the old and familiar themes, but there are some fresh and original turnings in the argument.

The distinction between the ultimate and the penultimate is gone, and instead we have "participating in the sufferings of God at the hands of a godless world.- We seem not to be asked to live etsi Deus non daretur, but in the sufferings of the God who is very much given and at hand. The world come of age seems somewhat pushed aside, and in its place is the world in which God suffers. The curious last sentence in the July 18 extract points in this direction: "Now that it has come of age, the world is more godless, and perhaps it is for that very reason nearer to God than ever before." Secularization seems not, after all, to be such a good way to describe the God-world relation. God may have withdrawn from the world, but he has not withdrawn from us. As Bonhoeffer had said earlier, and which we are now prepared to understand, "God allows himself to be edged out of the world and on to the cross" (July 16, 1944). The world come of age is now seen as the world in which God suffers. The world come of age, which before had seemed to demand a nonreligious interpretation, receives as "religious" an interpretation as one can conceive. Do these July letters permit us to say that Bonhoeffer has set aside the demand for a non-religious interpretation? In one sense, at any rate, the poem "Christians and Unbelievers" stands as his final interpretation of God and the world. Can we say, even in his definition of the terms, that it is a non-religious one?

Men go to God when they are sore bestead,
Pray to him for succor, for his peace, for bread,
For mercy for them sick, sinning or dead:
All men do so, Christian and unbelieving.

Men go to God when he is sore bestead,
Find him poor and scorned, without shelter or bread,
Whelmed under weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead:
Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving.

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God goeth to every man when sore bestead,
Feedeth body and spirit with his bread,
For Christians, heathens alike he hangeth dead:
And both alike forgiving.

We have already noted Prenter's remark that the God-world relation is conceived by Bonhoeffer not as a negation but as a Lordship. We are now in a position to see just what this Lordship involves. It is a particular interpretation of the Lordship of Jesus. Earlier in his writings, in the Ethics, Bonhoeffer had made some proposals for a theology of the secular based on a view of Jesus' Lordship.¹⁵ Here he had protested against thinking in two realms, secular-sacred, church-world, revelation-rational. This was based, however, on a somewhat different view of the Lordship of Jesus than we find in the last letters. In the Ethics, Jesus was seen as the triumphant Lord, in whom the whole reality of the world, secular and religious, was drawn together. This united world is now wholly in Jesus' hands. But now, at the end of his life, Bonhoeffer returns to the idea of Lordship, but it is no longer a Lordship of triumph and completion, but of suffering and humiliation. If Bonhoeffer was aware of moving away from the humiliation Christology of his 1933 Berlin lectures in The Cost of Discipleship and in what we know as the early pages of the Ethics, these final letters from prison seem to return to that same "theology of incarnation and humiliation, the fullness of God to be found in that limited, weak, and humiliated man Jesus, who took the risk of utter human concreteness."¹⁶ This Lutheran theology of humiliation has never found a more fitting setting. Some words from those early University lectures fit exactly the situation ten years later.

Jesus Christ is not in some divine nature, ousia, substance, or essence; that is, he is not God in a self-evident and explainable manner, but only in faith. This divine being does not exist. If Jesus Christ is to be described as God, then one must not speak about his divine essence, not about his omnipotence, and his omniscience, but only about this weak man among sinners, about his cradle and his cross.

¹⁵ Sec Ethics, pp. 63, 64, 70.
¹⁶ Thus Bethge describes the Christology of the Berlin lectures, and it can precisely describe the Christology of these late letters ("The Challenge of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life and Theology," p. 10). There is an interesting passage from the Ethics, apparently written before imprisonment, that anticipates this final position: "The cross of atonement is the setting free for life before God in the midst of the godless world; it is the setting free for life in genuine worldliness" (pp. 262-263).

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If we are dealing with the divinity of Jesus we must speak especially of his weakness.¹⁷

Bonhoeffer may have rejected the law-gospel distinction of Lutheran theology, but at the end this Christological vision, so much like the early Luther, becomes the final theological foundation for his understanding of the world. And it is important to note that the tension we noted earlier between the life of Jesus and the cross of Christ has disappeared, and in place of this tension is the single vision of Jesus, the man for others. Two passages from Bethge point this out:

There was, all the time, Bonhoeffer's Lutheran Kondeszens-Cliristology, which separated him from the early Barth and was widened and deepened to the Christokrator whose omnipotence is his humanly suffering and being for others ... this strikingly simple formula, "the man for others," not as a simplification but as the reminiscence and the result of a long struggle with Christology and its history-Deity not in monstrous almightiness but in weakness and repudiation.

But who is Jesus? How is he real for us? Bonhoeffer wants to recheck the doctrinal shape of the Churches in order to prove that Christ is precisely ... the man for others against individualistic inwardness. He is lonely and forsaken without transcendent escape. He worships not in provinciality but in the midst of real life. He, though longing for him, does not experience the deus ex machina. Thus the time for religion might have gone, but not the time for Jesus, or if you like, for the theologia crucis.¹⁸

The tension between the life and the cross is overcome in the formula, God's being for the world.¹⁹ Cross and discipleship become a single vision of the same truth. A passage from the outline for a book, included in the volume of prison letters and papers, indicates the coming together of incarnation and crucifixion, cross and Jesus' life among men.

Encounter with Jesus Christ, implying a complete orientation of human being in the experience of Jesus as one whose only concern

¹⁷ Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. III, p. 233.
¹⁸ "The Challenge of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life and Theology," pp. 32 and 34.
¹⁹ As Prenter, op. cit., p. 16, rightly points out: "The formula which Bonhoeffer usually uses for the relationship of God to the world which has come of age is 'God's being for the world' (das Fürsein Gottes für die Well). And this existence is then often described as God's suffering in the world. The non-religious interpretation of revelation then consists in the fact that man's participation in God's revelation-faith-is not exhausted by specifically religious acts which belong to a sphere of inwardness, but finds expression in a suffering existence for others in this worldly life."

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is for others. This concern of Jesus for others is the experience of transcendence. This freedom from self, maintained to the point of death, the sole ground of his omnipotence, omniscience, and ubiquity. Faith is participation in this Being of Jesus (incarnation, cross, and resurrection). Our relation to God not a religious relationship to a supreme Being, absolute in power and goodness which is a spurious conception of transcendence, but a new life for others, through participation in the Being of God. The transcendence consists not in tasks beyond our scope and power, but in the nearest thing to hand. God in human form, not, as in other religions, in animal form-the monstrous, chaotic, remote and terrifying-nor yet in abstract form-the absolute, metaphysical infinite, etc.-nor yet in the Greek divine-human of autonomous man, but man existing for others, and hence the Crucified.

Thus Karl Barth is quite right when lie describes the theology of the July letters as a theology of Imitatio Christi. He rightly describes it so, but he obviously doesn't like it.

And concerning the matter of the sharing in the sufferings of God, etc., it appears clear to me that it concerns a variant of the with him so rightly accented Imitatio concept.... To me it is long since clear that I must give this matter broad room in its place in the Dogmatics. Was Bonhoeffer of the opinion that the whole of theology must now be built on this ground? It could be that in his cell he was at times of just this opinion.²⁰

We have set down nearly all the relevant theological material from the published prison letters and papers of Bonhoeffer. We have tried to put it in order. In so doing, we have traced two different themes through four stages. The first theme might be called the problem of the world. We saw Bonhoeffer begin with a plea for worldliness, move to a demand for a non-religious interpretation of Christianity, move on to a description of the world come of age, and conclude -with a description of the life of the Christian today as a participation in the sufferings of God at the hands of a godless world. The second theme concerns the theological justification for the several views of the Christian in the world. We saw Bonhoeffer begin with an essentially Old Testament definition of worldliness. We moved forward and saw two distinct Christological themes weaving in and out of the argument: the life of Jesus and the cross of Christ. For a while these themes were not wholly resolved. But

²⁰ Barth, Die mündige Welt, Vol. I, p. 122.

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at the end, in the final conception of the suffering Lordship of Jesus, seen in both his life width men and his suffering and death the two merged into a single vision, both acting as signs of God's being for the world. How sharply these "themes" and these "stages" ought to be distinguished is difficult to say.

When we have looked over this material, just what is it that we have before us? To use our theological jargon, I suppose one could say that we have here a proposal for a specific theology of culture, or more exactly, a theology of secular culture. It includes both a description of man in the world today and a Christology to illumine that description.

The Christological background gives the courage to let everything be what it is. Bonhoeffer liberates the Christians so that they can listen to Feuerbach and Nietzsche and give them their honest share for their contribution.... It had not been heard before with this emphasis that Christ's Lordship corresponds to secularity, discipleship to participating in this-worldliness. The natural, the profane, the reasonable, the human, the polyphony of real life gets its share not against, but in, Christ.²¹

It is a theology of secular culture that is in some opposition to the alternatives available in our time. In the modern world as interpreted existentially by a Tillich or a Bultmann, men are seen, III their acts and in their despair, unconsciously longing for God, and in their negations of God unconsciously witnessing to him. Our work in this kind of world is to enter into a theological criticism and interpretation of the world. In the modern world as interpreted by the religious liberal, the work of man still remains a work of ethical transformation. In the world of Barth, the distinction between the man with God and the man without God is radically relativized, and our work is to point such men, insiders or outsiders, to the Holy Scriptures where all men may perceive that a decision for them has already been taken by the gracious election of grace given men III Jesus Christ. In Bonhoeffer we can find a fairly clear alternative theology of culture Lo these. The modern world is come of age; it is a godless world and man's work is to participate in God's stifferings in the world, to watch with Christ in Gethsemane.

If this incomplete vision of Bonhoeffer should prove to be the best one for us, at least for a while, what would this mean? How

²¹ Bethge, "The Challenge of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life and Theology," p. 33.

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would it alter the way we look at our theological tasks? Is this theological vision, as I have suggested, really a vision of a theology without a doctrine of God, without a doctrine of the Church, without an eschatology? Is such a thing possible? What would our beloved professors say? What would the ecumenical movement say? And finally, if this vision should prove to be the best one for us for a while, how would it alter the way we look at the godless (if so it be) world? How would it change the way we go about our work of conversation with literature, art, science, psychotherapy? These are just a few of the questions that this unnerving material raises for us today. I don't see how we can disagree with Karl Barth when he remarked that "the letters are a particular thorn; and (since unlike demythologizing this is unrest of a more spiritual kind) only good can come from letting them excite us."²²

²² Letter to P. AV. Herrenbrueck, Dec. 21, 1952, Die mündige Welt, Vol. I, p. 121.