The God Who Is Given: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Sacramental Theology and Religionless Christianity 1978700849, 9781978700840

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The God Who Is Given

The God Who Is Given Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Sacramental Theology and Religionless Christianity

Chris Dodson

LEXINGTON BOOKS/FORTRESS ACADEMIC

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic Lexington Books is an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dodson, Chris, 1986– author. Title: The God who is given : Dietrich Bonhoeffe’s sacramental theology and religionless Christianity / Chris Dodson. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Chris Dodson places Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity in the context of his Lutheran sacramental theology, revealing the former as a faithful product of receiving Christ in baptism, Eucharist, and confession. This reframing then serves to challenge American evangelical traditions to reconceptualize their worship in a more religionless manner”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021005532 (print) | LCCN 2021005533 (ebook) | ISBN 9781978700840 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781978700857 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 1906–1945. | Theology. | Sacraments. Classification: LCC BX4827.B57 D65 2021 (print) | LCC BX4827.B57 (ebook) | DDC 234/.16—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005532 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005533 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

This book is dedicated to those friends and family without whose nurture and motivation this work would never have been possible. Especially you, Sarah, for never doubting and always assisting.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Frequently Cited Sources

xi

Introduction xiii 1 The God Who Is Given: Luther and the Sacraments

1

2 Bonhoeffer’s Sacramental Theology

31

3 Bonhoeffer’s Theology of the Sacraments

67

4 Faithful Habitation of a Religious World

95

5 Among the Iconoclasts: Un-conceiving God

127

6 Sacraments against Religion: Receiving the God Who Is Given

167

Conclusion 211 Bibliography 217 Index 229 About the Author

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Acknowledgments

I will be forever indebted to the many people who have assisted in bringing this work to fruition. Countless hours spent in discussion and debate with peers like Matthew Burdette, Claire Hein-Blanton, Stephen Schaffer, and so many others were invaluable in shaping and refining arguments in this work. Tom Greggs, Mike Mawson, Stephen Plant, Myles Werntz, and Phil Ziegler were likewise crucial mentors and interlocutors. I am grateful to the International Dietrich Bonhoeffer Society and its leadership for the many opportunities they have provided to gather with other scholars and discuss Bonhoeffer’s theology. These opportunities have cultivated and deepened my knowledge and appreciation of Bonhoeffer and his legacy profoundly. More, the open collegiality that this group has always expressed has been a constant source of support. Finally, I am thankful for the team at Fortress Academic/Lexington Books for their encouragement with this project, and for all the hard work they have put in to see the final product fully realized.

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Frequently Cited Sources

The following are by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and are from the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English edition: DBWE 1 1998. Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church. Ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. DBWE 2 1996. Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology. Ed. Wayne Whitson Floyd, trans. H. Martin Rumscheidt. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. DBWE 3 1997. Creation and Fall. Ed. John W. De Gruchy, trans. Douglas Stephen Bax. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. DBWE 4 2001. Discipleship. Eds. Geffrey G. Kelly and John D. Godsey, trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. DBWE 5 2004. Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible, Ed. Geffrey B. Kelly, trans. Daniel W. Bloesch and James H. Burtness. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Ebook. DBWE 6 2005. Ethics. Ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. DBWE 8 2010. Letters and Papers from Prison. Ed. John W. De Gruchy, trans. Isabel Best, Lisa E. Dahill, Reinhard Krauss, Nancy Lukens, H. Martin Rumscheidt, and Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. DBWE 9 2003. The Young Bonhoeffer: 1918–1927. Eds. Paul Duane Matheny, Clifford J. Green, and Marshall D. Johnson, trans. Mary C. Nebelsick and Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. xi

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DBWE 10 2008. Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928–1931. Ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. DBWE 11 2012. Ecumenical, Academic, and Pastoral Work: 1931–1932. Eds. Victoria J. Barnett, Mark S. Brocker, and Michael Lukens, trans. Anne Schmidt-Lange, Isabel Best, Nicolas Humphrey, Marion Pauck, and Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. DBWE 12 2009. Berlin: 1932–1933. Ed. Larry L. Rasmussen, trans. Isabel Best, David Higgins, and Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. DBWE 13 2007. London: 1933–1935. Ed. Keith Clements, trans. Isabel Best. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. DBWE 14 2013. Theological Education at Finkenwalde, 1935-1937. Eds. H. Gaylon Barker and Mark S. Brocker, trans. Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. DBWE 15 2012. Theological Education Underground: 1937–1940. Ed. Victoria J. Barnett, trans. Victoria J. Barnett, Claudia D. Bergmann, Peter Frick, Scott A. Moore, and Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. DBWE 16 2006. Conspiracy and Imprisonment: 1940–1945. Ed. Mark S. Brocker, trans. Lisa E. Dahill and Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. DBW will designate German-language editions corresponding to the aforementioned volumes. The following are by Martin Luther and from the Luther’s Works, American edition: LW 35 1960. Word and Sacrament I. Ed. E. Theodore Bachmann. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. LW 36 1959. Word and Sacrament II. Ed. Abdel Ross Wentz. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. LW 37 1961. Word and Sacrament III. Ed. Robert H. Fischer. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press.

Introduction

A great deal of ink has been spilled on Bonhoeffer’s proposal for religionless Christianity and still more on his ecclesiology, yet very little has been done that addresses the communion between these two aspects of his theology. This lack may be due in part to the history of Bonhoeffer’s reception in the English-speaking world: First popularized in the non-ecclesial writings of the death of God theologians, “religionlessness” became problematically divorced from Bonhoeffer’s larger theological framework and Lutheran identity. Scholarship has yet to fully mend that rupture. Yet, closer attention to overlooked aspects of Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology can repair the rupture originally wrought by the death of God theologians’ use of Bonhoeffer. Particularly, attending to Bonhoeffer’s much-neglected sacramentology (with all its Lutheran flavor) brings unity to what have been perceived as radically divergent theological projects. Tracing Bonhoeffer’s references to the sacraments and situating them within his account of religion allows one to see how the sacraments motivate and sustain the form of life that “religionless” describes. Bonhoeffer drafted a book from prison meant to elaborate on his vision of religionlessness. He dedicated a section of that book to the topic of the “cultus.” Yet, his description of that section is woefully anemic: “Details to follow later, in particular on cultus and ‘religion’!”1 His premature death ensured that these details never followed after all. Those who find the fragmentary reflections of his letters intriguing are left to speculate on the relationship between the cultic, religion, and religionlessness.2 Eberhard Bethge assures the contemporary reader, however, that there are clues to guide interpretation. In fact, Bethge explicitly states that Bonhoeffer was not unaware of how religionlessness pressed for a more thorough account of this relationship. Bethge wrote to Bonhoeffer in prison: xiii

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So how are we to concretely claim our “ground” in the world? What is the role of ritual, and what is the role of the prophetic? And ultimately, what importance does the Christ[ian] tradition in which we stand have? The “ideas” that people have of it, with which they should be nourished and have been nourished? But all that is precisely what you are thinking about.3

Taking cues from Bethge’s language, Bonhoeffer’s religionless project should be understood as a ritual and prophetic critique of certain ideas of God and faith that have malnourished the church. This work attends to the gap between Bethge’s “should be” and “have been.” In short, religionlessness is defined as an anti-idolatrous scheme. Idolatry denotes all the false ‘ideas’ that too often emaciate the church’s witness. Religionlessness means being stripped of these false ideas. If the church is to be properly nourished, it must be prepared to receive the God who is and who is revealed to the church in and as Christ. For Bonhoeffer, the place where Christ has bound himself to be so received is the sacraments. Sustained attention to the sacraments—what they are and what Christ is doing to those who encounter him there—is necessary if the church and its members wish to receive Christ and so be directed by Christ in a religionless form of life. If religionlessness is the negative way of describing Bonhoeffer’s project, his work may be positively described as a plea for faithfulness. Religion, as will be seen in chapter 4, can denote all those dispositions and ideas which are falsely substituted for the God who is to sustain a sinner against God’s claim. Bonhoeffer desires religionlessness and the stripping away of all religious falsehoods to call the church to be faithful to the God who is revealed. Yet, this begs the question: Where is God revealed? The traditional Lutheran answer is twofold: word and sacrament. Word and sacrament map on to Bethge’s language of the prophetic and the ritual. According to the Lutheran tradition, the word is the place where Christ is present as both law and gospel, simultaneously convicting sinners of their falsehoods and conveying to sinners the promises of the gospel so that they do not fall into despair. In the sacraments, Christ is present as the confirmation and effective agent of those same promises. Christ’s presence in the sacraments makes it possible for sinners stripped of their religion to live faithfully in the truth of revelation. In this way, sacraments become necessary conceptual backgrounds for articulating Bonhoeffer’s vision of a religionless, or a faithful, church. RELATING SACRAMENTS TO RELIGIONLESSNESS It is good to be clear up front about the relationship between sacraments and religionlessness for Bonhoeffer. There are two. First, it is rarely possible to

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point to passages from Bonhoeffer’s prison letters in which there is a direct statement from him that faithful reception of the sacraments evokes a religionless form of life. Such a direct correspondence would require far more explicit references to the sacraments within the prison letters than are actually present. It is possible to argue that Bonhoeffer makes this or that claim about the sacraments, or that he makes this or that claim about religionlessness. Yet, demonstrating a direct, exegetical relationship between sacraments and religionlessness will generally, though not always, prove difficult. Second, while Bonhoeffer seldom expressly related sacraments and religionlessness in his own work, the argument is not that a more robust sacramentology or sacramental praxis is necessary to achieve Bonhoeffer’s vision of religionlessness. That is, the relationship of sacraments to religionlessness is not one of correction or augmentation. Bonhoeffer’s theology of religionlessness does not lack something that must be added in. While John Phillips argued that early on in the history of Bonhoeffer studies that Bonhoeffer is not interested in ecclesiology during his imprisonment, that conclusion is simply untrue.4 Enough ecclesiological reflection exists within the fragments of the letters for one to see that, for Bonhoeffer religionlessness assumes an ecclesiology, particularly, the sacramentology and sacramental praxis already displayed in his earlier ecclesiological work. Exposing this assumption requires a double contextualization of Bonhoeffer’s theology of religionlessness. Religionlessness will be interpreted with reference to Bonhoeffer’s sacramentology. This sacramentology, itself, requires attention to the particularly Lutheran content of Bonhoeffer’s theology. It is therefore necessary to contextualize religionlessness within Bonhoeffer’s sacramentology. Chapter 1 outlines the shape of a Lutheran sacramentology derived from its source, Martin Luther, while chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate the ways in which Bonhoeffer participates in that broad outline. Bonhoeffer is a particular kind of Lutheran—modern through and through. He never expressed any great interest in the confessional Lutheranism of his time, nor does he seem beholden to all of Luther’s theological conclusions or Lutheranism’s theological creeds. Bonhoeffer did, however, study Luther extensively. Luther was far and away Bonhoeffer’s most quoted source. In all this, Bonhoeffer was not simply replicating Luther. Bonhoeffer is a Lutheran in the sense that he cannot do theology without being in a conversation with Luther. Therefore, Bonhoeffer takes cues, whether positively or negatively, from Luther to articulate the former’s own theological claims. Chapter 2 describes how Bonhoeffer understands Christians to know the world through the sacraments. As a Lutheran, one might say, Bonhoeffer believes that Christians come to know the truth of all things through encountering Christ, who alone determines the truth of reality. Christians encounter Christ in word and sacrament. Because of this belief, it is necessary to see

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how religionlessness participates in the truths learned through a Christian’s encounter with Christ. These themes are articulated, within the topography of systematic theology, within sacramentology. It is also necessary to recognize that sacramentology not only contextualizes Bonhoeffer’s theology of religionlessness but also that reception of the sacraments motivates religionlessness. As will come to the fore in chapters 5 and 6, the sacraments have a functional place within the praxis of religionlessness precisely because they affect something in those Christians who receive the sacraments. That is, Bonhoeffer believes that Christians see the world through the lens of the sacraments because the sacraments effect faith.5 This belief indicates how Bonhoeffer participates in his Lutheran inheritance. Sacraments are not merely a lens through which the world is viewed; sacraments are also the medium by which the possibility of faithful Christian living is born and sustained. To the degree that religionlessness denotes a faithful Christian form of life, as will be defended in chapters 5 and 6, it should be possible to indicate how religionless life is sustained by faith which is itself born and sustained by the sacraments. Anyone familiar with Bonhoeffer’s letters from the prison will recognize these letters clearly do not contain a heavy volume of explicit references to sacraments. Nevertheless, Bonhoeffer’s latter theology rests upon and assumes a kind of sacramental theology that operates largely beneath the surface because he has already developed it explicitly in his earlier works. The perceived success of this claim is dependent on the ability of the first chapters of this work to convince one that Bonhoeffer is building the theology I argue he's building. This early theology can then be used to explain the latter theology, exposing the deep unity in Bonhoeffer’s theological project. If his theology of the sacraments truly makes them as foundational to the Christian experience as the first chapters argue, then Bonhoeffer can proceed to describe religionlessness without making the connection between sacraments and religionlessness explicit because Christian faithfulness always comes from encountering Christ through reception of the sacraments. For Bonhoeffer, faithfulness to Christ today looks like religionlessness. Therefore, even within an account of religionlessness, the church still relies on the sacraments as places where faith is instilled, sustained, located, and vitalized. As a Lutheran communicating with another Lutheran, Bonhoeffer can presume this view of the sacraments. Whether this connection should receive explicit treatment is another matter entirely, and the presence of a chapter on cultus in Bonhoeffer’s outline for a book suggests that this relationship might have received some explicit treatment after all.6 Nevertheless, subsequent interpretations of religionlessness that have operated without reference to Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran context have obscured this assumed connection and necessitated a more explicit rendering of the relationship between

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sacraments and religionlessness. The aim here is to draw out the ways in which the practices and beliefs that undergird religionlessness are themselves a product of the work that Lutherans like Bonhoeffer believe the sacraments accomplish. To be clear, the argument requires two moves for relating Bonhoeffer’s theology of the sacraments to his theology of religionlessness. First, because he is a Lutheran, Bonhoeffer’s theology of religionlessness should be contextualized within his sacramentology. Word and sacrament are the means by which Christians come to know the truth of all things including the truth of religionlessness. Second, as a Lutheran, Bonhoeffer believes that the Christian’s faith and, by extension, faithfulness are effected by the sacraments. Therefore, where faith or faithfulness is enacted—as is the case, for Bonhoeffer, in religionlessness Christianity—the sacraments have done their work to instill, strengthen, locate, and vitalize faith. WHY SACRAMENTOLOGY? Given the importance Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology has played in his interpretation, it is perhaps surprising how thoroughly neglected his sacramentology is. The list of seminal works on Bonhoeffer which hardly touch on the sacraments is expansive, and the authors on the list comprise some of the best interpreters in the field.7 However, if Bonhoeffer’s interpreters have typically adopted a nonchalant attitude toward the sacraments, then sacramental theologians have typically returned the favor with regard to Bonhoeffer. Despite being one of the twentieth century’s most significant theological voices, Bonhoeffer does not appear once in the Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology.8 Robert Jenson, self-avowedly indebted to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, never cited him in Visible Words despite many places where doing so might have been appropriate.9 While it may be tempting to assume that such neglect is deserved—there is nothing in Bonhoeffer’s work of note—such an assumption would be poorly made. That this assumption has been made too long explains some of the most egregious misinterpretations of Bonhoeffer. Theologically, the distance often implied between his dissertations and prison theology is fundamentally a result of ignoring the sacraments. The scholarly debate as to whether ecclesiology or Christology is more fundamental to Bonhoeffer’s project ignores how the two loci are brought together as one in the sacraments. The thrust of this project is not primarily historical. Biographical detail is consciously limited so that it does not over-determine Bonhoeffer’s theology and so that the theology and its unity may come to the fore. Bonhoeffer’s theology undoubtedly develops over the decades, as does the work of any

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theologian. Many books already exist exposing these developments and placing them in the context of Bonhoeffer’s life. The argument of this book respects those developments but does not seek to lay them all out. Moreover, because Bonhoeffer’s theology of the sacraments develops in terms of expansion and augmentation rather than contradiction or reinterpretation, historical context may explain why new facets of this theology are being explored but is not as necessary to understanding the theological content. This project is first and foremost theological with the hope to bring Bonhoeffer’s theology to bear on a contemporary context in which fewer and fewer American Christians perceive the urgency of corporate worship. A 2016 Pew Research Center poll found that 22 percent of American adults attend church less regularly today than they did in the past. While there is some solace to be found in that survey by observing that 27percent of adults were attending more regularly, the survey defined “regular” attendance as appearing once or twice a month. Such a standard hardly reveals that the 51percent of adults attending religious services actually prioritize being present. Christians, perhaps especially Protestant ones, are tempted to think that there is little worth doing in church on Sunday mornings any longer. Sermons can seem a relic of the past with the advent of the information age. What is the point of listening to the pastor when a quick internet search could bring up all the relevant Bible passages pertaining to a subject in which one is actually interested? Moreover, when pastors are using the internet to find their sermons anyways, why not go straight to the source and read or listen while in your pajamas lying comfortably in bed? Christians could gather for the sake of fellowship and food. But, truth be told, the food can often be just as good elsewhere, and while church can source some kind and enjoyable friends, the company can be better elsewhere, too. There is an unfortunate sense that nothing significant happens when Christians come together for worship. Bonhoeffer’s sacramentology can help the contemporary church to overcome this malaise. Emphasizing what the sacraments do precisely because they are the gift and work of Christ in his church allows the church to fundamentally reassess the content of its Sunday worship. If Paul exhorts Christians not to neglect coming together, then the church can work harder to ensure that what we come together for has meaning and significance. Christians, in their better moments, want their worship to change them. They want worship that brings them closer to God and that drives them into the arms of their neighbors. The only worship capable of achieving those ends is worship in which the worshipper encounters the living Christ. For Luther, as for Bonhoeffer, the whole of the Christian life should be oriented toward and by the Christ on the cross. This is the theologia crucis, the theology of the cross. But Bonhoeffer’s ever-pressing question, asked in various ways throughout his life, was who Christ was for the contemporary

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believer. Who is Christ today, and where is he to be found? Bonhoeffer answered the question in many ways. But he consistently offered one place where Christ could, in faith, be consistently, concretely located. This place is where Christ promised to be located: in the sacraments. Christ’s work on believers through the sacraments is the origin of worship that participates in the theologia crucis. Therefore, the work Christians do in worship should carefully and thoughtfully facilitate the movement of worshippers toward Christ as he is present in the sacraments. Bonhoeffer’s vision for how sacraments can motivate faithfulness provides a paradigm by which the American evangelical church can begin reassessing its liturgies today. OVERVIEW OF THE ARGUMENT Through paying attention to the distinctly Lutheran character of Bonhoeffer’s theology, one is able to see how the sacraments of baptism, Eucharist, and confession motivate a vision of Christian life characterized by thisworldliness, creaturely autonomy, corporate discernment, and suffering with and alongside God in lives of prayer and action in which contemporary Christian worship can participate more fully. Christ’s presence in the sacraments enables the Christian to read the world differently and so to inhabit the world in a new and creaturely way. Each sacrament does this distinctly, and attention must be paid to the differences. The argument is as follows. To understand Bonhoeffer and reform worship to participate in the vision he casts, he must be within his Lutheran context. When read in this way, it becomes clear that he is convinced Christians come to see and inhabit the world in a faithful way only through receiving an encounter with Christ through the sacraments of baptism, Eucharist, and confession. To speak of these three practices together as sacraments is to describe a specific role, or function, within the economy of grace: Sacraments are the places where Christ in grace is present in an earthy sign with a divine promise such that faith is established, sustained, located, and vitalized. Yet, each sacrament must also be addressed independently as each contributes to this function in a unique way. Religionlessness is a grammar for describing a church purged of its idols and open through and to receiving Christ and participating in Christ’s life in the world. In the first chapter, Martin Luther’s theology of the sacraments sets the basic grammar for a Lutheran understanding of the sacraments. Bonhoeffer, himself a devoted reader of Luther and a minister theologian in the Lutheran tradition, understands and in many ways shares Luther’s basic grammar and theological movement. Reading Luther reveals three key loci. First, “form” suggests how the three ecclesial practices of baptism, Eucharist,

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and confession can be grouped together under the category of “sacrament” by fulfilling a united role in the economy of salvation. Second, discussion of “function” reveals how, for Luther, these three practices serve to instill, strengthen, locate, and vitalize Christians’ faith and love. Third, sacraments can do these things precisely because God is present in and active through the sacraments to accomplish these ends. The second chapter establishes Bonhoeffer’s Act and Being as an attempt to explain how the church comes to know and inhabit the world through its encounter with God in word and sacrament. Knowledge born from this primary encounter is what Bonhoeffer refers to as a “churchy way of knowing.” This chapter draws out Bonhoeffer’s subtle but important references to the sacraments, especially baptism and the Lord’s Table, arguing that these references demonstrate Bonhoeffer’s belief that who the church encounters in the act of revelation, Christ revealing himself through the sacraments, proves determinative for how the church is, that is, the church’s witness in and to the world. This chapter shows that, for Bonhoeffer, the church can faithfully describe itself, God, and the world only because it receives Christ in the sacraments. In this way, Christ proves determinative of reality. Moreover, to receive Christ-reality in this way is to participate in his reality. Christ’s gracious, self-giving presence in the sacraments determines reality and motivates a corresponding form of life for those to whom God’s self is given. This account of real presence establishes the unique role of the sacraments in the divine economy of salvation within Bonhoeffer’s theology. Precisely because the sacraments play this role, the church’s worship should be consistently tuned to the sacraments if evangelicals want to experience worship that is truly transformative. The third chapter ranges through Bonhoeffer’s works to demonstrate the unique contribution of each sacrament to the function of revealing Christ so as to effect Christians’ faith and love. The sacraments all play a certain role in the divine economy: Through each of them, God is revealing divine promises and inviting participation in God’s redemptive activity. This chapter shows how each sacrament, in its own way, participates in this function. In baptism, God puts sinners to death and raises them to life in the community of Christ’s body. Through the Lord’s Supper, God directs members of this community back to their concrete neighbors. This chapter also argues that Bonhoeffer treats confession as a sacrament through which God restores relations ruptured by sin. Accounting for this diversity in revealed content and effect demonstrates that it is the synergy among all three sacraments rather than any one sacrament by itself that fully accomplishes the fourfold function to instill, sustain, locate, and vitalize faith. By way of transition, a final section acknowledges a necessary caveat: Bonhoeffer remains aware that for all God is doing in the sacraments, the sacraments are also human

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acts and, as such, belong firmly in the sphere of the “religious.” While there is nothing a human can do that adds to or detracts from the efficaciousness of the sacraments as divine works, as human acts there are things humans can do in their worship to more properly prepare and align themselves with the work of God. The fourth chapter unpacks what it means to locate the sacraments in the human and religious so that one can more fully consider what human impulses and proclivities need resisted in contemporary worship. To do this, the chapter first traces Bonhoeffer’s evolution of thought on religion to demonstrate a key distinction between religious structures and religious dispositions. This distinction explains Bonhoeffer’s sometimes approving and more often unfriendly attitudes toward religion. Religious structures are creaturely and contingent forms that God takes up so as to preserve creation in the midst of sin. These forms order faithful human life together before God. When these structures cease to order their respective domains well, other forms can be raised in their place which are better suited to governing relations in concrete times and places. The religious disposition is the human proclivity for falsifying these structures for self-serving purposes. Whether this is expressed as the cor curvum in se or idolatry, these dispositions and their distorting effects are the religion from which the church needs delivered by religionlessness. With this distinction in place, as human actions the sacraments belong among religious structures. Unlike other such structures, however, the sacraments’ sustained good governance is ensured from above rather than below. That is, humans’ religious attempts to circumvent the sacraments fail precisely because God is present in the sacraments to resist entropic human distortions. This demonstrates why religionlessness need not be conceived as somehow non- or anti-ecclesial: Bonhoeffer perceives that there is in the sacraments a means in place that ensures that the church can be restored to the good governance of reality without the dissolution of the church’s cultic practices. Acknowledging how the sacraments can be a persistent feature of the church’s life opens up the possibility of re-reading the prison correspondence, enabling the reader to see how religionlessness carries forward the deep ecclesiological commitments from Bonhoeffer’s earlier career. It becomes possible to see how religionlessness is a disposition formed in and by the church with the very sacraments some have used religionlessness to dismiss. Rather than dismissing the sacraments, though, these cultic and ritual acts become indispensable to religionlessness and by extension to the church and its worship today. The fifth chapter demonstrates the presence of these commitments by showing how five religious dispositions central to Bonhoeffer’s critique of religion are unmasked and their faithful alternatives established in the practices of the church through reception of the sacraments. The chapter

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begins by demonstrating how the newly developed genus of religion had malnourished the church and malformed the church’s witness. In light of this, Bonhoeffer saw how it was necessary for the church to once again pay attention to the God who is. It is important that Bonhoeffer’s call for religionlessness goes out to the church, and so a survey of Ethics is offered to show how religionless should not be used to distance Bonhoeffer from his ecclesial commitments. Having demonstrated that even in the era of conspiracy and imprisonment Bonhoeffer is still thinking of the church, the next section takes up five distortions of the church’s witness and belief to show how the sacraments give rise to more faithful, alternative forms of Christian life. These five distortions include belief in the deus ex machina, over-reliance on the conscience, other-worldliness, moral and liturgical ambivalence, and a theology of glory. Each distortion belongs to a modern, religious idea of God that has little in common with the God revealed on the cross and in the sacraments. With these dispositions thoroughly unveiled, alternative faithful forms of life emerge which better order the life of the church and, through the church, the world. These faithful alternatives consist of this-worldliness, creaturely autonomy, corporate discernment, and suffering with and alongside God in lives of prayer and action. It becomes clear that faithful dispositions are born out of the particular content revealed in baptism, the Eucharist, and confession. Religionless life is found in the encounter with Christ at font, Table, and confessional. These three acts, constitutive of Christian worship, are therefore the primary acts toward which evangelicals’ worship, where it is not already, should be reconceived. If evangelicals, perhaps historically leery of Bonhoeffer’s language of religionlessness, can share that vision for faithful Christian life after all—and they can—then everything about worship should participate in, move toward, or reinforce the significance of these three acts. The sixth chapter reveals the fundamental unity between religionlessness and the sacraments as conveyed by Bonhoeffer’s baptismal reflection from prison. That this occasion of baptism prompts this theme of religionless life is no accident. Understood from within the context of a homily for a baptismal service, this chapter will articulate directly how Bonhoeffer conceives of the faithful church inhabiting the changing world. Fritz de Lange has previously expounded at length on this homily, though without heeding as carefully as possible its baptismal context. Not heeding this context introduces several misinterpretations that this chapter hopes to correct. In so doing, the chapter exposes the unity between the church coming to know the truth of the world through the sacraments and the church’s embodied witness in and to the world. Precisely because this unity exists, the chapter concludes with concrete proposals for how American evangelicals can reform their worship to reinforce this unity.

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The observable truth is that growing numbers of American evangelicals are expressing interest in two topics: social justice and the church’s historical liturgical and sacramental practices. That both of these interests emerge together is not surprising given the unity Bonhoeffer helps the church to perceive. However, the evangelical church can more thoroughly and thoughtfully relate these interests by reconceiving its worship along the lines advocated in this chapter. Religionless life should be neither conceived nor performed without attention to the sacraments. In answer to the question about cultus in Bonhoeffer’s outlined book, the church’s cultus is at once religious (in the pejorative sense) and faithful. Precisely because cultus is the place where faithful life is envisioned and by the power of God enacted, the cultus cannot be neglected. When Bonhoeffer’s theology is taken up in its Lutheran context, the significance of his consistent attention to the sacraments throughout his pastoral and academic career is illuminated. God uses the sacraments to make faithful Christians who inhabit the world well. If Bonhoeffer is correct, then the sacramentology he outlines can contribute mightily to the life of the church today. The dual movements in American evangelicalism toward both social justice praxis and more historically liturgical worship can and should be understood and practiced in relation to one another. Evangelicals continue to face challenges, both internally and externally, to reconceive what it looks like for them to practice their faith in light of the living God they encounter today. For example, as head of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Russell Moore’s sometimes controversial and prophetic leadership continues to challenge evangelical Baptists on issues of race, migrant immigration, refugees, and the closeness to political power evangelicals have embraced in the last decades. Similarly, The Gospel Coalition’s Thabiti Anyabwile has become a rather uncompromising voice in the need for confession of racial sin, past and present, before reconciliation can truly occur. The Ancient-Future Faith network features many prominent evangelicals and calls on them to embrace an older way of worship for the sake of evangelicalism’s future. Externally, the Me Too movement has challenged evangelicals to reassess the way its institutions have described and engaged with women, while shifting cultural norms constantly call into question the efficacy of worship patterns. Can a thirty-minute-long sermon work in a soundbite age, after all? Perhaps yes, but that’s a different book. With so many voices calling for attention and reform, Bonhoeffer’s may be just one voice among many. But his voice bears a vision capable of focusing all these voices together toward the same end: faithful enactment of the church’s embodied witness in the world God loves and is redeeming through word and sacrament.

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NOTES 1. DBWE 8, 502. 2. “Cultus” first appeared in reference to the sacraments in DBWE 1, 237–47. 3. DBWE 8, 414. 4. John Phillips, Christ for Us in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1967), 27. 5. DBWE 2, 103. 6. DBWE 8, 502. 7. For example, Clifford Green suggests the sacraments are tertiary in Bonhoeffer’s Sanctorum Communio. Clifford Green, Bonhoeffer: A Theology of Sociality (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1999), 22. Kelly’s conversation on revelation only meagerly mentions the sacraments. Geoffrey Kelly, Liberating Faith: Bonhoeffer’s Message for Today (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1984), 87–91. Dramm’s introduction to Bonhoeffer only contains references to the sacraments in direct quotations. Sabine Dramm, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: An Introduction to His Thought, trans. Thomas Rice (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing 2007), 78. Recent works like Gaylon Barker, The Cross of Reality: Luther’s Theologia Crucis and Bonhoeffer’s Christology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015); and Michael DeJonge, Bonhoeffer’s Reception of Luther (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) are beginning to realize just how important theme sacraments were to Bonhoeffer. 8. Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 9. Robert Jenson, Visible Words: The Interpretation and Practice of Christian Sacraments (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010).

Chapter 1

The God Who Is Given Luther and the Sacraments

To understand Bonhoeffer’s theology of the sacraments, one must first understand his theological tradition. A solid understanding of Luther’s work is particularly necessary, given that Bonhoeffer’s theological formation coincided with a renaissance in Luther studies being undertaken by Germany’s university professors.1 This renaissance, spearheaded in part by Karl Holl, reached its apex in 1917. To say that Karl Holl spearheaded the renaissance in part is to acknowledge that Luther and his theology were already matters of discussion and debate in the work of liberals like Albrecht Ritschl, whose own contribution was radicalized by Adolf von Harnack.2 The renaissance therefore should not be perceived as a revival or rebirth of interest in the first reformer. Nor did the renaissance conclude with Holl’s work. Holl’s contribution to the debate was purposed to rebuff the conclusions of the liberals.3 Thereafter, Holl’s conclusions were challenged by Karl Barth and Friedrich Gogarten, both of whom belonged to the so-called dialectical theology movement that developed in response to the liberal movement of Ritschl, von Harnack, and, for a time, Holl.4 Even then, Barth and Gogarten cannot be considered in agreement about how to interpret Luther or measure Luther’s enduring value.5 Thus, the Luther renaissance cannot be conceived of as a united project with a singular interpretation of Luther; instead, the Luther renaissance must be understood as a moment in time in which the meaning and enduring value of Luther’s theology was being hotly contested. The question of Luther took on such importance in part because of the question raised by historical-critical inquiries into the theological relationship between Jesus and Paul, whose unified theology Luther claimed to be recovering and carrying forward. Other theologians with profound influence on Bonhoeffer—among others, Reinhold Seeberg, Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack, and Karl Barth—were no strangers to this discourse. That Bonhoeffer was shaped profoundly by this 1

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discourse cannot be disputed. Bonhoeffer’s engagement with this discourse motivates him to carry on Luther’s task to reform the church to be faithful in its time and place. This chapter explicates what Luther believed faithful worship to look like in his own time by outlining the main concerns of Luther’s sacramental theology, foundational to the Lutheran tradition of theology in which Bonhoeffer participates. With this basic Lutheran grammar in place, the next chapter can explore how Bonhoeffer takes up these concepts and themes in his own work to encourage faithful worship in the modern world. Luther offers sermons and treatises on the sacraments from the beginning of his career to its end. Oswald Bayer suggests that one reason Luther pays such significant attention to the sacraments is that the very foundation of his theology is liturgical.6 The church, as Christ’s body and Christ’s life in the world, is the starting point for meaningful theological reflection. In his own reflections, Luther draws his readers’ attention to three crucial topics: (1) the form of the sacraments, (2) the function of sacraments, and (3) the divine presence therein found. “Form” suggests how the three ecclesial practices of baptism, Eucharist, and confession cohere together under the category of sacrament. “Function” reveals how, for Luther, these three practices serve to instill, strengthen, locate, and vitalize Christians’ faith and love. Sacraments do these things precisely because God is present in and active through the sacraments to accomplish these ends. Working primarily with Luther’s early texts on the sacraments is strategic: These texts, largely in conversation with Roman Catholic critics, concern themselves with all three of this chapter’s main topics: form, function, and real presence. Moreover, Wilkes and Barker both evidence the strong influence of these early texts on Bonhoeffer.7 With regard to Luther’s later works, the debate with Zwinglian or Anabaptist positions focus most exclusively on real presence with only marginal concern for the sacraments’ form and function. Luther’s own reasons for writing in this way could be quite simple: The form and, especially, the function of the sacraments can change dramatically depending on whether Christ is truly present. Luther could only debate form and function with his opponents if they could be persuaded first to acknowledge Christ’s real presence. While the later debates could prove illuminating insofar as Luther offers several means by which to explain the real presence, some of which are more helpful than others, it is not necessary to rehearse those explanations here. Unlike Zwingli, Bonhoeffer would readily concede to Luther that Christ is present in the sacraments. In addressing form, the first section of this chapter presses issues of sign, promise, and faith. These are the three loci around which Luther’s theology of the sacraments turns. Luther developed this material largely in debate with Roman Catholic practice. Despite that highly polemicized context, Luther remains surprisingly ambivalent about certain forms of receiving

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the sacraments to the degree that they retain the content of the promise. Whenever they convey the promises of God, sacraments are life-determining encounters between persons. With matters of form as settled as is appropriate, the second section discusses the four tasks that sacraments perform when they are given by God and received by God’s people in faith. Luther describes these as the “significance” of the sacraments.8 In order, sacraments (1) instill faith, (2) sustain faith, (3) unite persons of faith, and (4) vitalize faith. Each sacrament does not perform each of these tasks in equal measure, however, so attention to these functions and the particular sacraments that affect them is necessary to explain why all three of the practices considered as sacraments in this thesis are indispensable to the role sacraments play in the divine economy. The ability of sacraments to perform Christ’s story and so orient the church’s life rests entirely on the final claim of this chapter; however, Christ is personally encountered in these life-altering events. Luther’s insistence on real presence is demonstrated, and then the chapter concludes with Robert Jenson’s account of real presence as a particularly insightful way of appropriating Luther’s doctrine of real presence. This makes clear that Luther’s work on real presence has proved generative for Lutherans more broadly, implicating Bonhoeffer by extension. Lutheran theologians have not needed strictly to reduplicate Luther to operate in close relationship with him. If the Lutheran tradition—all the way from Luther to Jenson—is invested in talk about Christ’s real presence in the sacraments then it comes as no surprise that Bonhoeffer is heavily devoted to this grammar as well, in his own way, as chapters 2 and 3 will show. For Luther, and those who follow after him, sacraments convey God’s effective promise to the church. In receiving the signs and promises of the sacraments together, Christians are simultaneously participating in the extension of these promises to one another. In the sacraments, God’s promises are given, received, and carried out into the world. There is no hope for faithful Christian living apart from these means of grace. LUTHER’S THEOLOGY OF THE SACRAMENTS What Is a Sacrament? While sacraments are a ubiquitous theme in Luther, they are not an immediate matter of controversy when the struggle erupts with Rome. As he writes the “Ninety-five Theses” in 1517, Luther still operates largely within the framework of the medieval Roman church, particularly as regards baptism and the Eucharist. For example, he seems to accept transubstantiation as an acceptable description of what occurs in the Eucharist.9 Even as he raises the

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subject of penance, there is not a fundamental challenge to either the work or sacramental status of penance as comes in “Babylonian Captivity.” That is, Luther does not question whether indulgences are an appropriate manifestation of penance. Instead, Luther wants to discuss the appropriate limits for indulgences so that they are not abused and so that works of love are not neglected. As the controversy with Rome grew, Luther realized more and more the systemic corruption of the institution he was now aligned against. He wanted to see it reformed but also saw how epic the scale of reform was. He concluded that the gospel could no longer be heard in the current climate: When the words of Jesus’ promise are not even said aloud during Eucharist, and when indulgences can be bought for crimes not yet committed, Luther found it necessary to rethink his previous opposition to Rome.10 He rethought because he had not been critical enough.11 True enough, the Eucharist served in the real presence of Christ had proven to be a powerful force for social cohesion and reconciliation among laity throughout the Middle Ages.12 Yet, the Eucharistic practices of the time served more and more to distinguish clergy from laity. Evans writes: “This deep and pervasive resentment of spiritual and practical privileges, reserved apparently for the priesthood, underlies and informs much of the argument of the sixteenth century on the reforming side. That is not to say that it was always conscious.”13 As Luther surveyed the church around him, Luther thus saw . . . a church enmeshed in a type of activism that tortured rather than comforted the sensitive and distressed conscience and that found it more profitable to encourage endless doing rather than confident being. In actual practice this meant that the church was fostering salvation by works instead of justification by faith.14

Luther’s new sacramental thought is developing, however, even before he begins this renewed assault on Medieval Catholicism due in part to a series of sermons delivered in 1519 on the sacraments themselves: the first on penance, the second on baptism, and the third on the Eucharist.15 These sermons are not the earliest references in Luther’s work to the sacraments, but they most clearly delineate the arguments in this first set of controversies. From these sermons, Luther’s belief about what a sacrament is sets the agenda for subsequent Lutheran reflections on the sacraments (including Bonhoeffer, who read at least the sermon on penance and Eucharist).16 Luther’s early doctrines of penance, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper rest on three constructs that were also important to Bonhoeffer: sign, promise, and faith.17

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It is significant that Luther commenced the series of sermons with a sermon on the sacrament of penance. This sacrament was the origin of his conflict with the powers that be, in particular, whether the Christian could be certain penance and forgiveness correspond with one another and how direct that correspondence might be. Does God forgive the penitent immediately for the sake of their penitence, or is some action required that further demonstrates repentance? Must the Christian pronouncing God’s forgiveness be convinced that the other party is truly contrite before offering absolution, and, if so, what ought to convince the absolver? In thinking through what penance is and ought to be, Luther transposed the sacramental tradition he had received, giving rise to conflict. Penance is the issue to which Luther’s entire sacramental theology intends to respond. Penance and assurance become the two main poles of the discussion about signs, promises, and faith. All sacraments should be understood as the interrelated and visible working out of penance and forgiveness, of contrition and absolution. The basic Lutheran form for describing what a sacrament is, a form within which Bonhoeffer will operate, emerges quite early and remains largely unchanged throughout Luther’s life. He writes: “This is why it (penance) is called a sacrament, a holy sign, because in it one hears the words externally that signify spiritual gifts within, gifts by which the heart is comforted and set at peace.”18 A sacrament then, is a sign and a promise received in faith. Sacraments Are Signs . . . A sign is an external object with which the Christian is encountered. These are tangible, creaturely entities having no extraordinary significance but which—when taken up by God and received in faith by humanity—become transformative. Yet, the signs always remain creaturely, ordinary. The sign of baptism is immersion in water; bread is given to all Christians in the Eucharist; and the sign of penance is the Christian’s concrete neighbor who pronounces forgiveness. Yet, signs can embody their respective promises more or less completely. There are better and worse ways of receiving the sacraments so as to better or worse comport with the promise a particular sacrament conveys. For example, Luther finds that baptism by immersion better embodies Christ’s death and resurrection and he therefore believes this to be the best practice, even for infants.19 Likewise, the promises contained in the Eucharist are better conveyed through communion in both kinds, although Luther is originally very pastorally sensitive on this issue and concedes that receiving the bread alone is enough for those whose conscience might be violated by receiving the wine as well.20 What is significant, however, is that the sacrament is not more or less efficacious because of the correspondence—or

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lack thereof—between the promise and the sign. Correspondence is primarily a matter of fidelity rather than efficacy. This correspondence between sign and promise needs further qualified. Sacraments Are Signs and Promises . . . Signs are less than what they signify—they point to something greater beyond themselves.21 For Luther, the sacramental sign points to a far more important promise: the word of Christ that accomplishes something significant within the Christian who receives the sacrament. In particular, these signs accompany the promise that sins are forgiven. This is most obvious in penance, during which the absolver directly articulates the words of absolution. Yet, the promise is also contained in the words of institution for the Lord’s Supper: Christ, along with the entire church community, will be there to bear the Christian through the trials and temptations of life.22 In baptism “sins are drowned” while “righteousness comes forth.”23 That righteousness is both ontic and ethical, for as Baldovin writes, “receiving one’s own baptismal dignity implies recognizing the dignity and human rights of all people.”24 Altogether, these promises rotate around the locus of assurance: Because Christ has spoken his effective word, sins are forgiven and the Christian borne down by guilt is lifted up to grace. Sacraments Are Signs and Promises Received in Faith The promise must be received in a certain way—in faith. Christians must accept that what God has promised is accomplished in God’s pronouncement. No further acts are required. God has indeed forgiven. Unbelief, refusing to acknowledge the efficacy of Christ’s promise, is a grievous fault: By such disbelief you make your God to be a liar when, through his priest, he says to you, “You are loosed from your sins,” and you retort, “I don’t believe it,” or, “I doubt it.” As if you were more certain in your opinion than God is in his words, whereas you should be letting personal opinions go, and with unshakeable faith giving place to the word of God.25

Luther’s insistence on passive acceptance of God’s pronouncement marks a crucial insight into justification.26 He later writes: The safest course, therefore, will be to go to the mass in the same spirit in which you would go to hear any other promise of God, that is, prepared not to do or contribute much yourself, but to believe and accept all that is promised you there, or proclaimed as promises through the ministry of the priest.27

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In sharp contrast to the medieval understanding of faith as right belief, the least of the theological virtues since even Judas could possess it, faith as a matter of accepting the pro nobis will and word of God becomes the virtue par excellance.28 A Case Study: The Sacrament of Penance? Sign, promise, and faith encompass Luther’s tridentate theology of sacraments and these three terms become basic grammar to subsequent Lutheran reflections on this theological theme. To more fully grasp how these three aspects fit together, a case study is helpful. The question of penance motivated much of Luther’s impulse to reform, and so the sacrament of penance is taken as the subject of this study. Moreover, because penance, or confession, has not always been numbered among the sacraments by Lutherans, it will be helpful to have as clear a grasp as possible of the debate within the Lutheran tradition about penance when assessing how Bonhoeffer does treat confession as a sacrament. When first introduced, the practice of penance concluded with “penances.” These were works of love fitted to the sin that made recompense for the harm done, ideally both to the individual and the community. Over time, as more and more confessions were being made, it became harder for priests to standardize these penances. So the process was simplified to “set prayers, alms, fasts, and eventually paying money . . . contingent upon the type and severity of each trespass.”29 Pilgrimages and donations at famous sites might also factor into the calculus. Eventually, indulgences were introduced. It began to seem as though works of love were no longer important in restoring relationships disrupted by sin. Grace came too cheap and too hefty all at once because it was sought in all the wrong places. What was necessary was to hear the promise of God from your neighbor: You are forgiven.30 In the 1519 sermon on penance, Luther expends a great deal of time discussing who is authorized to pronounce the promise. The promise is God’s alone, but God condescends and speaks it through a human. Ordinarily, this function is gifted to the priest who is present with words of forgiveness and absolution. Luther’s allowance that anyone ought to be able to pronounce the promise of forgiveness to another is curtailed by his subsequent insistence that the order and authority of the church ought to be observed.31 Yet, as early as the final sermon in the series, on the Eucharist, such clerical restrictions on the practice of the sacraments are already giving way to a more egalitarian belief in the community of priests and the community of saints. In “Babylonian Captivity,” he insists that the practice of confession specifically must be freed from clerical bounds.32 What is telling, however, is that the promise of penance is never extended outside the church community.

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There was never a question of whether non-church members could be in a position to pronounce the sacramental promise. The sacraments are given to and administered within the church body, and the right order restricts them to within this body. Whether the Christian is a cleric or not may be of no consequence, but it matters a great deal that this Christian should be a priest when serving as God’s vessel to proclaim the forgiveness of sins. The promises of God are made to and effected in the church. Bonhoeffer will never back away from this same belief. In “Captivity,” Luther also displaces penance from among the sacraments, introducing an ambiguity that would forever plague Lutheran sacramentology. Penance ultimately lacked, in Luther’s opinion, a divinely instituted sign; only the promise was present in scripture.33 Luther could be challenged from within his own theology, however, about this lack of a sign associated with penance. The promise to which Luther most often refers when discussing penance is Matthew 16.19: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you lose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” This particular promise is referenced in both the 1517 sermon and “Babylonian Captivity.”34 Luther draws a great deal of significance from this promise, certain that it means all Christians are able to pronounce the word of forgiveness to one another. In “Captivity,” Luther also incorporates Christ’s promise that he is present where two or more are gathered (Matt 18.20). The words of absolution pronounced by a Christian brother are Christ’s words.35 There is, therefore, access within these passages to both Christ’s promise and presence, such that only the sign remains. Yet, these same passages from Matthew can resolve Luther’s worries about the sign of penance: Not only should his concern be with the promise of binding and loosing, but also with the sign of the “you” who binds and loses. Christ’s presence is hidden in the presence of a Christian brother or sister. From within the presence of that brother or sister, Christ calls the Christian to confess. Christ’s promise of forgiveness is attached to the sign of a fellow Christian’s bodily presence, a body in which Christ also dwells; Christ’s formation of a church community is simultaneously the formation of a communion of confessors. Within a community of confessors, each Christian offers his or her confession to another and then receives back the words of Christ’s promise that sins are forgiven, taking in faith that what Christ has said through this brother or sister is true and trusting that Christ will fulfill that promise. Since sign and promise are both present and received in faith, penance might be numbered among the sacraments. Other Lutherans have developed this line of thinking and recovered penance, most notably, Melanchthon. Luther’s wavering on the status of penance, along with the resources within his theology for defending penance as a sacrament, open the possibility for his theological heirs to either include or exclude penance from the sacraments and the work that sacraments do. As

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a result, close attention must be paid to how Bonhoeffer, an inheritor of this ambiguity, describes confession and its relationship to the other sacraments in effecting the church’s religionless habitation of the world. Luther had originally suggested that a Christian brother or sister serves as the sacramental sign.36 His reticence to continue classifying penance as a sacrament could be based on a genuine shift in theological position, one over which he seemed conflicted. Once, however, the practice of penance has been reconceived as one Christian confessing to another who pronounces the words of absolution without hesitation and without demand for satisfaction, the practice’s sacramental character comes to the fore. There is a promise of forgiveness mediated through the sign of a fellow Christian who pronounces absolution in faith that is received in faith by those whose hearts are uncertain.37 And even though he changes his mind, nothing about his latter theology necessitates dismissing the sign his early theology has attributed to penance. This is clearly reflected in Melanchthon’s own journey with the question of penance, a journey which inverts Luther’s. Melanchthon had originally supported Luther’s later notion that confession is an extension of baptism rather than a sacrament in its own right.38 Melanchthon states in the earliest edition of his Loci Communes, published the year after Luther’s “Babylonian Captivity,” that “Baptism is the sacrament of repentance.”39 Yet, at Augsburg Melanchthon accepts penance as a third sacrament.40 The inclusion of penance, or confession, as a sacrament is significant because Christ conveys his presence through the sacraments in a way that his presence is not conveyed by other mediums. Observing the special connection of Christ’s presence to the sacraments does not limit his presence to the sacraments. Yet, it does suggest that Christ, so long as he is sought and received in faith, can be reliably encountered in the act of confession if it is a sacrament. That encounter is less certain if confession is not a sacrament. This ambiguity within the Lutheran tradition means that a stronger defense is necessary to claim that confession serves as a sacrament alongside baptism and the Eucharist in motivating Bonhoeffer’s vision of religionlessness.41 If a disproportionate amount of space is therefore devoted to this defense, Luther’s own equivocation is at fault. Summary Within the confines of the church community to which God has made this promise, the sacraments serve to convey that sins are indeed forgiven. This is how distinctive practices are able to cohere formally under one category. Each sacrament—whether baptism, Lord’s Supper, or penance—is comprised of a sign conveying this promise of forgiveness; both promise and sign are received in faith. The sign is notable for its everydayness, or its worldliness;

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the promise is notable for its origin in divine utterance. Just as Luther equivocated between whether there were two or three scriptural sacraments, so too has the Lutheran tradition vacillated between these positions. Yet, no matter the number, the sacraments are indispensable to the church’s life because of what they do to those who engage them. Therefore, discussion must shift from form to function to ask what a sacrament does. While discussion of form has largely permitted general speech in a categorical grammar of “sacraments,” discussion of function now presses after each practice’s unique contribution in conveying and effecting the promise of forgiveness. WHAT DOES A SACRAMENT DO? In his sermon, “The Blessed Sacrament of the Holy and True Body of Christ, and the Brotherhoods,” Luther opts to speak first of the sacramental sign or form.42 Immediately after form, he turns to “significance.”43 In particular, the significance of the Eucharistic meal is “the fellowship of all the saints.”44 This significance, or function, of the sacrament, can be separated rhetorically from the sacrament’s promise (a word conspicuously absent from this particular sermon). Sacraments are practiced not only because of Christ’s command to practice them but also because they do something to those who practice them; sacraments effect something transformative in the lives of those who partake. This is a noteworthy point for Luther—that sacraments exist to benefit believers—because it stands in stark contrast with the Scholastic notion that sacraments exist opus gratum opere operato, as works done to please God: “For [the Eucharist] was not instituted for its own sake, that it might please God, but for our sake, that we might use it right, exercise our faith by it, and through it become pleasing to God.”45 Sacraments are gifts from God meant to transform the recipient. By insisting that sacraments act opus operantis, with reference to the doer, rather than opus operatum, with reference to the deed, Luther shows that sacraments have implications for the community that receives them. While the form of sacraments themselves requires a passive acceptance of God’s promise, the entire work of that promise is not encompassed in hearing alone. That is not to say that the promise is incomplete without some human response. The thought that something should be added to the promise of God would be reprehensible to Luther. Rather, the promise received in faith contains a response from the recipient that extends the event of sacrament beyond the immediate moment of encounter and reception. As Luther writes concerning the Lord’s Supper in the 1527 treatise “That These Words of Christ ‘This is My Body’ Still Stand Firm against the Fanatics”: “For he (Christ) is not digested or transformed but ceaselessly he transforms us, our soul into righteousness, our body into immortality.”46

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Or, as he wrote in the 1519 sermon on baptism: “Therefore this whole life is nothing else than a spiritual baptism which does not cease till death.”47 The sacraments are distinct events, but they implicate the ongoing whole of a Christian’s life. The sacraments are important because they shape the Christian form of life. Life is lived in reference to baptism, Eucharist, and confession as these practices structure how Christians conceive and participate in reality. Four functions of the sacraments are of “significance” here. Sacraments instill faith, strengthen faith, unite in faith, and vitalize faith. Beyond their significance for Luther, these functions also have ways of mapping on to the themes that dominate Bonhoeffer’s vision for religionlessness. For now, though, a simple explanation of each of these functions suffices. Before explaining these functions, however, another question looms large: If the performed signs can correspond in greater or lesser degree to their promises, might not signs with less correspondence less effectively solicit their appropriate extensions? That is, might the form of life crafted from less suitable cultic practices be somehow skewed compared to a form of life forged by practices that accord more closely to their scriptural institution? This is not always Luther’s question so much as it is a question that Luther’s theology necessitates asking. This question should be answered before talking about the “significance” of the sacraments because the shape of the practice might adversely affect the shape of the promise conveyed and received. For example, Luther makes a great deal of the everyday nature of elements such as bread and water.48 Could luxury items—perhaps being baptized with precious oils—be appropriate substitutions, or might they inflame a lust for wealth that bread and water consciously resist? Directly from Luther, is remission of sin accomplished through purchasing indulgences truly equal to penance for sin accompanied by transformative works of love?49 Or does fellowship at the Lord’s Table promote unity and togetherness when some are denied the cup and others privileged to partake from it?50 To answer, signs that correspond less closely to their promises also give rise to deviant forms of life. A promise embodied less faithfully forms a community committed to a promise different than Christ’s promise.51 Historically, this is why Luther called the Pope an Antichrist: He headed a community that embodied a form of life at odds with Christ’s promise.52 For all the claims of fidelity to Christ made by the Roman church, Luther insisted that the fruit revealed the tree was bad. Practices had been corrupted until Christ’s promise was no longer recognizable therein. The church community that gathered for these practices no longer heard the promise of Christ. Therefore, the church could not inhabit the world in a way corresponding to Christ: Christ’s word has not been revealed to take root in the community’s being and form it into his likeness.

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Bad form makes for bad faith; bad faith reasserts bad form. Luther, therefore, insisted on close attention to the details of scripture when formulating his sacramental doctrines and liturgies. It was necessary to pay close attention to the promise and the means of its conveyance so that this promise would not be warped into something entirely different through human negligence or avarice. Admittedly, Luther is not always consistent on this point.53 Yet, if the promise has been heard and received in the manner Christ intended, then certain things begin to happen as the community conforms to Christ. The significance of the sacrament depends heavily on the form of the sacrament. Any form at odds with the form Christ instituted may very well suggest significance at variance with the promise enfleshed by Christ, and therefore reform may be needed.54 Luther’s form has been discussed in the last section: Sacraments consist of a promise and sign received in faith. Luther identifies four significances, or effects, that follow from the church receiving the sacraments rightly, and to these the chapter turns. Instils Faith: The Identity-making Task of Sacraments Pinning down just what exactly Luther means by “faith” is not an easy task. The secondary literature is replete with competing, though generally agreeable, definitions. For Paul Althaus: “Although faith is an act of man which is oriented to the word of promise, it is not an act which he either should or can produce by himself; rather God creates it through the word. . . . Faith is God’s power. . . . In faith man shares in the power of God.”55 Eric Gritsch notes that faith is not a shared commodity, as if it were a limited good to be shared among members of the church, but is the boundless gift of God.56 Robert Kolb describes faith variously as both that faculty by which the Christian is able to see the truths reason alone cannot and “trust in God’s person.”57 Hans-Martin Barth psychologizes faith as a human “courage to abandon oneself to the God concealed in Christ’s suffering” to better comprehend and locate the Christian’s own suffering.58 Bayer resists Barth’s psychologization of faith, insisting that faith be associated with a via passiva: faith is received and suffered.59 One thing is abundantly clear, however. Faith, for Luther, comes from without. Faith is not the human being’s natural possession or possibility. Faith is the gift God gives believes so that believers can be justified before God. That faith is a gift, however, should not obscure its costly nature. Gerhard Forde brings out the radical nature of this: Now, of course, it is just this claim, that in the judgment of God we are just because of the faith that Jesus awakens in us, that the world finds so absurd. . . . It is preposterous to us as “old beings,” what Luther and others could call the Old Adam. . . . The gospel of justification by faith alone is . . . the end of the

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age, the end of the old, the death of sinners. God is not out merely to change, or even to convert old beings. . . . Faith in Christ is a death. . . . But it is not just a death; it is also the hope of resurrection, a being grasped by a new life of love, hope, and care.60

The installation of faith, and the death and resurrection such a creation entails, is linked most closely to baptism. Writing in the early sacramental sermons, Luther says: “For baptism . . . signifies that the old man and the sinful birth of flesh and blood are to be wholly drowned by the grace of God.”61 Once more, in “Babylonian Captivity,” Luther writes: “Baptism, then, signifies two things—death and resurrection, that is, full and complete justification.”62 Death and resurrection are indispensably linked to Luther’s theology of baptism. It was not always clear that this death and resurrection language should attach to baptism, however. This radical language of death and resurrection was variously located in the theological topography in the Middle Ages. In fact, the most common home for such language was actually the Eucharist: While conversio and transubstantio were effectively interchangeable, the question remained whether the bread and wine’s transformation into body and blood was a “turning into, the new being brought forth from the old” or “the annihilation of the first substance and its replacement with the second.”63 The connection between conversion and baptism common to Luther— and through him to contemporary discourse—was less emphatic among Scholastics as a result of the Medieval Christendom context.64 Luther’s insistence that baptism (as opposed to Eucharist) constitutes a Christian form of life, that is, that a Christian life is an extension of the baptismal symbol of death and resurrection, limits the radical, apocalyptic claim of Forde even while upholding it. The entire Christian life, not one single moment in it, is marked by the transformation from death into life: The fact that there is no clear distinction between repeatable and unrepeatable conversions in the Dictata corresponds to the shape of the Christian life in the thinking of the older Luther, where it is difficult to talk of conversio as a discrete event that can never be regarded by the Christian individual as past, or as fully accomplished.65

Baptism marks the beginning of a process of repeated, even continual, dying and rising.66 Sin is not done away with, but in baptism Christ promises that sin shall be wiped away: “From that hour he begins to make you a new person. He pours into you his grace and Holy Spirit, who begins to slay nature and sin, and to prepare you for death and the resurrection at the Last Day.”67 The Christian lives trusting that promise.68 Faith makes trust in Christ’s promise

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possible. Faith, first instilled in baptism, might now be summarized as the work of God to turn the Christian outward to trust in God. Faith makes it possible for the Christian to love both God and neighbor because God has allied Godself to the Christian in baptism. Strengthening Faith: The Resilient Task of Sacraments Faith is God’s act of turning a Christian outward to trust God and thereby to love God and neighbor, not the human being’s natural disposition. The sinner is predisposed to trust in herself; she loves others only insofar as loving another brings benefit and security to herself, so far as love remains a reflexive love of self. To be turned outward is a miracle, a fruit of the miracle of faith.69 Therefore, this outward orientation must be actively maintained, not simply left to its own devices. The process of dying and rising must be sustained across time. Beyond instilling faith, the sacraments also function to sustain and strengthen faith, that is, the love and trust that they have instilled. Whereas baptism is primarily associated with instilling faith, the language of sustaining faith is found in reference to all three sacraments—baptism, penance, and Eucharist. Baptism works to strengthen faith when the Christian recalls her baptism. Baptism bears the promise that sin is put to death and love and faith resurrected in the Christian. The last section explained how baptism marks the rupture in a Christian’s identity between the old life and the new, or, more accurately, between death and life. Through baptism, the Christian’s preoccupation with self-love and self-security came to an abrupt end, and she received a new occupation to love and serve God and neighbor. Of course, so long as the Christian remains finite and disposed to all the insecurities finiteness entails, the temptation back to self-security at the expense of others is ever present. Therefore, “[E]thical advances can only come in the return to one’s baptism. Progress . . . comes in repentance and in a return to one’s baptism and thereby to an awareness of the world in which the alternatives of optimism and pessimism . . . are destroyed.”70 Optimism and pessimism are left behind because neither is appropriate to the truth Christians experience in baptism. Things are not becoming better or worse. God is making all things new. Newness requires the death of the old, such that optimism is inappropriate; yet the old is not consigned to oblivion but rather passes into newness, negating pessimistic sensibilities. In remembering that she is baptized, the Christian remembers that she has been and is being made new. Remembering her newness in baptism sustains faith in two ways. Or, in other words, remembering baptism is both a call to obedience and an invocation of assurance.71 First, remembering baptism prompts the Christian to put aside dead works and take up the new life of faith and love.72 Second, remembering

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baptism reminds the Christian that the old life is still being put to death and that Christ’s promise remains that she will be brought to the fullness of life.73 In the first instance, faith is strengthened as baptism encourages works of love. In the second instance, faith is strengthened as baptism heartens those who remain sinful with the knowledge that this sin does not mean Christ has abandoned them. Baptism is not the only sacrament that works to strengthen faith. Penance, too, strengthens faith by “comforting and strengthening [one’s] conscience.”74 Penance bears the promise that sin is forgiven no matter the troublesome doubts.75 In this sacrament, the Christian is reminded time and again that her own strength is not enough to overcome sin, but neither has God ever left the Christian to her own strength. Words of mercy are offered so that the Christian learns again to trust that sin is overcome by the power of God. The Christian grows to love the other who is pronouncing such words of mercy—both God and the Christian through whom God speaks. Penance is performed as often as needed so that the Christian does not fall into despair— which would be a lack of trust and mark a return to self-preoccupation—or hatred—which would be a lack of love and mark a similar return. Penance keeps the heart oriented in the way God has directed it. When the sacrament does not function thus, when the Christian has difficulty believing her sins are forgiven, Luther suggests that this lack of belief be regarded as a temptation (Anfechtungen) that might drive the Christian to cry for God to increase her faith.76 These spiritual Anfechtung mark one as Christian.77 The experience of Anfechtung “is the touchstone that shows the Word of God itself to be credible and mighty within such struggle and when opposing it.”78 When the Christian struggles in faith she experiences the power of God’s promise to overcome the powers of guilt and uncertainty that assail. In struggling to trust, she gains experiential knowledge that God is trustworthy, helping her to stand more firmly in faith the next time.79 Thus far, this section has demonstrated how both baptism and penance participate in the work of the sacraments to strengthen faith. Finally, the Eucharist works to strengthen faith by bringing the Christian into fellowship with God and others. The Eucharist bears the promise that sin, which divides persons from one another, is forgiven and that unity prevails. Bayer describes it succinctly: “From that meal comes a new focus toward fellow creatures, with a proper courage to live life.”80 Death gives way to life in baptism, suffering gives way to joyful assurance through penance, and from these the Christian gains the audacity to live in love and trust in those with whom God has placed her in relationship. That the Christian has been placed in relationship with others is never more clear than at the Lord’s Table, where barriers of race, class, and politics are broken down as God calls everyone to one place to receive the same sustenance.81 As the Christian looks around to see

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those who gather to receive God’s grace, she sees those she is called to love and care for and those who will love and care for her in return. He writes: “Here your heart must go out in love and learn that this is a sacrament of love. As love and support are given you, you in turn must render love and support to Christ in his needy ones.”82 These are the people to whom the Christian will say, “This is the blood of Christ, the cup of our salvation,” and they will respond in kind. In the Supper, the Christian is placed into a community that will bear her up with the promises of God when her faith is weak.83 This same community will require from her the strength to love that only comes from a heart turned outward to sustain its faith from time to time. The church community that goes to the Table together (1) bears with the Christian’s shortcomings and teaches her that others can be trusted to bear her up and (2) operates in need of each Christian’s faith and love so that her reversion to despair and self-security becomes an unthinkable betrayal. In this way, the community that takes the Supper sustains a Christian’s life of faith and love. Luther describes the Eucharistic community thus: “All sufferings and sins also become common property; and thus love engenders love in return and [mutual love] unites.”84 The Table makes it possible to suffer the effects of baptism: death to self and life to love.85 The sacraments not only instill faith; they are also the means by which faith is sustained. Unites in Faith: The Situating Task of Sacraments If the Lord’s Supper makes the baptismal life possible, it is because the Table not only symbolizes the church’s unity but also establishes that unity. The Eucharist locates Christian faith and love in a concrete body of believers, tying faith and love inescapably to the world. Luther says repeatedly in his 1519 sermon that the Eucharist signifies the “fellowship of all the saints.”86 The community gathers round its members to fight against sin.87 When a member gives in to sin, the community bears the burden of that sin and reminds the community member that Christ’s righteousness is still given to the Christian.88 Luther writes about that promise: Christ with all saints, by his love, takes upon himself our form [Phil. 2:7], fights with us against sin, death, and all evil. This enkindles in us such love that we take on his form, rely upon his righteousness, life, and blessedness. And through the interchange of his blessings and our misfortunes, we become one loaf, one bread, one body, one drink, and have all things in common.89

The theme comes forward again in the 1520 work “A Treatise on the New Testament, that is, the Holy Mass.” The abundance of laws leads to an abundance of division, but trust in Christ’s promise creates unity as in the mass the Christian offers to care for her neighbor.90 “Babylonian Captivity”

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carries the theme forward, albeit more obliquely, when speaking about the “works of the mass” comprised of prayer and believing.91 In “The Misuse of the Mass” (1521), Luther argues that late medieval Roman Catholic theology obscures the meaning of the mass to the point that Christians have completely forgotten that true Christian work consists of neighborly love bearing others’ “affliction, agony, pain and all that vexes us.”92 The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, for Luther, works to locate the Christian community as one body of care and concern. The form of the sacrament, especially the liturgical sign, however, matters a great deal when assessing the Supper’s ability to fulfill this function. Baptism distinguishes between those who are Christian and those who are not, and therefore baptism is the only division that should bear spiritual weight. The Supper should bring together those whom baptism has separated from prior affiliations to unite them together as a new community. Nothing is left to distinguish one baptized believer from another or to set one above another.93 All are equally a part of this new community by grace alone. No greater grace has been given to one Christian over another, but all received the same grace of Christ’s promise. How should the Supper be received so as to communicate and embody this truth? Luther suggests communion be received in both forms, bread and wine, by clergy and congregation alike.94 Yet, Luther holds to communion of both kinds with a surprisingly light grasp. Luther did not wish to make communion of both kinds necessary lest those be excluded who felt they could only partake of bread.95 The irony is his reasoning: In his immediate context, receiving communion in both kinds might less fully embody the promise of forgiveness and unity of the church than might receiving communion in one kind. In his setting, forcing communion of both kinds violates the law of love—and therefore the unity of the church—by forcing some to go against their conscience. In provoking people to act against their conscience, the Supper would become not a promise that sin is forgiven but rather a cause of sin!96 Therefore, Luther writes: “It is enough that each one do that right thing which is appropriate to himself and incumbent upon him. Where this order is perverted nothing is right, no matter how good it might otherwise be.”97 The form of the sacrament matters, as bad form can obscure the promise, but no Christian should be so zealous in pursuit of a proper form that the promise is violated. Luther’s sole criterion for determining the appropriate form for the sign of Christ’s Eucharistic promise is this: love of neighbor. Luther will not pass definitive judgment on the ritual’s form. The form matters—it has a promise to convey well—but the form remains fluid. Care must be exercised in reading Luther’s criticism of his opponents’ sacramental practice: he condemns a form to the degree that it corrupts and misrepresents the promise,

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but that is the limit of his censure. The promise stands prior to the sign. The sign points to something greater than itself. The ritual meal and the unity of the church are related to one another in Christ’s institution of the sacrament, and no reform should be instituted that hinders the Supper’s ability to bind Christians together.98 Even reform should not resist the sacraments in their function to locate faith and love in a concrete community of believers. Vitalizes Faith: The Ethical Task of Sacraments The final significance of the sacraments is that as practices, they are repeatedly performed that Christians might learn to inhabit creation according to God’s purpose. First, the sacraments open a Christian’s eyes to the grace of God that overcomes human limitation and turns her heart outward. Second, the sacraments serve to maintain this outward orientation by helping the Christian resist the temptation back to self-love and self-security. Third, the sacraments place her within a community where love is both provided and required. To rephrase these points, first, by the sacraments, love is made possible. Second, love is promised. Third, love is located. Now, fourth, love is practiced. Sacraments, insofar as by their divine assumption they bear the grace and promises of God, have forged persons of faith and forged those persons into a community. This is not simply any old community, however. It is the church. This community took baptismal vows to resist evil in all its forms. It heard the call to go and sin no more. It has learned to receive each person as a neighbor with whom it shares Christ’s Table. This is a particular community: The sacraments forge a community of loving hearts. Abraham states that the close connection between the sacramental and the ethical is a unique emphasis of Bonhoeffer over and against Luther.99 Perhaps, as an “emphasis,” this statement may be true. Nevertheless, the connection between the sacramental and the ethical is still very present within Luther’s theology. This process of ethical change begins with baptism: “From that hour [God] begins to make you a new person. He pours into you his grace and Holy Spirit, who begins to slay nature and sin, and to prepare you for death and the resurrection at the last day.”100 In baptism, the Christian vows to put off all evil and be conformed to Christ by grace.101 This vow is all that a Christian could ever promise or hope to fulfill.102 Daily remembrance of baptism is a reminder to put off the old self so that the new person might come forth. This new person is liberated from self-justification so that she might love God and neighbor.103 She bears the responsibility of receiving grace: extending grace. The outward focus makes all the difference: “Otherwise, spiritual formation will just be a generic discipline, similar, if not identical, with

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self-centered exercises of minds and bodies.”104 The discipline of daily remembering her baptism serves to remind the Christian of her placement within a community of persons who now bear one another’s sins and weaknesses with acts of love that uphold and restore the other in their finitude. Karl Holl, responsible for teaching Luther to Bonhoeffer, also emphasized that for Luther self-interested discipline is to be given wide berth: The very idea of a duty to oneself seemed to put him (Luther) on guard: it looked too much like the complacency and egotism he wanted torn out by the roots. Instead he took as a starting-point, here as everywhere, the concept of community. From the duty of love he deduced one’s obligation to oneself. One should discipline oneself so as to become proficient in serving one’s neighbor.105

The Christian remembers her baptism so as to remember those whom she has been called to love. Thus remembering, she begins again to hear her neighbor’s need. At the Table, the Christian receives her neighbor exactly as they are—in their need and despondency. She receives them exactly as Christ has called them and laid them at her feet. She receives them as someone who makes a claim on her, who requires from her love and service which can be willingly given.106 Perhaps, this neighbor’s need is to hear it proclaimed that her sins are forgiven; perhaps the service she requires is that the Christian provide aid with food, shelter, clothing, and so on. There is no end to the possible needs. Yet, Christ has put each Christian together in community with others by their sharing of the sacramental meal precisely so that those needs might be met.107 Summary A sacrament is a promise and a sign received in faith. The promise is that sins are forgiven. The sign is an earthy, ordinary object God has deemed appropriate to take up into the economy of grace. The Lutheran tradition has generally recognized up to three sacramental signs: the water of baptism, the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, and the neighbor pronouncing absolution in penance. Together, participation in these three signs transforms those persons who make up the church: Sacraments instill faith, maintain faith, identify the community in which love is practiced, and encourage acts of love. So doing, the sacraments both recall the death and resurrection of Christ and perform the Christian’s death and resurrection so that a community of loving hearts is born.

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THE SACRAMENTAL PROMISE AND THE SELF-DONATION OF GOD By attending to form and function, this chapter has identified ways in which Luther closely connected worship and life, or connected the sacraments and the way by which the church faithfully inhabits the world. To leave this discussion at the level of form and function, however, neglects one vital element: the necessity of divine presence. It is Christ’s presence through the sacraments, not the signs themselves, that is responsible for the transformative work that takes place when Christians receive the sacraments. In so doing, this section reasserts the primacy of an encounter between persons which drags the Christian beyond herself and opens her to the being and claim of another. This particular aspect of Luther’s theology will have profound importance in subsequent discussions of Bonhoeffer’s theology. Luther had reasons beyond biblical literalism for scratching ‘ist’ into a table at Marburg as he and Zwingli divided the Reformation on the question of Christ’s presence. The sacraments are not self-contained by those who practice them but an encounter between persons by which the Christian who receives the sacrament is transformed. Rachel Muers describes why Bonhoeffer also found it important to stress that the sacraments are an encounter between persons: “Bonhoeffer’s concentration on the pro me . . . should not be taken as evidence of an exclusive interest in soteriology—in Christ ‘for us’ to the exclusion of Christ’s being. That would risk losing sight of the ‘Who?’ question and dissolving Christ into a collection of benefits.”108 The work of God for us is not a list of benefits: God’s work for us is a person who encounters and overcomes us. In a Lutheran context, transformation is possible precisely because Christ is present in and through the sacraments. Luther writes: “This blessed sacrament of baptism helps you because in it God allies himself with you and becomes one with you in a gracious covenant of comfort.”109 In the Supper, the words of institution serve as Christ’s promise of continual presence to the church.110 Without divine presence, sacraments cannot perform the above significances: The Christian is transformed through engaging the sacraments only because she engages Christ in them. God’s first words to humans were words to give and sustain: Eat freely of every tree. This gift is given again, now of God’s very self, when Christ says, “Take and eat. This is my body given for you.”111 Interpreting Luther, Oswald Bayer contends: “God’s entire Trinitarian being, within his own being as well as for us . . . is to be apprehended as giving and giving as a sacrifice.”112 In the “Small Catechism,” Luther’s discussion of the Apostle’s Creed’s second article hinges on the fact that God has redeemed the world (and more specifically the particular catechumen) by no other means than the shedding of Christ’s blood in his suffering and death.113 Redemption

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beckons Christians into lives of discipleship, following the Christ who has been resurrected. Luther’s discussion of baptism builds on this claim. In Christ, the church has a promise that the world is being set to rights and each believer along with it. To this end, the waters of baptism have an efficacious role in fulfilling this promise. This becomes clear when one notes that Luther’s second question inquires after the actual work baptism does, and Luther answers without reference to symbol, metaphor, or expression, but instead writes what baptism in fact, “effects.”114 Of course, it is not, in fact, the water that performs these tasks “but the Word of God connected with the water.”115 Luther continues: “For without the Word of God that water is merely water and no Baptism.”116 “Word of God” is then described in terms of Christ and the Holy Spirit, divine agents at work through the sacraments to renew and regenerate a creation gone awry. This conversation is mirrored in Luther’s articles on both “Confession and Absolution” and “The Sacrament of the Altar.”117 Sacraments do something to the Christian who receives them precisely because God gives them, or moreover, because God is giving God-self. Christ’s real presence in the sacraments becomes a generative theme for many theologians in the subsequent Lutheran tradition. Contemporary theologian Robert Jenson, also strongly influenced by Bonhoeffer, deploys Luther’s doctrine of real presence in an especially creative way. Interestingly, Jenson does not take Bonhoeffer as a serious interlocutor when developing his sacramentology in Visible Words. Nevertheless, Jenson’s work does mirror many of Bonhoeffer’s own concerns. There are at least two possible explanations for this: (1) Jenson was unconscious of the way in which Bonhoeffer’s work was influencing him or (2) Luther’s work provokes a certain kind of response to the modern philosophical tradition at which both Bonhoeffer and Jenson arrive. Both of these possibilities warrant further study, though neither is being explicitly argued for here. While working within the broad parameters of Luther’s sacramentology, Jenson’s work also shows the playful and sometimes radical way in which modern Lutheran theologians have reworked the Luther tradition. Jenson thinks with Luther rather than repeating Luther in a manner that parallels Bonhoeffer’s own appropriation of the Lutheran tradition, as chapters 2 and 3 will demonstrate. Jenson begins by establishing that the speech of the Christian gospel’s God requires embodiment: Only in that way are past and future tied together.118 Past and future must be tied together because of the content of God’s speech: God promises a future to the community called together in the past.119 In particular, this promised future is the future for which Jesus hoped and died.120 Christianity’s “abnormal” notion is that God refuses to be silent. Indeed, God cannot be silent because “God is his word.”121 This restates Luther’s claim: “God does not deal, nor has he ever dealt, with man otherwise than

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through a word of promise.”122 If God is always speaking, it follows that God is always being embodied so as to effect and guarantee that promise. God must be present because the nature of a promise is that “the one who makes a promise undertakes the conditions of the promised future’s realization.”123 One would not trust a promise made by someone in no position to fulfill that promise. For example, one rightly balks at the claim of a traffic cop that the person who burgled one’s home will be caught and will be sent to jail. It is not because the traffic cop is unreliable, incompetent at his or her job, or even because the traffic cop is necessarily wrong about what the future may hold. Yet, this cop does not necessarily have the particular training necessary to investigate this crime, and even then, the expertise and care of lawyers, judges, and juries still bear significant weight on the possibility of that promise’s fulfillment. If God makes a promise, and we are meant to believe that promise, then God must be in a position to fulfill that promise. To inhabit such a position requires the agency of embodiment. The gospel requires the continuous embodiment of Jesus in a body with which the church can recognize him and in which Christ recognizes himself, that is, in the same body Mary held and Pilate crucified.124 Only this continuity ensures that the same person who made the promise before is making the promise now and will fulfill the promise in the future. Thus, it cannot be otherwise than that Christianity is sacramental. Jesus said, “This is my body,” as he broke bread in front of the disciples. Any attempt to communicate with and about God that resists the sacraments, the places where Christ has located himself and promised the church he can be found, resists God.125 Describing this, Jenson writes that in Protestantism’s less commendable moments: It sometimes supposes . . . that the whole of our religious and liturgical turning to God, the whole reality of prayer and sacrifice and praise ought really to be eliminated, that it is at best God’s concession to our weakness. . . . But God does not maintain his exclusive initiative by hiding from our prayer and obedience, by de-objectifying himself from before us. Rather, he maintains his exclusive initiative precisely by intruding himself embodied into our lives and refusing to let us escape from or transcend this embodiment. God is utterly sovereign precisely in persisting as our religious object, in letting us turn to him as “Father” with our prayers and songs and offerings, and never letting us turn to him in any other way.126

As the person who makes the promise, Christ must be present to secure the promise’s fulfillment. Moreover, Christ must be present in a body he recognizes and in which the church recognizes him.127 The sacraments provide this identifiable body because on the night in which Jesus was betrayed, he took the bread and the cup and before the company of disciples

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said, “This is my body. This is my blood.” Christ looked at the bread and recognized his own body; now, Christians, too, in keeping with Christ’s own act of recognition, can look at the bread and perceive Christ. One question remains: When receiving the sacraments, how does the Christian know that the God therein encountered is the God who is rather than the God she wants? The work of the sacraments has less to do with the elements themselves and more to do with the relations of persons mediated through those elements.128 Signs are less than that which they signify. For the sacraments to be transformative events, there must be a genuine encounter between persons, not a self-contained encounter between a person and her own ideal or projection.129 Moreover, the other who is encountered cannot be just anyone but must be the person capable of giving and guaranteeing the promise, that is, Christ. An eschatological promise such as the one given to the church can only be meaningfully made by a living person with death behind him, a resurrected person.130 Therefore, the promise to which the church clings requires for its fulfillment the genuine other of a resurrected messiah as the guarantor of that promise.131 Anything less than this messiah leaves humans to their own recourse to fulfill their own vain ambitions, and all Christian theology and worship is merely a projection of the God Christians want (and want to be, as Feuerbach might contend). The sacraments require Christ’s living presence, nothing less, to transform those who engage them into persons of faith and love. John Colwell operates very aware of this possibility of human projection. For him, it is not that Christians are incapable of projecting the God they want thereby causing all manner of harm. His argument is that precisely because Christians can do this, the remedy to the problem is “greater faithfulness” by way of “a more careful listening to the gospel; by an ever-deeper concern to be shaped by its story rather than . . . to shape it.”132 The Christian must be placed back on the via passiva: receiving, trusting, and suffering the work performed on the Christian by God whose sacramental grace is “the presence and action of this one who loves in freedom.”133 Anything less than this act of receiving and suffering the presence of God is idolatry, not faith. Nothing ensures the Christian is encountering God in the sacraments. The Christian could very well use these material media to remove herself from God as if to erect some other entity in God’s place, meant to keep the true God at bay, to determine the when and what of God’s speech. Yet, Edward Hahnenberg offers a necessary reminder: “As much as our doctrine and our rituals try to contain or control this self-gift of God, it continually bursts out, flows over, and floods the field of our imagination—challenging Christians to a radically different way of understanding the world.”134 The messiah has overcome death, and he will overcome those barriers we erect to obscure him. Where Christ is present the sacraments will, Christians recognize in

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faith, prove effective. In fact, the symbols themselves compel us outside ourselves and resist our attempts to corrupt them. Therefore Jenson concludes: “Christians pray looking at one another rather than inside themselves, and Christians worship around bread and cup rather than alone with a Bible, and they look for peace in the kiss of one another rather than through selfreflection or self-acceptance.”135 Pulled into fellowship with other beings who counter her propensity for idolatry, the Christian is forced to pay attention to Christ’s voice.136 She hears the voice of God that promises and transforms. Luther’s insistence on Christ’s real presence in the sacraments continues to be a generative and powerful theme in the Lutheran tradition more broadly which has been explored and used as a basis for exploration within distinctively Lutheran sacramentology. The sacraments can convey and effect lifealtering and life-sustaining promises only because Christ is present and active. The creative way in which Jenson appropriates Luther reflects Bonhoeffer’s own way of interacting with Luther’s legacy: Think with and alongside rather than reproduce so as to better articulate who Christ is for us today. Jenson’s engagement with Luther both exemplifies Luther’s lasting significance within the Lutheran tradition and mirrors the way in which Bonhoeffer himself reckons with Luther, the founder of his theological tradition and a thinker whose impact Bonhoeffer cannot escape. From Luther to Bonhoeffer to Jenson, the message will be the same: Meeting Christ in the sacraments makes Christian fidelity possible. This message is Luther’s legacy. CONCLUSION Luther believed that the church receives a promise that sins are forgiven and the world will be set to rights. That promise comes from God in the resurrected Christ, the only person who can bring that promise to fruition. The promise is brought to fruition exactly where it is made: in the sacraments. In sacraments, that promise of grace is not only received but enacted. The sacraments instill and sustain the faith that allows the Christian to look to God for sustenance rather than trying to secure life at the expense of her neighbor. Having directed the Christian’s gaze outward, sacraments locate her within a community of persons whose needs and sufferings she helps to bear as faith is vitalized within her. In the sacraments, Christ comes to free his people to love. So as to develop a basic grammar for Bonhoeffer’s sacramentology that is faithful to his Lutheran roots, this chapter exposed three claims of great significance in Luther’s thought: Sacraments (1) take the form of signs conveying promises received in faith that (2) function to transform believers (3) by means of Christ’s effective presence in the sacraments. Sacramental

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signs convey Christ’s promise of forgiveness and make Christ present so as to effect that promise. Because Christ’s promise is effected, the encounter with Christ in the sacraments proves transformative as faith is instilled, sustained, located, and vitalized. Those who receive Christ in the sacraments are molded into persons of faith and love. The signs that convey this promise are not accidental. It is not immaterial that sacraments come in earthy, everyday materials like water, bread, and one another’s craggy faces. Yet, the truly salient matter as regards form is whether the form best conveys the promise and, if not, how to change the form without controverting the promise or resisting its effects. The three claims just listed above, central to Luther’s theology of the sacraments, must now be identified in Bonhoeffer’s work. By seeing how Bonhoeffer closely ties reception of the sacraments in worship to life in the manner Luther did it becomes possible to conceive of the way in which reception of the sacraments sits at the heart of religionlessness and, by extension, how religionlessness sits at the heart of contemporary Christian fidelity, therefore prompting evangelical Christians toward a fundamental reform of their liturgical praxis.

NOTES 1. For the Luther Renaissance and the role it played in German theology and politics, see Karl Kupisch, “The ‘Luther Renaissance,’” Journal of Christian History 2.4 (1967): 39–49. 2. James M. Stayer, Martin Luther, German Saviour: German Evangelical Theological Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917–1933 (London: McGillQueens University Press, 2000), 4–11. 3. Ibid., 18–47. 4. Ibid., 48–78. 5. Ibid., 67. 6. Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Silcock and Mark Mattes (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2007), 16. 7. Nicola Wilkes, “Private Confession of Sin in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2015), 50. Barker, The Cross of Reality, 99, 153. 8. LW 35, 50. 9. The Eucharist is not discussed in the “Theses.” Two years later, in 1519, Luther still refers to the bread on the table as being bread only in appearance. LW 35, 49. Lohse suggested that Luther’s turn to language of element and word marks the explicit break with Aristotelianism and a turn to an Augustinian doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology: Its Historical

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and Systematic Development, trans. Roy Harrisville (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 299. 10. LW 36, 41–42. 11. Ibid., 11–14. 12. Frank C. Senn, The People’s Work: A Social History of the Liturgy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 175. 13. G. R. Evans, Problems of Authority in the Reformation Debates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 170. 14. Editorial introduction. LW 35, 6. 15. Ibid. “The Sacrament of Penance,” 3–22; “The Holy and Blessed Sacrament of Baptism,” 23–44; and “The Blessed Sacrament of the Holy and True Body of Christ, and the Brotherhoods,” 45–74. This series of sermons was indeed a trilogy with no attempt to preach about the other four practices designated as sacraments by the Roman church. Ibid., 5. 16. DBWE 2, 123, 139. 17. Stephen Plant, Taking Stock of Bonhoeffer: Studies in Biblical Interpretation and Ethics (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 109–11. 18. LW 35, 11. 19. Ibid., 29. 20. Ibid., 50. See also Ibid., 61–62. For Luther’s pastoral qualification, see LW 36, 250. 21. LW 35, 23. 22. Ibid., 65. 23. Ibid., 30. 24. John Baldovin, “Baptism and Justice,” in Sacraments and Justice, ed. Doris Donnelly (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), 12. 25. LW 35, 13–14. 26. This insight is not solely Luther’s. It is his inheritance from hours of tutelage under Johannes von Staupitz. Berndt Hamm, The Early Luther: Stages in a Reformation Reorientation, trans. Martin Lohrmann (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2014), 15–17. Nor is this “Reformation insight” a sudden breakthrough. Luther was working on how to incorporate and refine this way of thinking about justification for some time before finally succeeding. Ibid., xvii, 29–31. 27. LW 36, 43. Oswald Bayer makes much of this vita passiva. Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way, 22–26. 28. Hamm, The Early Luther, 63. 29. Brian Brewer, Martin Luther and the Seven Sacraments: A Contemporary Protestant Reappraisal (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), 45. 30. Marius Timmann Mjaaland, The Hidden God: Luther, Philosophy, and Political Theology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 27. 31. LW 35, 12–13. Martin Luther, Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy Lull (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1989), 129. 32. LW 36, 87. 33. Ibid., 124. 34. LW 35, 13, and LW 36, 82.

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35. Ibid., 87–88. 36. LW 35, 14. 37. Ibid., 15. The claim that one Christian can never be certain of the faith of another, even though the other confesses Christ, was also central to Luther’s repudiation of Anabaptists and their practice of believer’s baptism. Luther, Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 351–52. 38. LW 36, 124. 39. Philip Melanchthon, Commonplaces: Loci Communes 1521, trans. Christian Preus (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 2014), 172. This connection between baptism and confession is less clear in subsequent editions, certainly in the 1543 edition. Philip Melanchthon, Loci Communes 1543, trans. J. A. O. Preus (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1992), 161–63. 40. Eric Gritsch and Robert Jenson, Lutheranism: The Theological Movement and Its Confessional Writings (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1976), 74. 41. The amount of attention given to the question of whether confession is a sacrament (here, for Luther and, in the next two chapters, for Bonhoeffer) is to acknowledge that the place of confession among the sacraments requires greater defense when engaging the Lutheran tradition than do baptism and Eucharist. Because confession seems to operate as a sacrament then a stronger defense must be mounted to make clear how this is the case. 42. LW 35, 49. 43. Ibid., 50. 44. Ibid., 50. 45. Ibid., 63. Lohse is quick to add, however, that Luther’s concern with the opus operatum is not actually based on the doctrine’s original intent but rather with a contemporary distortion: “[Luther] did not allow for the original intent of this piece of scholastic doctrine, which is that if performed correctly, according to the intention of the church, the sacramental action is in itself salutary and not due to the priest’s own state of grace.” Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology, 132. The doctrine of opus operatum was first crafted to combat a neo-Donatist impulse that the effectiveness of the sacrament could be related to the spiritual stature of the one leading the mass. By Luther’s time, the medieval doctrine had been distorted so that the sacrament was salutary by virtue of its performance. The original doctrine could have sat more comfortably within Luther’s doctrinal scheme. Or at least, it could have been more easily accommodated with the caveat that it is not the church but God who is performing the sacrament, that is, it is God who is making a promise. In that case, the sacrament is salutary opus operatum, with reference to the deed, precisely because the one who performs the sacrament is also the one who makes and secures the sacramental promise. Opus operatum and opus operantis, then, are not irreconcilable—the former must simply be reserved exclusively for the divine giver and the latter applied to the human recipient. 46. LW 37, 132. 47. LW 35, 30. 48. LW 35, 86–87. 49. Luther, Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 25.

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50. LW 35, 50. 51. LW 36, 176. 52. Ibid., 72. 53. See Luther, Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 358. 54. Helmar Junghens, “Luther on the Reform of Worship,” in Harvesting Martin Luther’s Reflections on Theology, Ethics, and the Church, ed. Timothy Wengert (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2004), 224. 55. Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert Schultz (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1966), 47–48. 56. Eric Gritsch, “Lutheran Theology and Everyday Life,” in The Gift of Grace: The Future of Lutheran Theology, ed. N. Gregerson, B. Holm, T. Peters, and P. Widmann (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 274. 57. Robert Kolb, Martin Luther: Confessor of the Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 58, 61. 58. Hans-Martin Barth, The Theology of Martin Luther: A Critical Assessment, trans. Linda Maloney (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), 87. 59. Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation, trans. Thomas H. Trapp (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2008), 43, 166–67. 60. Gerhard Forde, A More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement, and Ecumenism, ed. Mark C. Mattes and Steven D. Paulson (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2004), 77. 61. LW 35, 29. 62. LW 36, 67. 63. Jonathan Trigg, Baptism in the Theology of Martin Luther (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 157. 64. Ibid., 158. 65. Ibid., 162. 66. LW 35, 30–31. 67. Ibid., 33. See also Mark D. Tranvik, “Luther on Baptism” in Harvesting Martin Luther’s Reflections on Theology, Ethics, and the Church, ed. Timothy J. Wengert (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 25–27. 68. LW 35, 33. 69. Sun-young Kim, Luther on Faith and Love: Christ and the Law in the 1535 Galatians Commentary (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014), 155. 70. Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology, 9. 71. LW 35, 35. 72. Ibid., 39. 73. Ibid., 36. 74. Ibid., 17. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., 19. 77. Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way, 59. 78. Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology, 37. 79. Hamm, The Early Luther, 32–33, 44–45. 80. Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology, 12. See also LW 35, 53.

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81. This instinct is in play when Luther bemoans how the elements of the Supper are falsely used to distinguish clergy and laity. LW 36, 21–22. 82. LW 35, 54. 83. Ibid., 53. 84. Ibid., 51. 85. Ibid., 55. 86. Ibid., 50. 87. Ibid., 53. 88. Ibid., 54. 89. Ibid., 58. 90. Ibid., 80, 96. 91. LW 36, 50. 92. Ibid., 161. See also Ibid., 203. 93. Ibid., 144–46. 94. LW 35, 50. Luther also argues that universality is attached to the cup. LW 36, 20. 95. LW 35., 27. See also Ibid., 250. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid. 98. Luther’s proposal is for the pastor to speak ad nauseum about the need to reform before actually reforming. In this way, he hopes to gather the congregation to the pastor’s side instead of permitting the pastor to rush ahead of the people. Ibid., 251–52. 99. Martin Abraham, “Wort und Sakrament Oder: Woven die Kirche lebt,” in Bonhoeffer und Luther: Zentrale Themen ihrer Theologie, ed. Klaus Grünwaldt, Christiane Tietz, and Udo Hahn (Hannover: VELKD, 2007), 125–26. 100. LW 35, 33. 101. Ibid., 41. 102. LW 36, 74–75. This is a stark reversal from his 1519 sermon on baptism that permitted vows corresponding to the various estates as means of fulfilling the baptismal vow. LW 35, 41. 103. Gritsch, “Lutheran Theology,” 267. 104. Ibid., 274. 105. Karl Holl, The Reconstruction of Morality, ed. J. L. Abrams and W. F. Bense, trans. F. W. Meuser and W. R. Wietzke (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1979), 91. 106. LW 35, 53. 107. Ibid., 96. 108. Rachel Muers, Keeping God’s Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 80. 109. LW 35, 33. Emphasis mine. 110. Ibid., 55. 111. Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology, 98–99. 112. Ibid., 99. 113. Luther, Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 480. 114. Ibid., 484.

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115. Ibid., 485. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid., 487–89. 118. Jenson, Visible Words, 29. 119. Ibid., 40. 120. Ibid., 43–44. 121. Ibid., 31. Also Ibid., 40. 122. LW 36, 42. 123. Jenson, Visible Words, 44. 124. Ibid., 44–48. 125. Ibid., 31–32. 126. Ibid., 37. 127. This point anticipates Bonhoeffer’s appropriation of being epistemologies, with their general concern for continuity of being. 128. Luther, Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 485. This insight has been increasingly shared by Roman Catholic theologians post-Vatican II. Doris Donnelly, ed., Sacraments and Justice (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), vii. 129. This point anticipates Bonhoeffer’s criticism of act epistemologies. 130. Jenson, Visible Words, 44. 131. This echoes Luther that “It is not God’s Word just because the church speaks it; rather the church comes into being because God’s Word is spoken.” LW 36, 144–45. 132. John Colwell, Promise and Presence: An Exploration of Sacramental Theology (Waynesboro, GA: Paternoster, 2005), 18. 133. Ibid., 29. 134. Edward Hahnenberg, “Confirmation and Justice,” in Sacraments and Justice, ed. Doris Donnelly (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), 27. 135. Jenson, Visible Words, 46. This anticipates Bonhoeffer’s move to prefer acknowledgment to conscience. 136. That Christ’s presence in the sacraments should help the church to resist idolatry is a fundamental point for Bonhoeffer that he derives from Luther. See Matt Jenson, “Real Presence: Contemporaneity in Bonhoeffer’s Christology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 58 (2005): 143–60.

Chapter 2

Bonhoeffer’s Sacramental Theology

Luther’s work establishes a basic grammar for understanding the sacraments in the Lutheran tradition out of which Bonhoeffer emerges. Sacraments take the form of signs conveying promises received in faith that function to transform believers by means of Christ’s effective presence in the sacraments. This grammar has been as influential as it has been creatively generative. Bonhoeffer’s Act and Being can be read to describe an “ecclesial” or “churchy form of knowing” that is a generative reflection on that grammar: Act and Being explains how Bonhoeffer believes the church comes to know and inhabit the world through its encounter with God in word and sacrament.1 Drawing out Bonhoeffer’s references to the sacraments, especially baptism and the Lord’s Table, makes it clear that Bonhoeffer shares the belief with Luther that who the church encounters in the act of revelation (Christ as he reveals himself through the sacraments) proves decisive for how the church is. The church learns the truth about God, itself, and the world because it receives Christ in the sacraments. Knowing the truth, the church can inhabit the world in a manner faithful to that truth, as proper creatures of God and neighbors to one another. Act and Being can be read as a text about word and sacrament: God’s gracious, self-giving presence in revelation determines reality and motivates a corresponding form of life for those to whom God’s self is given. This argument establishes the unique role of the sacraments in the divine economy of salvation, laying the groundwork for chapter 3 to explore how this role is performed in the discrete practices of baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and confession. Perhaps the greatest difficulty in systematizing Bonhoeffer’s theology of the sacraments is that this theme is present everywhere and nowhere. Bonhoeffer’s corpus certainly provides explicit treatments of the sacraments, but these are often briefer and less systematic than one might desire. 31

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Moreover, the presence and weight of sacramental thought and themes are often felt even where explicit reference is lacking. This chapter tries to reflect both of these communicative modes. Act and Being is unequivocally Bonhoeffer’s most philosophical work. Its primary concern is epistemology. It seems odd that such a philosophical book would address a topic so particular to theology as the sacraments. Perhaps it is a result of this oddity that previous commentators on Act and Being have not generally seen fit to offer sustained discussions of the place of sacraments in this work. However, even here, the sacraments do have a pivotal role in Bonhoeffer’s reflections. In appealing to a “churchy form of knowing,” Bonhoeffer describes an existence determined by word and sacrament. That this is the case may not be immediately evident, but it is suggested by the fact that Bonhoeffer concludes his text by inquiring how a child is carried by the church community in baptism. Baptism is not merely a convenient way of ending the book. Baptism is a central problem Bonhoeffer seeks to understand in his Habilitationsschrift. That this is not more obvious is a case of a student deeming to write what a thesis supervisor wants to read and, in fact, Reinhold Seeberg did a great deal to reshape the project that Bonhoeffer had proposed to write.2 While previous commentators have focused on Act and Being as a philosophical attempt to understand how humans know things, such a philosophical orientation is belied when baptism and knowing are knitted together in the actus directus and the actus reflexus.3 In the knitting together of faith both direct and reflected, life is placed under the purview of Christ. Act and Being describes a way of knowing that proceeds through him. The event of baptism is the lens through which Bonhoeffer’s book ought to be read, and this baptized child will become the foundation for much of Bonhoeffer’s subsequent reflections on the church and discipleship, becoming the impetus to another moment of significant theological reflection from prison when he writes a series of reflections on religionlessness for the baptism of his godson. Prior interpretation of Act and Being therefore necessitates a fundamental reanalysis of Bonhoeffer’s book along sacramental lines to more fully glean the author’s insights relative to the question he is actually asking though not always explicitly stating. By substantiating the claim that sacraments are often an implicit mode of reference for Bonhoeffer, as Seeberg’s supervision necessitated in Act and Being, this chapter clears the ground to see how even the prison correspondence, where direct appeal to the sacraments is less frequent, can still be explained by Bonhoeffer’s sacramental theology. If it is true that sacraments are the way by which all things are interpreted rightly, and the future carried by present life, then how the sacraments motivate a religionless habitation of the world by the church can be seen more clearly.

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A brief first section establishes expectations for what it means to say that Bonhoeffer is a participant in his Lutheran theological tradition, expectations already reflected in the way Jenson applied Luther’s theology. To do this, the section examines concrete cases where Bonhoeffer both affirms and disagrees with this inheritance to demonstrate that Bonhoeffer is a creative interpreter within the tradition, rather than strictly repeating the tradition. The second section turns to Act and Being, exploring this text’s epistemology with a more sustained reference to sacramental idiom. This section demonstrates how the theme of sacraments as an encounter between persons, discussed at the end of the last chapter, becomes a driving motif for Bonhoeffer. Human existence happens in encounters between persons both by their being and by their responding to these others. This section concludes with Bonhoeffer’s explicit treatment of baptism in reference to the theological problem of the child: Baptism emerges from an un-self-conscious dimension of faith that is no less than present participation in the eschaton. The third section discusses the degree to which sacraments should be considered a determinative theme for Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology and his theology more broadly. Sacraments continually appear at key points in Bonhoeffer’s writing. Failure to acknowledge the presence of these practices in Bonhoeffer’s corpus only distorts Bonhoeffer’s theology. Naming this chapter “Bonhoeffer’s Sacramental Theology” implies that Bonhoeffer’s is a theology born out of and determined by encountering Christ in receiving the sacraments. Bonhoeffer’s theology is sacramental because everything from sociality to eschatology is determined by the truths received from participating in the practice of receiving the sacraments. BONHOEFFER AS A PARTICIPANT IN THE LUTHERAN TRADITION What does it mean for Bonhoeffer to be a participant in the Lutheran tradition? Answering this question sets expectations for Bonhoeffer and his relationship with Luther over the next two chapters. The previous chapter examined Luther’s theology of the sacraments to lay bare the theological background out of which Bonhoeffer emerges, asserting that this grammar and logic would prove necessary to understanding Bonhoeffer. This chapter makes plain that Bonhoeffer participates actively in this theological tradition. This section accounts for the manner of this participation. Bonhoeffer is neither interested in scholastic preservation and repetition of Luther, nor is he disinterested in the particular content of Luther’s theology. Bonhoeffer remains genuinely interested in the tradition even as he reworks certain aspects of it, a critical sensibility common among modern theologians.

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Bonhoeffer’s relationship with the Lutheran tradition can best be illustrated by way of an interaction he had with Superintendent Baumann through a series of letters. Bonhoeffer had produced a study guide on Article 7 of the Formula of Concord, the article on the Lord’s Supper, which was distributed to the Confessing Church.4 Bauman expressed his concerns regarding the material’s presentation, insofar as it aggravated tension within the Confessing Church’s Lutheran and Reformed wings by anticipating the Lutheran victory over the Reformed. Baumann took this guide as Bonhoeffer’s own understanding of the Lord’s Supper, and as an indication of what the Confessing Church’s leadership thought the church’s position ought to be.5 Following up, Bonhoeffer sought to correct this misrepresentation of his purpose: This letter neither reflects my personal view of the Lord’s Supper nor presents a general exegetical or systematic treatment; rather, it is a rendering of the key ideas of Article 7 of the Formula of Concord, which I do try hard to understand and which I love and treasure more and more the longer I work on it. . . . I might add that personally I depart from the Formula of Concord on several points and do so precisely because of the Institutes’ thorough exegetical work.6

Bonhoeffer hoped that his articulation of the confession would inspire further theological reflection between the Lutheran and Reformed wings, and looked forward to a time when a Reformed pastor would exegete Calvin’s Institutes to the edification of both wings.7 That Bonhoeffer takes exception to the tradition will be no surprise, and that these might be distinctly Reformed exceptions is certainly of interest. However, the particulars of these exceptions are not the immediate concern of this moment. Rather, what is key to the current discussion is the value Bonhoeffer places on the task of engaging the tradition well. Only after taking the time to understand and appreciate the tradition’s content is a theologian free to depart therefrom.8 Luther’s thought is reflected in Bonhoeffer’s sacramentology. Luther is far and away Bonhoeffer’s most cited source. However, for all of Bonhoeffer’s debts to Luther, it is key to note that Bonhoeffer does not simply parrot or repeat Luther’s claims. He creatively reinterprets them. DASEIN: EXISTENCE AND ENCOUNTER Having established how Bonhoeffer sets himself in relation to Luther and the Lutheran tradition, it is now possible to see how this relationship takes form in Act and Being, Bonhoeffer’s Habilitationschrift, a postdoctoral thesis necessary to qualify for an academic post in a German university. Act and Being, proposes to offer an epistemology of revelation.9 The abundance

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of possibilities offered by Bonhoeffer’s contemporary field for relating the human to the transcendent are pared down into two broad alternatives: those concerned with the fleeting act of revelation as constitutive of how humans know God, grouped under transcendental approaches, and those concerned with the continued being of God if God is to be known, arranged as ontological approaches. Within each of these approaches, Bonhoeffer distinguishes between philosophical and theological accounts. In Bonhoeffer’s estimation, none of these approaches proves adequate insofar as each flounders when addressing the other’s driving concerns. Independently, neither yields a theologically sufficient account of how God and humanity engage one another. Therefore, Bonhoeffer proposes: “The dialectic of act and being is understood theologically as the dialectic of faith and the congregation of Christ. Neither is to be thought without the other; each is ‘taken up’ or ‘suspended’ in the other.”10 Only a theological, dialectical account can remedy an otherwise insoluble problem by way of a new, “churchy form of thinking.”11 Bonhoeffer’s book proceeds in three parts. The first section examines Bonhoeffer’s criticism of various act-centered accounts of revelation, culminating in his response to Karl Barth. The second moves to being-centered accounts, culminating in Bonhoeffer’s treatment of Heidegger. The final part relates Bonhoeffer’s own alternative, a “person theology,”12 with sustained and explicit interest in the sacraments. Bonhoeffer’s concern is to develop an account of revelation in which the event, or act, of revelation (the encounter with Christ) is sustained in the existence, or being, of Christ as the church. The church’s participation in Christ, effected in its transformation by and conformation to Christ through word and sacrament, is the means by which Bonhoeffer proposes to develop this theory. By doing this, Bonhoeffer ties the events of the church’s worship inescapably to the church’s life in the world. Act: Transcendental Attempts That Lack Transcendence Bonhoeffer begins by diagnosing act-centered accounts, both philosophical and theological. Such accounts are problematic for Bonhoeffer on account of their being unable to sustain Christ’s revelatory presence in history and therefore leaving human beings trapped within the cor curvum in se. Philosophical act accounts, attempts to understand the problem of relating human and divine by the event of revelation, believe that epistemology is a person’s attempt to understand herself as a being in relation to others, that is, that the self and reflection on the self can be separated.13 Two theological problems quickly emerge from this description. First, it becomes tautologically true that the “I” has never been transcended, or encountered from

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without. There has never truly been any moment of relationship between the human and God.14 Second, if the first observation is correct then God is nothing other than human self-projection and self-assertion. Everything about the act of encounter has taken place completely within the bounds of the “I” that has merely separated itself from its conscious reflection and confused that reflection with the being of another entity. The transcendental mode fails to address the presenting problem of Act and Being: the encounter between Christ, the Christian, and the church in baptism. The self-contained structure of philosophical act accounts cannot explain why the church would baptize infants, as those who are de facto incapable of reflection upon themselves. The first problem for such act accounts is to acknowledge the theological impact of this philosophical transcendental structure for any account of revelation: the human person remains trapped within the cor curvum in se, the heart turned inward.15 Human persons never encounter God in the event of revelation; they only encounter themselves. This is because philosophical act accounts break apart the person from the act of reflection thereupon: The “I,” thought of as something in process, must, instead, become something completed. “I” cannot be thought, because it is the precondition for thinking itself. . . . A profound contradiction comes into view now: the I is being-alreadythere. It is both the very process of attainment and its precondition, and as such the I logically precedes thinking. But inasmuch as everything about the I is constituted by thought, thinking precedes the I.16

In other words, when the act of reflection upon being brings one into being, there is no way of accounting for the presence of a being to reflect or upon which to reflect. There is no way of acknowledging that the person who is prompted to reflect on her own existence did, in fact, exist prior to this act of reflection and continues to exist even when the immediate act of reflection concludes. To reframe the posture of transcendental attempts in the manner of Descartes: “I am only so long as I think.” Presumably, whichever being is prompted to become aware of its own existence in the next instance must be a different being than “I,” the being conscious of existence now. A mechanism for continuity does, in fact, exist—that all persons remain always present to the mind of God. This mechanism may not be entirely persuasive as grounds for confirming the genuine existence of any being other than God, however, as I cannot know that I exist as anything other than a bit of divine imagination. Critics of act accounts rightly protest that it is nonsense to think no plausible mechanism is in place to explain how a being is sustained between immediate acts of consciousness. I do not stop existing simply because I’m not actively thinking about existing any more than I stop breathing when not actively thinking about inhalation.

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Philosophical act accounts have traditionally responded in one of two ways, neither of which permits any genuine transcendence of the “I,” a getting beyond oneself to an encounter with another.17 Either the “I” elects to limit itself or the “I” establishes itself as the reference point for all reflection. In both cases the theological concern rears itself again: No other person is genuinely encountered. In the first case, any boundary to the self is selfimposed and the self can overcome it. By way of analogy, one can set the boundary not to reach into the cookie jar, but precisely because that boundary is only self-limitation then the ability to transgress the boundary and grab the cookie from the jar always remains. In the latter case, the self assumes all things exist for one’s own purposes. The world is as I perceive it and create it. Others do not exist in their own rights but only in their relationship and utility to me. In neither case is there a genuine other whose otherness demands to be respected, cannot be circumvented, and must be received in grace as a gift. The human being remains in sin, functioning as a god unto herself: “I can understand myself from myself—one may even say ‘from God,’ to the extent to which God is in me, and to the extent that God is the unconditional personality, which I am.”18 The human being is only genuinely transcended when that being encounters another person who cannot be explained away or incorporated into a persons’ own self-understanding, that is, only when revelation occurs. This other must be acknowledged as genuinely other, as a genuine exterior boundary (Grenze) to one’s attempts to secure the world in reference to oneself.19 A second problem follows from the first. If the self is never transcended because no other is ever encountered, this must be because God is never an objective being outside the self for these theologies. In short, Feuerbach will always be right: “God ‘is’ not outside the spirit coming to itself . . . God is indeed only in the act of the self-knowing spirit . . . God is not an objective existent but is only in the execution of that philosophizing . . . I find myself— that is, I find God.”20 If God is not an objective being outside of the self, then act accounts collapse the theologically appropriate distinction between creator and creature. An account of revelation, when run through a set of act-centered commitments, presupposes that God and humanity are alike. Therefore, reflection alone, unmediated by other means, is sufficient for attaining knowledge of both God and self. Yet, Bonhoeffer wishes to preserve the limits of humanity in a stronger form: Humans are not able in their own rights, respective to their own faculties, to know and relate to God. He writes: “It is not because human beings are like God that God comes to them . . . but precisely because human beings are utterly unlike God and never know God from themselves. That is why God comes to them, that they may know God.”21 With this, Bonhoeffer insists with Luther that the creaturely being incapable of bearing with God is

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made by God capable of such a bearing. The transformation effected in revelation requires the presence of a being, God, outside the self who serves as a boundary to the self’s ambitions. This being must remain genuinely other, irreducible to the self or even the self’s act of knowing this other being. The creator/creature distinction must be maintained more strongly than act theologies ultimately permit. While acknowledging that Barth avoids some of the more egregious errors of act-centered accounts, Bonhoeffer fears that Barth’s theology falls victim to certain weaknesses of act accounts. Tom Greggs helpfully acknowledges how Barth, upon reading Bonhoeffer, did in fact feel misunderstood if not ill-used by Bonhoeffer.22 Greggs does not deal directly with the criticisms from Act and Being in this essay, however, and for that matter, the question of whether Bonhoeffer read Barth correctly is not of primary significance. For now, it is sufficient to relate Bonhoeffer’s concerns with Barth’s theology; the question of whether this is a fair reading of Barth can be set aside as even misreading can be creatively generative in significant ways. In certain respects, Bonhoeffer’s criticism should be surprising, and he is aware of how odd his accusation appears.23 He is aware of how Barth continually stresses the otherness of God, the incapax of human beings, and the insufficiency of human reason which leads to a need for revelation that proceeds from God to humanity.24 The direction of Barth’s account seems appropriate—God’s act of self-revelation discloses to humans the truth about themselves—and suggests firm commitments to divine otherness and human incapax. However, Barth also states: “The knowledge of God is not a possibility that we use in our search—or at worst in our non-search—for a meaning of our world. It is, rather, the presupposition that we always start with in our searching.”25 Knowledge of God is a product of revelation. Revelation is acknowledged as such only in faith. Faith is a posture into which humans are placed, a presupposition rather than the conclusion of human striving. Barth’s description of the human search for God rests, then, as Bonhoeffer understands it, on the way Barth structures his doctrine of election, but this reflexive move is precisely Bonhoeffer’s problem with Barth’s work.26 For Bonhoeffer, Barth has failed to distinguish between knowledge of God and the mechanism by which such knowledge is received within history.27 Bonhoeffer’s reading of Barth enjoins that because humans have knowledge of God it must be that humans can begin with knowledge of God, knowledge of non-alterier provenance. Knowledge of God, even knowledge of God that comes from God, is still mediated through a person’s own faculties, such that she could say “I come to know God through God’s use of my reason.” If human reason not only can but should assume that God has been made known to it (the posture of faith), then human reason does not need to be transcended, only expanded. To invoke the language of baptism: In act theologies, reason’s

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self-imposed barriers are extended more than they are put to death.28 A person can begin the search for God from within the “I.”29 That God should be an object of knowledge in just this way is precisely the problem that motivated Barth to reject the theology of his predecessors, but Bonhoeffer believes that Barth has not overcome the problem so well as he would like.30 God must come from without. Faith cannot come to the Christian first from within the “I.” The reflexive problem is recurring for Barth. For example, he writes: “Religion forgets that its existence is only justified when it continually overcomes itself.”31 If religion can overcome itself, then religion was never a real boundary to itself. Nothing has been transcended, only self-actualized. This move requires no genuine other. The being a Christian “encounters” could be manifest fiction so long as a new level of knowledge is self-produced. Knowledge of God collapses into self-knowledge. There is no need for the God who is, and who is as Christ who is existing for us today. Behind Bonhoeffer’s critique, though not explicit, a Lutheran law/ gospel impulse is at work. Human beings do not begin their search with a knowledge of God; each person begins her search with knowledge of herself, in particular, knowledge that she is finite and that her efforts to secure herself against this finitude are ineffectual. God engages this morass of existential angst to reveal Godself as the creator upon whom this flailing creature can repose. Human reason is put to death by word and sacrament; a new reason, a new way of knowing, is born. The reflexive move is not possible in such a law/gospel system. God can and must be the agent responsible for initiating the encounter and God’s subsequent self-revelation.32 The law/gospel dialectic better precludes, in Bonhoeffer’s estimation, an inappropriately reflective grammatical voice.33 While Barth’s move, similar to Calvin’s ellipse between knowledge of God and knowledge of self, might work to structure a systematic theology, it does not fit well on to the lived Christian experience of encountering God and so coming to faith. Human beings, if they are to know the world, must come to know that world through someone outwith themselves who is nevertheless made “graspable” within history.34 The problem of transcendence means that human beings only find their salvation in their death. The problem of transcendence can be further restated with respect to another agent: God. Despite Bonhoeffer’s affinity with Barth’s concern to keep God and revelation free from human consumption or coercion, Bonhoeffer is critical of Barth’s claim that revelation be understood as a formal event.35 DeJonge articulates Bonhoeffer’s anxiety: “When God reveals through discrete acts, nothing binds God to remain in that relation.”36 For Bonhoeffer, the difficulty for Barth’s articulation of the human agent in the problem of freedom and transcendence is that nothing is transcended.37 With respect to God, a formal understanding of freedom such as Barth’s introduces

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a discontinuity into the being of God. Human knowledge of God is always based on the revelation of God. Bonhoeffer understands Barth to believe that revelation is always and only immediate, never available to humanity apart from discrete acts of divine speech, the content of which is nothing more than to reveal God as the revealer.38 God’s being always escapes back out of history.39 God’s self is not made available, leastwise not in any lasting way; all that lingers after the event is the notion that God has been revealed. If Barth’s (as read by Bonhoeffer) is an accurate description of how God engages history, then God never encounters humans in revelation as a person—persons necessarily bear extension across time.40 God has no being. No ability to fulfill the promise of revelation because there is no continuity between God now and the God of the future. The content of revelation is instead the event of revelation. Bonhoeffer paraphrases this: “All reflection upon the accomplished act takes place at a distance from it, with the result that the act cannot be grasped.”41 If no other person is encountered, then the self has not been transcended. If Bonhoeffer has read Barth correctly, then Barth has described a situation in which God has failed to act so as to secure the inversion of the human being’s cor curvum in se. This inversion requires constant attention to avoid reversion.42 Precisely by escaping history (if God was ever truly even in history), God does not remain present to maintain the transformation begun in revelation but must begin anew with each act. God is not bound to the promises of before. In contrast, for Bonhoeffer, God’s continued presence within the church as Christ’s body serves to ensure this continuity of God’s being within history so as to perpetually affect what God has begun. Only God’s continued being ensures God’s continued fulfillment of the promise that we are moving together toward the eschatological kingdom. Bonhoeffer characterizes this contrast in their theologies as the replacement of Barth’s “formal understanding” of divine freedom with a “substantial” understanding.43 DeJonge points out Bonhoeffer and Barth are engaging in sacramental debates that have long plagued Reformed and Lutheran theologians.44 Bonhoeffer’s criticism of Barth should be taken as the Lutheran rejoinder to Barth’s more Reformed sensibilities. Rehearsing this debate between Bonhoeffer and Barth by drawing out the sacramental implications helps to clarify the theological stakes sometimes obscured by Bonhoeffer’s more overtly philosophical grammar. Paul Molnar characterizes Barth’s theology of the Lord’s Supper by saying that: In the particular history of Jesus Christ a man was, for the first time, faithful to the covenant. He lived by grace and by faith alone. In this particular life, Christian living and acting became possible. It is this unique history of Christ, namely, his historical existence which Christians have in view in celebrating the

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Lord’s Supper. They recognize this history as effective and saving history when they celebrate the Lord’s Supper.45

Molnar’s language of “effective” is suspicious with regards to Barth. For example, in the Church Dogmatics, Barth is clear that the sphere of the sacraments is the “subjective reality in revelation,” and not the objective. The sacraments help us perceive reality; they do not create reality. In this way, the sacraments provide a grammar and practice with which “man has to think of himself.” The objective dispensation of grace in baptism is always already behind the Christian, and the dispensation of grace in the Lord’s Supper is always already in front of the Christian. Yet, these sacraments are in no way thought of as effecting grace in the present.46 As innovative as he is with his inheritance, Barth is still Reformed, and the language of “effective” suggests a sacramental logic that Barth (along with certain Reformed circles) might find distasteful. Yet, Molnar is clear about what is effective: It is precisely Christ and his history that proves “effective” and “saving.”47 Barth has a way of agreeing that Christ is the one sacrament, while still distinguishing Christ from the sign itself.48 That same Christ has, after all, ascended to the right hand of God there to reign in eternal glory.49 Therefore it is the Supper’s task to celebrate, to recognize, Christ’s historical existence and its significance as the climax of covenant history.50 It does not follow from this act of ecclesial acknowledgment that the church should believe its celebration effects Christ’s condescension into history once again. To put this another way, Barth insists on a Zwinglian interpretation of the Lord’s Supper insofar as Christians recognize the event of revelation, that is, Christ’s historical existence as Jesus of Nazareth.51 Bonhoeffer finds this interpretation unsatisfactory because the Table then presents no being who is present and transcending Christians now.52 The connection between past and present is broken. Memorialism does not require a sustained continuity of historical being between the Christ event of first-century Palestine and the God who encounters one today; there is only a being who appears in revelation at this time and again at another time but with no guarantee that these two beings should be understood together.53 As Jenson insisted, the church can only recognize Christ in a body that he himself identified and recognized as his own. Anything less than Christ’s confirmation of continuity amounts to mere speculation, and Christ pointed to bread and wine and said “This is my body and blood.” Bonhoeffer understands that Barth is making a theological maneuver: In this way, Barth hopes to preserve God’s freedom and otherness by articulating how God is removed from historical continuity.54 As a result of this maneuver, Barth is better able to articulate that God is not compelled to be present, active, and revelatory at the Table merely because God was present in the event which the Table commemorates. Yet, while

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being in sympathy with Barth’s concerns, Bonhoeffer cannot agree with Barth’s conclusions. While Barth was keen to preserve divine freedom and otherness, Bonhoeffer believed that the consequence of the way in which Barth carried out this impulse resulted in an account of the Supper that no longer requires another being, God, to be present; the human self does not need transcended for the Table to do its memorial work. For Barth, this was acceptable—the earthly elements of bread and wine should not be able to bear the glory and grace of God, anyhow—but for the Lutheran Bonhoeffer this is an indefensible solution.55 The Lutheran replied that bread and wine are incapax; but precisely because they are incapax God makes them capax, transforming them to bear that which is not naturally theirs to bear: God’s glory and grace. It is true that God cannot be compelled to be present at the Table; even so, it is entirely unthinkable, from the perspective of faith, that God would be absent. Continuity of being for revelation is found in the promise of God to be present to and for creation. Divine freedom finds its dialectical limit in divine promise: In revelation it is not so much a question of the freedom of God . . . on the other side of revelation. . . . It is a question of the freedom of God, which finds its strongest evidence precisely in that God freely chose to be bound to historical human beings and to be placed at the disposal of human beings. God is free not from human beings but for them. Christ is the word of God’s freedom, God is present, that is . . . “haveable,” graspable in the Word within the church.56

The church became, for Bonhoeffer, the location for God’s sustained being in revelation. If this is so, then the sustained acts of revelation are immediately apparent: word and sacrament. This will be returned to below. Bonhoeffer believes that Barth’s theology fails to maintain a proper continuity when it comes to God who is with and for us in history, with the result that the church only experiences God as an act and never experiences God’s being. God’s being-as-such is not present in revelation. Barth has not articulated a God who is present in history, actively existing so as to convey grace and forgiveness to and through the church. God has not placed God’s self in a position to fulfill the promise of revelation. Instead, for Barth, it is the case that a forgiving God stands outside history, and it is to God’s acts of disclosure that the church responds. The Lutheran Bonhoeffer looks unsuccessfully for an articulation of real presence from the Reformed Barth. Being: Continuities That Fail the Contingent Act accounts of transcendence and revelation are insufficient to a Christian epistemology of revelation because they leave beings wholly self-contained.

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There is no encounter between two persons.57 At best there is an encounter between a person and an act, and at worst an encounter between a person and that person’s own self-reflections. So far as the sacraments are concerned, act accounts cannot explain infant baptism and the epistemology such a practice implies: They collapse into an agent’s conscious reflection. Such reflection is impossible for a passive, receptive child.58 Rooted in conscious reflection, act accounts do not require a being (God) who encounters the Christian from the outside with the transformative power of faith. Bonhoeffer turns next to being-centered accounts that attempt to understand the problem of transcendence. These, too, are insufficient for a theological account of revelation. Because they stress continuity, being theologies are unable to account for revelation as an event. Any account of baptism, for example, requires some description of consciousness of faith. The nature of ontological attempts is to “demonstrate the primacy of being against consciousness and to uncover this being.”59 That is, ontological accounts wish to show that beings exist whether they are actively acknowledged or reflected upon or doing something. This way of phrasing it reveals that being theologies, too, have a tautological conundrum: How is it possible to demonstrate that being exists with reflection by a process of reflection upon being? Any understanding of being arrived at in this way will be an abstraction, being-as-such rather than concrete historical existence. A being-as-such that lacks historical concreteness cannot be encountered in revelation.60 We can only encounter genuine beings, not abstractions. Bonhoeffer sees this abstraction as a particular risk for philosophy. There is only one way to work around this tautological difficulty. Bonhoeffer concludes: “Genuine ontology, therefore, must always remain a critical scholarly pursuit that does not cause being itself to be seen as a given but rather thinks of itself as always something existing only within the logos, in self-understanding.”61 Genuine ontological approaches proceed as if being were already present behind the act of understanding. This description of being theologies underscores Bonhoeffer’s main problem with them as epistemological accounts of revelation. How can something that takes place within self-understanding serve to direct a person beyond the self? Put theologically, how has revelation occurred? Bonhoeffer sees this question as a particular problem for philosophical accounts like that of Husserl: “Now the I, or consciousness, is once again restored to the place of God.”62 This question is also a problem for Scheler, for whom “it would appear the object of (his) investigation is the essence of the idea of God, rather than the existence of God, and that he does not proceed to the positing of the reality of God.”63 Revelation, in such an account, cannot be an encounter with a concrete other because the other upon whom a person is reflecting is now consciously a product of her reflection and not the historical being.

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An idea of God displaces God, and the I who created that idea rules in God’s stead.64 By reflecting on the problem of being in a non-historical, contingent way—that is, not conscious of the way being becomes compacted, reflected, transcended in an act, an event—these two thinkers fail to explain how God and humanity encounter one another, how they be-with-and-for one another. Dismissing Husserl and Scheler, Bonhoeffer moves on to Martin Heidegger, and particularly his reflection on Dasein in Being and Time. Bonhoeffer summarizes this monumental work: “Being understands itself in Dasein, in spirit (Geist). But Dasein is the existence of human beings in their historicity, in the momentariness of the decisions that they, in every instance, have already taken.”65 In one respect, Heidegger is correct. Within his account, genuine being is sustained as it is historically experienced, which is to say that there is no problem of being-as-such. For Heidegger, one being acknowledging the experience of another being in history causes the former being to reflect on and understand its own being-ness more fully.66 Being becomes self-aware as it is asked to respond to another so that “Dasein is neither a discontinuous succession of individual acts nor the continuity of a being that transcends time. Dasein is constant decision-making and, in every instance, already being determined.”67 Bonhoeffer finds Heidegger’s form of Dasein to be fitting enough for an account of revelation insofar as it avoids the historical abstraction characteristic of other philosophers.68 Bonhoeffer only finds Heidegger’s formal rendering of Dasein useful for theology, however. There is a fundamental difference between Heidegger’s philosophical Dasein and a properly theological rendering.69 For the former, Dasein is left to understand and interpret itself—allowing itself to recognize its contingency and limitedness, resigning itself to finitude and death. This is not so for theology. In theology, the believer who encounters God in her historical living finds her being recast not in terms of finitude, but creatureliness.70 This is not to say that, theologically, humans are not finite, but that this is not the primary way in which Christians should experience and reflect upon their being. Humans can recognize their finitude on their own, but not their creatureliness. The Christian does not experience her finitude as her limitedness in herself, but in her relationship to the God who made her, calls her, and relates her to other creatures.71 Her being is contingent, yes, but always in such a way as to put her in relations to others—especially relations of faith and love.72 The Lutheran background of Bonhoeffer’s theology, articulated in the last chapter, makes it clear how Bonhoeffer’s criticism of Heidegger anticipates why Bonhoeffer should be so interested in baptism for his book. In the event of the encounter with God in baptism, theology recognizes a promise that death is overcome in resurrection. The promise contained in this event provides the church with a concrete object of reflection that disrupts and transforms being. By disrupting being, the

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Christian is put to death. Nevertheless, death is not the end, and so resignation to finitude is not appropriate. Being is transformed, too, by baptism so that the Christian now is-in-Christ. Baptism, being-in-Christ, displaces Heidegger’s finitude as the continuous, existential character of Christian existence. Baptism, especially of infants, reflects that the Christian has been placed in revelation as “a step that must already have been taken so that we may be able to take it all.”73 Heidegger’s existential nihilism is not the appropriate ontological content for a being who has been transformed through the event of revelation. Bonhoeffer finds another ontological marker to put in finitude’s place: creatureliness before God. Person Theology: Being a Creature Act accounts are insufficient to an account of revelation because they do not explain how persons are present and continuous to one another in history. Being accounts are insufficient because they do not account for how revelation is also a radically disruptive event. So Bonhoeffer posits the church, Christ existing as community, as the location where act and being are united. Existence understands itself only by contrast when encountered from the outside, and only in revelation is there a genuine encounter from without.74 The content of revelation is the content of baptism: death to self and one’s incorporation into Christ’s resurrected community. Yet, certain questions remain: What is the mode of revelation? How is continuity of the “I” maintained? Does a particular description of revelation best resolve the problem of transcendence? Bonhoeffer answers these questions directly in the following order: 1. The church as the place where Dasein is understood. 2. The mode of being of the revelation of God within the church. 3. The mode of being of human beings within the church. 4. The question about knowledge within the church.75 Each of these claims or questions can be taken in turn. “The Church as the Place Where Dasein Is Understood” Bonhoeffer’s ambition here is straightforward. He highlights that the entirety of his argument so far has been to explain how act-centered and being-centered accounts fail to solve the problem of transcendence because both fail to begin with a sociological rendering of the church. While the church has not been his explicit mode of critique thus far, he brings his implicit referent into focus now. If act and being accounts fail independently, whether this account is philosophical or theological, an account rooted in the historical body of the

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church succeeds because it reconciles act and being. The church is not one of the possible locations in which Dasein is revealed to humans; the church is the location to which God draws humans to reveal the truth.76 Cross and resurrection, sin and revelation, are not contingencies to the way in which Dasein is understood, as if it could be conceived differently but happens to work out this way. God draws humans into the event of revelation that can be none other than cross and resurrection, death and being reborn, finitude and creatureliness. God draws humans to baptism. “The Mode of Being of the Revelation of God within the Church” With his assumption in place, Bonhoeffer asks how revelation is to be understood within the church. He begins with a radical statement: “Revelation should be thought of only in reference to the concept of the church, where the church is understood to be constituted by the present proclamation of Christ’s death and resurrection—within, on the part of, and for the community of faith.”77 Three things are strikingly clear. First, present proclamation highlights the act, or event, nature of revelation. Historicism and memorialism are insufficient. Second, proclamation takes place for the sake of and by a community already in via. This recognizes the being, continuity, of revelation. Third, the concrete content of revelation is Christ’s death and resurrection. Each of these must be taken in turn. Present proclamation underscores that revelation is an event. What is interesting about the precise way in which this is phrased is that there is no designated speaker. “Within, on the part of, and for” do not signal by whom proclamation is made.78 However, revelation worthy of the name must come from outside. In a break from the Ritschlean school, Bonhoeffer insists that the contingent character of revelation now means that the revelation in the past no longer serves as revelation in his sense, but becomes “caught up ‘in its context’ ” until such a time as new revelation brings the old forward into the present.79 It is not enough to speak of revelation by Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Christ is not the author of revelation in the sense that his historical existence becomes the topic upon which a Christian reflects. As with Bonhoeffer’s case against Barth, the prepositions make the difference. Someone must be speaking now. That someone must come from beyond and disrupt the community of the church while being present to the church now. That someone is Christ, giving himself over into the community to secure their future. In revelation, God comes to the world such that Christexists-as-community. In revelation, the church is constituted as the body of Christ.80 Describing revelation in this way brings out the second point: The community of faith for which revelation occurs stresses that revelation maintains a

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certain continuity of being. Demonstrating this continuity requires, however, a “specific Christian sociology.”81 Bonhoeffer has already laid this out in Sanctorum Communio. For now, his summary of this sociology is sufficient: The community of faith is God’s final revelation as “Christ existing as community,” ordained for the end time of the world until the return of Christ. Here Christ has come in the closest proximity to humanity. Here Christ has given Christ’s own self to the new humanity in Christ so that the person of Christ draws together in itself all whom Christ has won, binding and committing Christ to them and them to one another. The “church” is, therefore, not a human community to which Christ then comes or not, nor is it a gathering of such persons as those who (as individuals) seek Christ or think they have Christ and now wish to cultivate this common “possession.” The church is rather the community of faith created by and founded upon Christ, in which Christ is revealed as the deuteros anthropos, as the new human, or rather, as the new humanity itself.82

Because the church is a person (Christ) existing as community, the being of revelation is sustained between discrete events of revelation and proclamation, or events of word and sacrament.83 The acting subject—the one preaching a sermon or presiding at the Table—now “is Christ.” By the dual presence of the acting subject and Christ, “the gospel is somehow held fast here.”84 The divine promise binds God to humanity so that when the church proclaims forgiveness of sins, forgiveness transpires. When the church receives the event of revelation, the church takes part in the being of Christ, “becom(ing) a Christ”85 to others. Finally, the concrete content of revelation (Christ) points in the direction of the sacraments. It may be unclear why this is so at first glance. Bonhoeffer has invoked images of promise and language of forgiveness.86 This invocation alone, in a Lutheran context, suggests sacraments are in his purview. Furthermore, Bonhoeffer’s appeal to Christ’s death and resurrection covertly recognizes that baptism is still a motivating force in this part of Bonhoeffer’s argument.87 Yet, more can be said. Language of the church’s “constitution” should bring to mind the Augsburg Confession.88 This Lutheran confession insists that the church is the church when the word is rightly proclaimed and the sacraments rightly administered.89 Bonhoeffer’s thesis effectually glosses this confessional commitment. There are repeated references to word and sacrament throughout Bonhoeffer’s work.90 Moreover, Luther’s sacramental form—promise and sign received in faith—as ascribed to the community of faith does a significant amount of work here. Bonhoeffer notes that “the being of revelation can be conceptualized neither as what exists, as something objective, nor as nonexisting, as something nonobjective.”91

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If revelation is something existing, it belongs to the past, to be taken up by the “I” rather than to transcend it.92 Revelation is no longer act. If revelation is something nonexisting, nonobjective, outside of history, then it loses continuity. Revelation no longer has being. Yet, in the church “the possibility of existential encounter is bound up with genuine objectivity—in the literal sense of something that concretely stands-over-against, that does not let itself be drawn into the power of the I.”93 The community is visible, a sign, moving outward with trust and loving action, but it does so precisely because it simultaneously bears an invisible promise that stands outside its own ability to make or maintain: the promise of God heard time and again in sermon and sacrament.94 To those placed into the posture of faith, the act of revelation by word and sacrament—where visible and invisible, sign and promise, combine—brings forth a new form of being. Being made new simultaneously means being incorporated into the being-who-already-was, the person of Christ, who exists now, in this concrete moment, as church community.95 The church’s sacramental practices evoke this reconciliation of act and being as they simultaneously invite and resist conscious reflection by the community being passively turned outward as it receives and is transformed by Christ. “The Mode of Being of Human Beings within the Church” It is noteworthy that there is a genuine connection between the being of Christ, revelation, and the being of church community and that, as was explained in the last section, this connection is explicable only to those who have been placed within the posture of faith. Observing this connection invites the question of the manner in which human beings exist within the church. To answer this question, Bonhoeffer relies on Luther: Being human in the church is to suffer, to be acted upon, to receive.96 For Bonhoeffer, persons in the church are not responsible for establishing their own being; their “I’s” do not secure themselves. Rather, to be in the church is to be encountered by Christ.97 Moreover, to be in the church is to be encountered in a specific way: “Encountered existence is existence in social context, existence in reference to Christ, which knows itself to be rejected and accepted in its historical totality.”98 Bonhoeffer invokes a traditional Lutheran dialectic that a Christian is both sinner and saint simultaneously. In suffering an encounter with Christ, act and being are brought together as a mode of human existence. Receiving the encounter with Christ places the Christian in a position to recognize her proper mode of creaturely being: She is simultaneously saint and sinner. At issue here is precisely the experience of a Christian acknowledging herself to be simultaneously saint and sinner. Acknowledgment is the appropriate idiom because the simul is a fact the Christian comes to recognize only after being placed into the posture of faith.99 The Christian must

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acknowledge both a disruptive event, that she is now a saint but was not before, and acknowledge in herself a continuity of being, that she both was and remains a sinner. For Bonhoeffer, the church is the place in which this experience can be properly acknowledged as the Christian recognizes herself to be both an individual and a participant in a corporate person.100 In terms of act, each person committed sin; in terms of being, each person was pulled into an inescapable nexus of sin. In terms of act, each person has the experience of bearing the gospel, of suffering the transformation into faith by means of word and sacrament; in terms of being, persons do not bear this event alone but all their actions, the sinful and the saintly, are borne by the church— united in the being of Christ.101 Understanding Bonhoeffer in his Lutheran context makes it possible to see how it is the act of receiving the sacraments that gives rise to this description of simultaneously bearing and being borne by the church. At the Table, one Christian presents the cup to another, sharing with them the promise and grace of God, only to have the other return to give the cup and its promises to herself. In confession, the Christian receives the words of absolution, and when the tables are turned she pronounces the same words of forgiveness without hesitation. At the font, the faith of a child is expressed by parents who confirm this child is turned to Christ. When it comes to the gospel and the community it forges, “Bearing it, I am borne by it.”102 Act and being are resolved, for Bonhoeffer, as revelation draws the Christian out of herself and places her in community. She is responsible for her own actions within the community. These actions include her sharing of the sacraments with others as well as her performance of those deeds of love which the sacraments provoke from her. Nevertheless, she is sustained within this community by the presence and acts of other. In this community around the sacraments, the Christian is made whole: reconciled to God and humanity. Moreover, the Christian’s whole self is incorporated into this community— “sin and death have to be included”103—such that even the sinful remnants are transformed by the act of revelation, by her being in the church. Bonhoeffer concludes: “My sin is no longer sin, my death no longer death, because the community of faith is with me. . . . In the power of the community of faith . . . faith can embrace the totality of historical life in its everydayness, sin, and death.”104 The Christian’s new, encountered, creaturely being no longer grasps about in the dark seeking to secure her life independently but trusts that her life is secured by God who entrusts her to others and entrusts others to her. The claims of others upon the Christian are no longer her fear but her joy. Even when she fails, another stands ready with word and sacrament to convey the promise of forgiveness. Her mode of being is faith—of gladly suffering the encounter with God and neighbor.105

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“The Question about Knowledge within the Church” For Bonhoeffer, revelation exists in the church as Christ exists in community. Humans exist in the church as sinful saints restored to Christ and one another in word and sacrament.106 Yet, the question remains: How does the church know that the promise it has received and which binds it together will be honored? That is, how is God bound to the promise conveyed in word and sacrament? Bonhoeffer criticizes Barth for casting God in the role of “subject” rather than “creator and lord.”107 Bonhoeffer believes that Barth has borrowed a concept from philosophy where a theological concept serves better.108 Saying that God is always subject leaves open the possibility that God could renege on the promises. Because God’s word is not bound in time, God remains free even from God’s own acts of promise.109 By contrast, describing God as creator and Lord places God in relationship to creation that secures the promise. The creator is such only in relation to its creatures. Namely, this relationship is a relation of self-giving. The Lord who makes promises must be in a position to fulfill those promises.110 Bonhoeffer works this out by way of three “ways of knowing”: believing, preaching, and theological. A believing way of knowing indicates how the Christian knows herself to be “overcome and pardoned” in Christ as she hears the promises proclaimed.111 Proclamation necessitates a preaching way of knowing: the content conveyed and received in word and sacrament. Christ remains free from both these ways of knowing; he is not to be captured and subjugated to the Christian’s mere ideas of Christ.112 On its own, neither believing what is preached nor preaching what is believed can guarantee that the Christian has been genuinely transcended by the presence of Christ.113 One could merely be projecting oneself with no basis in or correspondence to reality. Because of this, Bonhoeffer asserts that believing is done in a social nexus.114 While God is free from the person who believes in the sense that God’s being is not dependent on such persons, God is free only in the act of self-giving. As Lord, God exercises freedom by being-for humanity. Because God is with and for humanity, the Christian’s act of believing or proclaiming is never performed in isolation from the God who is believed and proclaimed. The word of God rightly proclaimed is itself God proclaiming God’s promises once again to and for the community of faith.115 To know by believing is to know by hearing and receiving God’s own word. While preachers might only have the texts of past events upon which to craft their own assertions, preaching truly becomes preaching because God is freely bound to speak. Sacraments become sacraments because God’s self is witnessing to and fulfilling the promises to which sacraments refer. But is there any way of knowing that the preacher’s assertions do in fact accord to the God-who-is such that this might be God speaking in the

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preacher’s words? This question asks after the theological way of knowing. Here, Bonhoeffer is unequivocal: “Theology is the memory of the church.”116 This memory is reflected on in such a way that its own presuppositions become the subject of critical engagement.117 A theological way of knowing is iconoclastic: “Because theology turns revelation into something that exists, it may be practiced only where the living person of Christ is itself present and can destroy this existing thing or acknowledge it.”118 The church undertaking the theological task knows that its own words do not compel God to be or act in any certain way.119 Therefore, neither the theologian, the pastor, nor the community can know it is speaking God’s word. But each still seeks to clarify in ever greater detail what it understands God’s word to be and is blessed when Christ acknowledges and affirms that which is proclaimed by the church’s enactment of word and sacrament. The church can, however, rest assured in faith that God is related to it as its creator and lord. The church is the people of God. This assurance means that despite all the times the church fails to articulate well its belief in God and despite all the idols it erects and fails to tear down, the church can trust that God has chosen to be for the church, God’s creatures, and so it cannot be led entirely afield.120 While Bonhoeffer’s concern at the close of Part B of Act and Being is exclusively the event of the word’s arrival and reception (that is, Bonhoeffer is concerned with the relationships between preaching, proclamation, and theology) his analysis nevertheless suggests why the church conducts its proclamation in sacrament, too. The act is not reducible to the words uttered. The image or sign resists being captured. God stands at the ready to encounter those who have raised idols and reassert lordship, which is to sustain the promise of forgiveness.121 The church, too, stands ready to receive the judgment it so deserves, to suffer the transformation of its idols into truth and of its disparate persons into reconciled unity. A Creature Who Is Borne: The Church and the Child Bonhoeffer uses the sociological-theological concept of person to resolve act and being in the church. The effect of this resolution is that the church’s simple obedience to Christ’s revelation coexists with the church’s acts of reflection and discernment upon the revelation the church has received.122 By relying on categories of creature and lord instead of subject and object, Bonhoeffer demonstrates how Christ can make and keep the promises that sets a Christian free from her cor curvum in se even as the Christian receives, reflects upon, and responds to Christ’s promises with her own being and faculties—especially with regards to the possibility of preaching and theology. Bonhoeffer returns to the sacraments, particularly baptism, in force at the end of Act and Being when he addresses the theology of the child. The final

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section of Act and Being is on what being-in-Christ means.123 Bonhoeffer’s intent is to carry on the work of ecclesial and personal reconceptualization of knowing to describe baptism as a child-like being “determined by past and future, reflection and intentionality.”124 In light of the Lutheran content of baptismal theology outlined in chapter 1, it is possible to anticipate how baptism emerges as a resource for this. Baptism is the mark of the Christian’s inclusion in a community polity. Polities are bound together as they tell a common story about their past and their future.125 The story Christians are encountered by year after liturgical year is the story of Christ born, living, crucified, and resurrected. Thus, the community is formed “in Christ,” in his story, in a way that orients its past (these are the events that took place) and its future (these are the events that will take place) to determine its present course of action and mode of being. Baptism has a crucial role in telling that story, particularly as it relates to the church. Baptism means that the Christian is born again, that she walks in newness of life, that she is buried with Christ and dead to sin, and that she is raised with Christ in glory.126 This is the story into which the Christian is initiated as a child, and the story to which the child witnesses to and on behalf of the church. As often as the church speaks of baptism in its present as a reflection upon the past, the church knows it is simultaneously making eschatological proclamations. The death and resurrection that was in Christ is now in the baptized church and will be for all of creation. Baptism binds together past and future in a cohesive story that yokes together a community in the present. Moreover, baptism suggests a way in which the Christian engages this community: In baptism, she is turned outward again to love God and neighbor.127 With this, the dialectic of reflection and intentionality can be brought together: The baptism a Christian receives has a way of directing future action. The problem for Bonhoeffer, as for all paedo-baptists, is that it is not directly clear how the reflective/intentional dialectic can resolve within a child. Any straightforward resolution expects an unreasonable degree of conscious reflection from an infant. Such an expectation is not unreasonable, however, for the community who is turned from sin and toward God in baptism so that this community might receive this child as God’s gift. The passive suffering of baptism by the child who receives a community coexists with the conscious suffering of baptism by the community who receives the child in faith.128 Child and community are united together in Christ as all three parties together constitute the oneness of Christ’s body, giving birth to the churchy way of knowing: to trust God and receive the neighbor in love.129 In baptism, the church comes to know and understand the world as belonging to God, both acknowledging the church’s own status as creature in the needy infant and acknowledging its obligation to fellow creatures in

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the congregation. The child is received not as an innocent but as a witness to God.130 Bonhoeffer’s discussion of “being in Adam” versus “being in Christ” is framed in terms of the heart turned inward and the heart turned outward. In Adam, persons cannot conceive of themselves as creatures and so each acts as if she were each the lord of all creation, each person orienting all things toward her own ends.131 Even should she feel unease about the way things are, she can appeal to her conscience as her judge.132 This conscience, because it is her own voice, will never fail to judge the act alone and never herself as the being who performs the act. She remains immune to the conscience’s judgment.133 She has established herself as lord and, as lord, she will not be mocked or brought low. Therefore, the false lord must die in baptism. Bonhoeffer writes: “Human beings die forever and remain in solitude, or . . . they die in order to live with Christ in the truth.”134 In either case, humans must be confronted from without by Christ who puts sinners to death both individually and corporately.135 When humans are turned from sin, from being-in-Adam, they are turned to Christ and exist in him. On the one hand, a definitive and disruptive act has taken place. The old has passed away and the posture of the sicut deus, the one like God, is replaced with the posture of faith.136 On the other hand, continuity remains insofar as “those living in Christ, the new human beings know themselves in identity with the old human beings that have passed through death—as God’s creatures.”137 A Christian discovers what it is to inhabit the world well when she discovers that God has acted for her as her savior and redeemer.138 Dead to sin, she is raised to newness of life.139 Turned to Christ, she renounces evil in all its forms. Baptismal liturgies are born from just the phenomenon of continuance amidst disruption that Bonhoeffer has been reflecting upon. Therefore, Bonhoeffer is correct to say that “in the community of Christ faith takes form (Gestalt) in religion and that, consequently, religion is called faith.”140 In history, the churchy way of knowing is borne by religion, which is to say by cultus, the ritualized and human phenomena incorporated in worship and taken up by God in revelation.141 A churchy way of knowing is not proper to human beings as such because human beings as such are in Adam rather than Christ.142 Neither is a churchy way of knowing proper to human beings in Christ. Locating it within human capacities, even human capacities in Christ, would require Christians to take an additional step beyond faith to reflection upon faith, turning faith into a work rather than a gift.143 Such a step exposes creatures who are trying to be lord over their own creatureliness. Instead, the churchy way of knowing is simply the way of being possessed by those who go about taking the Table together, absolving one another of their sins, and going to the waters of God as one body. The churchy way of knowing comes to believers

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from the outside, but transforms everything about them by putting them to death and raising them anew.144 Christians possessed of the churchy way of knowing are not even aware of their own righteousness, a theme to which Bonhoeffer ultimately returns in Discipleship: “The saints themselves are unaware of the fruit of sanctification they bear. The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.”145 In light of this, baptism becomes the mode by which Bonhoeffer works through the last two sections of Act and Being. In these two sections, Bonhoeffer discusses the binding together of the past with the future. He begins by acknowledging that the Christian’s past persists through death and rebirth. Whereas the churchy way of knowing is not proper to human beings in any way, the conscience is proper to beings in Adam and even to those in Christ.146 This is surprising, particularly given the proclivity of the conscience to facilitate self-justification. Such a means of justification, contingent as it is upon the task of uncritical self-reflection, is entirely antithetical to being a creature in Christ.147 The conscience-in-Christ must be reoriented; it must die and be born anew.148 The Christian sees sin and forgiveness always together. Her conscience implicates and justifies her acts and being equally.149 Selfreflection is the undoing of humanity’s creatureliness in Adam, and selfreflection is the undoing of humanity’s sinfulness in Christ. Bonhoeffer calls this penitence.150 The Christian is compelled into a habit of daily dying and raising, “repentance within the belief in forgiveness”:151 Because Christ died, and because we, too, died that death with Christ in baptism (Romans 6), death is concealed in faith; for that reason the faithful must daily die that death. The strength to die is not given by asceticism or focusing on the self—that is the work of natural human beings who cannot desire cross and death; rather, they die solely in faith. They do not give themselves death but, in faith, see themselves given into death by Christ. . . . Those over whom the future of Christ have triumphed in faith must daily die the death of the past anew with open eyes.152

The conscience now goads the Christian to remember her baptism. This is because baptism is death and resurrection; baptism is the lordly-self dying as it encounters the life-giving promise of God. Baptism is encountering God’s very self as God gives creatures into death to claim that creature back. Even baptism, however, is meant to be superseded. Eschatologically, Christians speak in faith of a time wherein sin is no more and death is overcome by resurrection. In such a time, creation is fully and finally directed outward toward Christ and the community of loving hearts will be realized. The community now present sees this future in word and sacrament: “here alone does that future reveal itself which in faith determines the present.”153

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The church knows its being is oriented toward precisely this future and yet actively suspends this future in the present as the church waits for this future to be gifted to it. Bonhoeffer calls this the “possibility of the child,” as embodied in infant baptism.154 The child, “full of anxiety and bliss,”155 is oriented toward the future, living from what power the future grants to the present. The child at the font is not plagued by self-reflection but simply receives her future. With three baptismal vows, the future is simply announced over the child: (1) She is turned to Christ, (2) she has forsaken evil in all its forms, and (3) the community of the church by whom she will be borne is also hers to bear. By receiving the future in this way, the child’s past (temporal baptism) and future (the eschatological reality which baptism anticipates) bring the child’s entire life into continuity from beginning to end.156 In Bonhoeffer’s use of the indicative case here, there is an unequivocal “is-ness” that Christ has forgiven and claimed this child in baptism when this child could not possibly have forgiven herself or claimed Christ for herself.157 This is-ness is merely received. The promise is not secured by or self-contained within the child. The promise is secured in an encounter with Christ so the child of God, God’s creature, lives as one whose future became their present in the past, even as their past (sin) is present to them. Finitude and sin beget one another is a nauseating cyclical pattern. But forgetting themselves as forgiveness enables and requires, Christians are no longer troubled by finitude and driven to sin.158 How could those who have died and risen again be bothered by death? Instead, they find their home in the community of Christ that “is the new creation of those who no longer look back upon themselves.”159 Instead, Bonhoeffer states that Christians look “only away from themselves to God’s revelation, to Christ.”160 Being transformed to look in this direction, Christians become “what they were or never were, a creature of God, a child.”161 Revelation in word and sacrament has transformed Christians, even as it carried them through the event, so that they live in faith and love. Christ is and acts through word and sacrament to call and redeem his children as his creatures. Summary It is apparent that a dominant concern for Bonhoeffer in this foundational work of his theology is to understand the problem of revelation and encounter. How is God present to humanity so that humanity is made present to God? Bonhoeffer answers that revelation can occur only in the church. To work out revelation and encounter ecclesially, he looks to word and sacrament. In the sacraments, Bonhoeffer locates where God and humanity are mediated to one another so that humans are effectively transcended and turned outward to accept their appropriate location as creatures in the world. Sacraments

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contain the qualities of both act and being. They are discrete, disruptive, transformative events. Yet, they are also encounters in history between the sustained presences of human persons and Christ existing as community who has willed to be inescapably bound to humanity. Lacking the presence of Christ, the sacraments would accomplish very little, and the human would remain cor curvum in se. When Christ is present in history to the believer through the sacraments, the believer is transformed as she moves from being in-Adam to being in-Christ and a creature under his lordship. Lives of faith and love unconsciously born out of receiving Christ in the sacraments are precisely what Bonhoeffer means by a “churchy form of knowing.” Font and Table are the means by which the Christian knows how to understand reality and the other. At Table and font, the Christian is given to know herself as a creature rather than a god. She receives her death and life from God rather than “living” from herself, freed from the insatiable need to secure life on her own. QUERYING THE ADJECTIVAL: A SACRAMENTAL THEOLOGY? Even Bonhoeffer’s most philosophical work cannot be distanced from the church and, more precisely, the church’s concrete reception of the sacraments. Is this enough, however, to call Bonhoeffer’s theological method sacramental? The next chapter will reveal how pervasive a theme the sacraments truly are. Yet, talking about the sacraments cannot be confused with systematically operating as if all things are known in reference to the truths revealed through the sacraments. Moreover, while the sacraments take a prominent place in the early years of Bonhoeffer’s career, this does not mean they should be a forceful point of reference as his life progresses. Theologians change, both in interests and methodology. Despite this host of issues, the adjectival marker of “sacramental” as a way of describing Bonhoeffer’s theology seems fitting for at least one reason. Act and Being undertakes a genuine effort to bring both act and being together in the concept of revelation. As a Lutheran, Bonhoeffer wants to articulate revelation theologically such that God’s very self as Lord is given over to the Christian who receives revelation.162 Bonhoeffer is insisting on divine presence and action in human signs of speech, breaking bread, and pouring water. The work of revelation is effected in the sacraments. Even if ecclesiology seems less prominent in future writings (a disputable claim), Bonhoeffer is adamant theology be done in the manner of theologia crucis, that is, from within the revelation of Christ within history. Theology operates from revelation.163 Revelation operates as God’s sacramental self-giving, giving of

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both God’s act and God’s being, to the believer. Word and sacrament are not merely the ways in which the Christian knows God; they are the means by which she comes to know the truth about all things. This is what it means to operate with a churchy way of thinking: Reality is not known until it is lived and read through the lens of the Christ Christians encounter as he calls them into a community through baptism and turns them outward to love others as he is lifted up in bread and wine.164 Even when Bonhoeffer is not talking about the church, as he is in Act and Being, his theology should be understood to be filtered through experiencing the Christ who is present in and as the church. Precisely this simultaneous insistence on Christ’s revelatory presence and action as the church, and these in history, constitutes a sacramental mode of doing theology.165 THE IMPLICATIONS FOR EVANGELICAL WORSHIP If Bonhoeffer is correct, then profound implications emerge for the American evangelical church. Or, at least, Bonhoeffer raises many significant questions with which the evangelical church must now wrestle. First, many evangelicals in America, though not all, would opt for some form of historicist or memorialist understanding of the Lord’s Supper. This is a memorial meal. Christians remember Christ; they do not encounter him. Christians reflect upon Christ and the implications of Christ for themselves; they do not experience Christ’s contemporary presence, or at least not in any way that is unique to the meal itself. Likewise, baptism is a thing Christians do to publicly witness to what Christ has already done. Nothing beyond witness takes place necessarily in the event itself. For this reason, many American evangelical traditions would balk at even the language of sacrament, preferring ordinance or something of that kind. Yet, Bonhoeffer compels evangelicals to ask is that language and that belief adequate? Does reflecting on Christ at the Lord’s Table sufficiently distinguish this event from what Christians can do any day on their own? In other words, does Zwinglian memorialism give Christians a reason to go to church? When Christ tasks the church to keep this fellowship meal, when he calls the church to this table, have evangelicals learned to articulate and participate in that call in a manner that articulates not merely the call itself, but its urgency and necessity? The force of Bonhoeffer’s conviction invites theological reassessment. Second, as evangelicals begin to reappropriate the practices of the liturgical tradition, they must also wrestle with the fact that these traditions and practices are meant to facilitate sacramental encounters that draw believers out of themselves and into the world. It is not directly clear that a memorial reflection works in precisely the same way or is meant to accomplish

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precisely the same ends. In that case, evangelicals must determine whether memorialism is sufficient to what they believe is happening when Christians gather in worship. If not, then evangelicals must consciously work to develop their theology of the sacraments. If they decide it is, then conscious and careful work will need to be done to adapt these liturgical traditions to facilitate very different functions in the evangelical context. Moreover, evangelicals would do well to identify and point toward those places in their existing liturgies where they too expect Christ to be found in faith. Either way, evangelical appropriation of these traditions cannot look like simple reduplication as the ecclesial, theological, and liturgical contexts are not obviously the same. Third, if Bonhoeffer is correct that Christ encounters and overcomes Christians in the sacraments, then what does it say about evangelical worship that the sacraments are such a meager part of much of evangelical liturgical praxis? Baptism is no longer a common element of most evangelical church services. For that matter, baptism numbers seem to be down across the entire spectrum of American Christianity and have been declining for some time. With the actual baptism of new Christians happening less frequently, then, how can evangelical worship ensure that the work Christ accomplished in the baptism of its members continues to be brought to the fore? Likewise, evangelical reception of the Lord’s Supper tends to be rather infrequent. Certain traditions will naturally be worse offenders than others in this regard, but few evangelical churches belonging to historically evangelical denominations would go so far as weekly participation in the Supper. How can baptism and the Lord’s Supper inform Christians’ social praxis and imagination when these practices are not regular parts of liturgical praxis? What is out of sight is out of mind and out of life. If Christ forms Christians through the sacraments, evangelical liturgical habits need reformed to honor Christ’s call to meet him at font and table. Bonhoeffer’s sacramental theology, in conversation with his prison letters, can help to address these concerns and cast a vision for both how American evangelicals can move toward worship that consistently encourages meeting Christ in the sacraments and how their worship can draw Christians more fully into that encounter so that worship will send Christians out into the world in justice and peace. CONCLUSION Bonhoeffer’s Act and Being offers an account of Bonhoeffer’s churchy way of knowing. Uncovering Bonhoeffer’s churchy way of knowing revealed that the Christian comes to know the truth about Christ and the world precisely by

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encountering Christ in word and sacrament in the church. Bonhoeffer outlined two schools for developing an epistemology of revelation, grouped broadly under the categories of act-centered and being-centered accounts (both philosophical and theological). Act theologies, culminating in Bonhoeffer’s reading of Barth, were insufficient for a Christian account of revelation because they failed to secure the continuity of being in revelation through an external encounter with another person. Under such theologies of revelation, God is never encountered in history. If there is no genuine encounter from without, then act theologies’ accounts of revelation leave the person trapped within her cor curvum in se. Being accounts, typified by Heidegger, were insufficient for a Christian account of revelation because they do not account for the way in which revelation radically disrupts the being of those who receive revelation. Bonhoeffer noted, for example, how revelation disrupts the human resignation to finitude precisely by opening the Christian to the resurrection. As those who know the truth of the resurrection, Christians can live as creatures before their lord instead of as resigned, finite beings. Bonhoeffer insisted that both act and being be held together. He accomplished this by use of the sociology he developed in Sanctorum Communio: In the church, Christ exists as community. In this description, Christ’s continual historical presence as the church ensures the continuity of revelation. Even so, those who encounter Christ from within-Adam must be put to death to be raised anew in-Christ. Death and resurrection mark the disruptive, act character of revelation. As should be clear given Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran pedigree, death and resurrection language evokes that the sacraments, particularly baptism, participate in the purpose of Christ to transform believers. Christians, through Christ’s revelation in the sacraments, come to know the world differently: The reality of the world is determined by Christ’s self-giving movement to judge and redeem. As those who know the world differently, Christians come to inhabit the world differently: as creatures. From chapter 4 onward, the focus of this thesis shifts from sacraments to religion and religionlessness. It is easy enough to demonstrate a place for the practice of sacraments themselves within an account of religion, as is done in chapter 4. Yet, when talk of religion gives way to a grammar of religionlessness, some interpreters have seen this transition as a point for jettisoning sacraments altogether. If Bonhoeffer’s theology is indeed sacramental in the sense that this thesis has defended, then letting the sacraments fall away is simply not an option. Rather than running sacraments through an account of religionlessness and finding sacraments wanting, religionlessness should be read as a working out of the sacraments and the way their reception affects the church’s reading and habitation of reality. Sacraments both contextualize and motivate religionlessness. Sacraments and religionlessness should motivate evangelical praxis. Before moving on to defend these claims, however, it is

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necessary to lay out Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the three church practices Lutherans historically identify as sacraments: baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and confession. Seeing how these three practices contribute to developing a faithful, creaturely form of life makes it possible to then see how this form of life corresponds to religionlessness. NOTES 1. “Kirchlichen Denken.” DBWE 2, 32. This might be most appropriately translated as “church thinking,” that is, thinking proper to those who inhabit the church. The translation offered by the editors of the Bonhoeffer Works series is “ecclesiological form of knowing,” but this does not reflect the first-order character of Bonhoeffer’s proposal. “Ecclesiological” suggests a further level of reflection. Therefore, “churchy” or “ecclesial way of knowing” is my own translation. My translation adds “way of” to smooth out the translation and to reflect the epistemological nature of Bonhoeffer’s project. 2. Andrew Root, Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker: A Theological Vision for Discipleship and Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014), 74–76. 3. DBWE 2, 159. 4. DBWE 15, 538–42. 5. DBWE 16, 33–35. 6. Ibid., 35. 7. Ibid., 36. 8. There is a methodological unity between this and Barth’s 1922 description of how one should read Calvin as a figure teaching in history. Karl Barth, The Theology of John Calvin, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 4. 9. DBWE 2, 31. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 32. 12. Michael DeJonge, Bonhoeffer’s Theological Formation: Berlin, Barth, and Protestant Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 7. 13. DBWE 2, 33. 14. See Bonhoeffer’s critique of Kant. Ibid., 35–36. 15. While this has been the dominant way of reading Bonhoeffer (evidenced in Charles Marsh, “The Overabundant Self and the Transcendental Tradition: Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the Self-Reflective Subject,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion [1992]: 659–72.), David Robinson recently challenges the point. David Robinson, “Peccatorum Communio: Intercession in Bonhoeffer’s Use of Hegel,” Studies in Christian Ethics 28 (2015): 86–100. 16. DBWE 2, 38. 17. Ibid., 38–39. 18. Ibid., 41.

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19. Ibid., 45. Bonhoeffer’s omission of the Cartesian “ergo” in “cogito ergo sum” functions to collapse reason and being together, hinting that transcendence is not achieved. 20. Ibid., 50. 21. Ibid., 54. 22. Tom Greggs, “The Influence of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Karl Barth,” in Engaging Bonhoeffer: The Impact and Influence of Bonhoeffer’s Life and Thought, ed. Matthew D. Kirkpatrick (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016), 45–51. 23. DBWE 2., 83. 24. For example, see Karl Barth, The Word of God and Theology, trans. Amy Marga (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 75. 25. Ibid. 26. “Before all thought there stands unfathomable predestination.” DBWE 2, 87. 27. Ibid., 84. 28. For Bonhoeffer, it is clear that Barth wants an account of revelation in which the I bears a certain kind of continuity even across the death which revelation effects. It is not clear to Bonhoeffer, however, that Barth achieves this continuity or even that such continuity could be genuinely possible within Barth’s definitions. Ibid., 98–100. As such, the complicated relations between revelation and time in Barth’s theology negates, in Bonhoeffer’s mind, the similus of beings-in-history. 29. Ibid., 89, 92. 30. Ibid., 85–86. 31. Barth, The Word of God and Theology, 83. 32. DBWE 2, 92. 33. Ibid., 90. 34. Ibid., 91. See also Justin Mandela Roberts, Sacred Rhetoric: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Participatory Tradition (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015), 92–93. 35. DBWE 2, 85, 91. 36. DeJonge, Bonhoeffer’s Theological Formation, 37. 37. DBWE 2, 89. 38. Ibid., 45. 39. Ibid., 84. 40. Ibid., 103. 41. Ibid. 42. “Even when existence is placed into the truth, its thinking about itself and about God remain within itself; but it is disrupted ever anew by the reality of revelation. . . .” Ibid., 2, 90. 43. Ibid., 91. 44. DeJonge, Bonhoeffer’s Theological Formation, 49. 45. Paul Molnar, Karl Barth and the Theology of the Lord’s Supper (Paris: Peter Lang, 1996), 53. 46. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 1.2, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. T. Thomson and Harold Knight (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 232, 359.

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47. Christ and his history refer to Christ as a first-century Palestinian Jew. This is why the Lord’s Supper is based in the history of Christ as opposed to based in Christ’s continued presence. Molnar, Karl Barth and the Theology of the Lord’s Supper, 118. Similarly, see Sung-Yong Jun, “Karl Barth’s Pneumatological Doctrine of Baptism” (PhD diss., University of Aberdeen, 1995), 156. 48. Barth, Church Dogmatics 1.2, 226–27. 49. Huldrych Zwingli, Writings: In Search of True Religion: Reformation, Pastoral, and Eucharistic Writings, vol. 2 of 3, trans. H. Wayne Pipkin (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1984), 236. 50. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.3.2, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 169; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.4, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (London: T&T Clark, 2009), ix; Zwingli, Writings, 200. 51. See Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.4, 127. Nimmo might challenge this reading of Barth by talking about the way in which God can be bound to the sacraments, nevertheless he also acknowledges that Barth cannot conceive of this binding substantially. See Paul Nimmo, Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 126, fn 164. 52. DBWE 2, 84. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. DBWE 2, 84. 56. DBWE 2, 90–91. 57. DBWE 2, 54. 58. Ibid., 90. 59. Ibid., 59. 60. Bonhoeffer believes that, in Husserl and Scheler, the system is predicated on an idea of God and not on the being of God. Ibid., 66–67. 61. Ibid., 60. 62. Ibid., 64. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier, 1962). 63. DBWE 2, 65. Cf. Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of Ethical Personalism, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 64. DBWE 2, 66–67. 65. Ibid., 71. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962). 66. Ibid., 149. 67. DBWE 2, 65. 68. Ibid., 71–72. Charles Marsh, Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Promise of His Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 117–20. 69. DBWE 2, 73. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., 75. 72. Abraham roots Bonhoeffer’s theological objection to Idealism in Luther’s sacramentology. Abraham, Wort und Sakrament, 147.

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73. DBWE 2, 80. 74. Ibid., 109. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., 110. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid., 111. For Ritschl, the revelation carried forward by the church is that of the religion impressed upon it by Jesus; it is the event of the historical person of Jesus that qualifies as revelation. Albrecht Ritschl, “Instruction in the Christian Religion,” in Three Essays, trans. Philip Hefner (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005), 230 ff. This same sentiment is carried forward in the generation of scholars responsible for teaching Bonhoeffer, for example, Adolf von Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann. While Bonhoeffer did not study under Herrmann, this theological giant of his age expresses his sympathy with this Ritschlian impulse when lecturing that the Gospels consist of a record of the way in which Jesus “sought to affect them (the disciples)” by his own religious affection. Wilhelm Herrmann, Systematic Theology, trans. Nathaniel Micklem and Kenneth Saunders (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013), 49. The Jesus of the New Testament is thereafter “apprehended by us” and “[w]e gain here an experience that we would otherwise seek in vain, the impression of a unique Person who is able to hold us in thralldom of utter surrender.” Ibid., 51. It is evident that such accounts as these leave the event of revelation in the past to be appropriated by the present. Bonhoeffer deduces that in such accounts the self is not transcended. The self must be encountered by a genuine other in the present. Without this, the I has only acted to affect the I. Any boundary supposedly transgressed by this event must not have been a genuine boundary to the self in the first place; true transcendence has yet to occur. 80. DBWE 2, 111. 81. Ibid., 113. 82. DBWE 2, 112. 83. Ibid., 111. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid., 113. “ein Christus warden.” DBW 2, 109. 86. DBWE 2, 112. 87. Ibid., 110. 88. Ibid. 89. “The Augsburg Confession,” Book of Concord. Accessed March 5, 2016, htttp​://bo​​okofc​​oncor​​d​.org​​/augs​​burgc​​onfes​​s​ion.​​php, Article VII. 90. DBWE 2, 111, 113, 115. 91. Ibid., 113. 92. Ibid., 115. 93. Ibid., 114–15. 94. Ibid., 115. 95. Ibid., 115–16. 96. Ibid., 116. For Luther, see LW 36, 43. 97. DBWE 2, 116.

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98. Ibid. 99. Ibid., 117–18. 100. Ibid., 120. 101. Ibid., 120–21. 102. Ibid., 121. 103. Ibid., 123. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid., 125. 108. Ibid. 109. Ibid., 124. 110. Ibid., 128. 111. Ibid., 126. 112. Ibid., 126–27. 113. Ibid., 127. 114. Ibid., 125–28. 115. Ibid., 129–30. 116. Ibid., 130. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid., 131. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid., 131–32. 121. For this reason, Brannon Hancock calls a sacrament an act “which simultaneously makes and breaks the Church.” Brannon Hancock, The Scandal of Sacramentality: The Eucharist in Literary and Theological Perspectives (Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 2014), xxii. 122. For a full account, see Joshua Kaiser, Becoming Simple and Wise: Moral Discernment in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Vision of Christian Ethics (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2015). 123. DBWE 2, 32. 124. Ibid. 125. William Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2002), 1–2. 126. LW 35, 67. 127. DBWE 2, 157. See also Gritsch, “Lutheran Theology,” 267. 128. DBWE 1, 241. 129. DBWE 2, 160–61. 130. Root, Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker, 78. 131. DBWE 2, 137. 132. Ibid., 138. 133. Ibid., 144–45. 134. Ibid., 141. 135. Ibid., 146. 136. Ibid., 150–51.

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137. Ibid., 151. 138. Creatureliness is not a broad ontological category but applies only to those who are in faith and only those in faith recognize what creatureliness is. There must be separate ontological accounts of those in sin and those in faith, and so Bonhoeffer has parsed this as being “in Adam” or “in Christ.” Even those in faith cannot reason back to a general account of creatureliness from within their position because what they know cannot be separated from how they know. Ibid., 151–52. 139. Death and resurrection are not only for persons, however, but for all of creation. Ibid., 152. Earlier anticipations about how past and future are bound together in the present begin to find their shape here. In this passage, Bonhoeffer continues working against general categories, here of history and nature, that are not derived from the acknowledgment that God has acted pro-nobis but rather from more “natural” footings. 140. Ibid., 154. The use of Gestalt is interesting here. Religion as Gestalt is present in the Tegel letters; but Sanctorum Communio, where form takes on a sociological guise, uses the word Struktur. On the whole, Gestalt appears translated as “form” more often in works where Bonhoeffer uses “religion” pejoratively, yet he generally appears perfectly agreeable to faith’s Gestalt as religion, as here. Too, in the baptismal letter from Tegel, Gestalt appears benignly. DBWE 8, 389. In Ethics, on the other hand, Gestalt refers not to a general form or structure, but to the “form of Christ,” the one who reconciles God and man. DBWE 6, 83. This reference is significant precisely because Bonhoeffer believes that religious structures serve to order the relationship between God and humanity. Further research on the different uses of Getstalt, Struktur, and Fromme would prove helpful. 141. DBWE 1, 237–47. The link between cultic and religion is suggested by the way in which religion bears faith whereas Bonhoeffer has just criticized certain dispositional states (piety, feeling, and conversion, for example) as forgetful of Christ. DBWE 2, 154. This contrast between religion and dispositional state anticipates the distinction between religious structures and dispositions that will be defended at length in chapter four. See also Christiane Tietz, “Friedrich Schleiermacher and Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” in Bonhoeffer’s Intellectual Formation: Theology and Philosophy in His Thought, ed. Peter Frick (Tübingen: Mohr Seibeck, 2008), 141. 142. DBWE 2, 151. 143. Ibid., 153–54. Here is why the translation of “ecclesiological way of knowing” as put forward by the DBWE version is inadequate to Bonhoeffer’s intent. As Bonhoeffer ultimately concludes, “The act of faith rests on the objectivity of the event of revelation in Word and sacrament. Clinging to Christ need not become selfconscious; rather, it is wholly taken up by completion of the act itself.” Ibid., 158. The additional layer of reflection suggested by ecclesiological requires the act of faith to become self-conscious. 144. Ibid., 151. 145. DBWE 4, 266–27. 146. DBWE 2, 155. 147. Ibid.

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148. Harasta, “Adam in Christ? The Place of Sin in Christ-Reality,” in Christ, Church, and World: New Studies in Bonhoeffer’s Theology and Ethics, ed. Michael Mawson and Philip Ziegler (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 71–72. 149. DBWE 2, 156. 150. Ibid. 151. Ibid. 152. Ibid., 157. 153. Ibid., 159. 154. Ibid. 155. Ibid. 156. Ibid., 160. 157. Ist, findet, ect. DBW 2, 161. 158. DBWE 2, 161. 159. Ibid. 160. Ibid. 161. Ibid. 162. DBWE 2, 125. 163. Ibid., 130. See also Philip Ziegler, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Theologian of the Word of God,” in Bonhoeffer, Christ, and Culture, ed. Keith Johnson and Timothy Larson (Nottingham: Intervarsity Press, 2013), 15–37. 164. DBWE 2, 135. 165. Ibid.

Chapter 3

Bonhoeffer’s Theology of the Sacraments

The last chapter detailed the significance of Christ’s presence in the sacraments for Bonhoeffer’s theology, as articulated in Act and Being. Christ is present in history to effect a genuinely transformative encounter in Christians. This encounter changes both how Christians know things and the content of their knowledge. Sacraments are those means by which Christ effects the turning of hearts outward, the advent of grace and love, through his promise of sin’s forgiveness.1 Christ makes himself present in sacramental signs, giving himself over so that the human self is encountered by an other who cannot be assimilated or dismissed.2 The self is directed beyond itself, to this other, this Christ, who claims her life. Present in historical continuity as the body of the church, Christ continues to claim those he encounters in word and sacrament, calling them repeatedly so that vain ambitions are put to death and creatures are resurrected.3 Because Bonhoeffer understands revelation to happen through Christ’s revealing himself and the truth of all things through the sacraments, closer attention must be paid to how, for Bonhoeffer, each sacrament participates in the role of the sacraments in the divine economy. Each sacrament deserves its own discussion because each participates in the sacraments’ role to instill, strengthen, locate, and vitalize faith in its own manner. There are perhaps few limits as to what might on occasion belong to the category of sacrament. Bonhoeffer claims in the Christology lectures that it is only because of the fall that “the whole of creation is no longer sacramental.”4 Even now, Christ might at any time reveal himself by way of any creaturely and contingent means he desires such that this means could be identified as a sacrament. Nevertheless, the church has identified Christ to be reliably and consistently present in certain practices that it dubs sacraments; indeed, Christ has promised that he himself will be found in these practices with 67

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his power to and for the purpose of turning hearts outward.5 The Lutheran tradition recognizes up to three practices Christ instituted for this purpose: baptism, Lord’s Supper, and confession. The first two of these three belong unambiguously among the sacraments for Bonhoeffer. Whether confession is a sacrament is a debated issue. Part of the burden of this chapter, therefore, is to demonstrate that confession operates as a sacrament for Bonhoeffer, too. As practices of the church, the three discrete events named as sacraments attain a degree of embodied continuity, extending the event beyond itself to maintain those effects which these events bring about. As practices, these are not only events, but these events act to form a distinct ethos, or corporate Geist, of the church, which enables sacraments to continue their work well after the discrete event itself is concluded.6 By being people who baptize, break bread, and confess, the church learns to inhabit the world in a certain way, conscious both of its creatureliness and its promise of resurrection. To treat these three practices concretely, this chapter draws on four particular works by Bonhoeffer with varyingly direct content pertaining to the sacraments: Sanctorum Communio, in particular its “positive presentation” of the church; the Christology lectures on “Christ as Sacrament”; part two of Discipleship, where Bonhoeffer becomes concerned with the way in which his exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount becomes enfleshed in the concrete community of the church; and essays and lectures offered during Bonhoeffer’s directorship of the Confessing Church seminary in Finkenwalde. Ethics and the prison correspondence will be bracketed out until their remarks can more fully frame the relationship between sacraments and religionlessness in chapters 5 and 6. In drawing on these works by Bonhoeffer, however, this chapter will not read the texts diachronically. Since the purpose is to consider the sacraments themselves, the chapter draws on these texts simultaneously to see what each text adds to an ongoing discussion about each sacrament. Bonhoeffer theology, like all theologies, evolves and changes over time. Regarding the sacraments, though, these changes seem to be of augmentation and emphasis rather than contradiction or changes in direction. Reading these texts linearly to trace these shifts could certainly prove instructive as a way of considering how Bonhoeffer’s shifting historical circumstances might require focus on different facets of the gem. However, that is not the task of this chapter, but rather to gain as full a picture of possible of the sum total insight Bonhoeffer has to offer. Turning first to baptism, this sacrament turns hearts outward by putting the sinner to death and raising the saint to new life in the community of saints that is the body of Christ. Second, the Lord’s Supper creates a community of loving hearts by directing saints toward those God calls their neighbor. Third, confession is rightly regarded in Bonhoeffer’s theology as

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a distinct sacrament through which Christ restores the community between saints. These three claims might create a rosy description of the church as an ideal, spiritual community. Bonhoeffer does not wear rose-tinted glasses, however, and he is perfectly aware that a community so described would have no earthly referent. Therefore, by way of transition, the chapter concludes with a necessary caveat that this description of the spiritual community of saints is not sufficient in itself. Bonhoeffer’s essay “What is Church?” is brought in to acknowledge how the community formed by these practices still maintains the character of being simul justus et peccator, saintly and sinful. On its own, attention to the spiritual character of the sacraments as works of Christ to form a spiritual community proves insufficient: It is also necessary to explain how the sacraments are creaturely and earthy. Accounting for the earthy character of the sacraments necessitates the transition in subsequent chapters to a topic very, very human: religion.

BONHOEFFER’S THEOLOGY OF THE SACRAMENTS Baptism Discipleship contains Bonhoeffer’s most direct and expansive reflections on baptism. He begins by drawing the parallel between discipleship and baptism: “What the Synoptics describe as hearing and following the call to discipleship, Paul expresses with the concept of baptism.”7 Discipleship begins when Christ is immediately present to call the Christian with nothing either to justify or condition the call, which “creates existence anew.”8 When discipleship happens ahead of the call, Jesus rejects it. When Christ calls and the Christian attempts to contradict or contravene the terms of this encounter, Jesus rejects that discipleship, too.9 Acceptable discipleship consists solely of the call and those who suffer it, receiving it with joy. This is the “situation in which faith can begin.”10 Bonhoeffer sees how this description of the Synoptic call to discipleship has deep resonances with the theology of baptism. Baptism “is grounded solely in the will of Jesus Christ, as expressed in his gracious call.”11 Nothing justifies or conditions it. Baptism “is essentially a paradoxically passive action; it means being baptized, suffering Christ’s call.”12 The baptized can do nothing but receive Christ’s call—a behavioral reflection of the churchy way of knowing. Baptism “implies a break.”13 In baptism, “Past and present are torn asunder. The old has passed away, everything becomes new.”14 Baptism, too, creates a new existence, and precisely because “Christ the mediator has stepped in between me and the world,” that is, Christ has made

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himself present.15 The beginning of the chapter on baptism in Discipleship offers a parallel paradigm with the description of Christ’s call to discipleship. Such a paradigm exposes four themes necessary to understanding Bonhoeffer’s theology of baptism: (1) the death and resurrection of those who receive, (2) the immediacy of Christ, (3) the inexplicability of Christ’s call, and (4) the receptive posture of faith. Each of these must be addressed in turn. In Discipleship, baptismal dying denotes simultaneously the beginning of the Christian’s life in both Christ’s body and the church’s life.16 Life lived from such a location is creaturely life in and subject to Christ. Christ encounters the Christian in baptism with the authoritative, inexplicable call to follow him as Lord in communal life, placed into a fellowship of those who bear Christ’s crucifixion and righteousness. The Christian receives her death and resurrection in Christ by faith. Death marks the end of self-occupation and the beginning of life: her inclusion in the community of loving hearts. Outwith Discipleship, the Christian finds that while her role in the Christian community may change, her posture toward the community will always be that of baptism: through her own death to receive God and neighbor as lifegiving gifts. Death and Resurrection Bonhoeffer begins with death and resurrection. The reader of Discipleship must begin by observing that baptism does, in fact, effect the transformation through death to resurrection.17 Throughout his chapter, Bonhoeffer resists any language of analogy or metaphor regarding death and resurrection. Time and again he states that “in baptism we die.”18 This death must come to the Christian from outside herself. If the impulse of the cor curvum in se is to twist the world toward the sinner’s own ends for the sake of self-preservation, no person turned inward can will to put herself to death. The call to baptism is the call into the community of the crucified Christ, and the community bears the wounds of crucifixion itself. Yet, Bonhoeffer continues: “This death is thus not the final, angry rejection of the creature by its creator but rather the gracious acceptance of the creature by the creator.”19 Death in Christ and at Christ’s call contains resurrection into the community of loving hearts.20 To die to oneself is to be received into the community. To be received into the community, to be received into the very body of Christ, is a gift of grace. Therefore, baptism is a means of Christ’s grace.21 The Immediacy of Christ’s Presence Baptism is gracious death at the call of Christ, and resurrection into Christ’s own body in the crucified community. In what manner, therefore, is Christ immediately present to the baptized in the event of baptism? The last two

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chapters have demonstrated the importance of this immediate presence for both Luther and Bonhoeffer. Furthermore, it is telling that Bonhoeffer has once again used the language of creator and creature, the language Act and Being recommended, as seen in the last chapter. Creatureliness must be established; therefore, Christ must be present to assert himself as Creator and Lord.22 Christ is the means of the Christian’s death, but also a companion in it.23 That the Lord should be crucified is the ludicrous claim about reality into which Christians are being drawn by baptism. Yet, precisely because the Christian’s own death participates with Christ’s death, sin is forgiven. God does not simply forget sin—God is not self-deceived—but rather puts the sinner to death. A new creature is raised, seen in the body of Christ into which she has been received.24 In his call, “Jesus gave [the disciples in the community of the cross] the gift of justification, of death and forgiveness of sins.”25 By being present in the call to death in baptism, Christ is present, simultaneously, in the resurrection of creatures into his body where creatures are reconciled both to God and to one another.26 The Authoritative Call of Christ No explanation of how Christ should be present with his call in the event of baptism is ever offered in Discipleship. This omission is purposive for Bonhoeffer. Christ’s presence can only be recognized and his authoritative call is only received. The Christology lectures contain essential insights for grasping what Bonhoeffer is advocating for and against by refusing to explain how Christ is present. The lectures begin with a set of three questions often put to Christ.27 Only the church’s question permits a genuine encounter with Christ. When Christ comes to those outside the church, they try to avoid him with questions of “How?” and “Why?” By so doing, they attempt to assimilate Christ into categories of their own making and control and maintain their own lordship. Only those placed in the church have been given the faith whereby they respond: “Who are you?”28 Those who ask this latter question find it turned back on them.29 By that question’s reversal, they are put to death, that is, their ambitions to be sicut deus are unmasked: The human that would be God is slain and the creature of God is born.30 If a person attempts to explain or justify Christ’s presence, she has immediately transgressed the line of questioning appropriate to creatures. She has tried to avoid the encounter by subsuming it into her own reason rather than receiving Christ when and where he has deemed to make himself present. Aware that desires to circumvent the encounter with Christ are not a problem unique to the uninitiated, Bonhoeffer adds: “These are all attempts to be finished with Christ. Even theologians do the same. Everywhere the Son of Man is betrayed by the kiss of Judas.”31 Bonhoeffer believes that such a

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kiss can be found within his own tradition in the form of Luther’s doctrine of ubiquity. The doctrine of ubiquity historically belongs to Reformation debates about the Lord’s Supper, not baptism. Yet, it provokes the point being made here just as readily. Arising from debates with Zwingli and his followers, ubiquity was meant to explain how Christ is bodily present at each Table when all of Europe was taking the Supper simultaneously.32 If a body circumscribes a person, then how is it possible for a person to be manifest in multiple places at once? Zwingli, and much though not all of the subsequent Reformed tradition, insisted that Christ ascended to the right hand of the Father there to reign in glory and is no longer historically present.33 As a fully human being (as well as fully divine), it is not possible for Christ’s body to be in more than one location. Luther responds that it is within the necessary power of a being who rules over all things to be near all things over which such a being rules.34 Bread and wine circumscribe Christ when Christ wills it to be so.35 Bonhoeffer discerns that by answering Zwingli’s question at all, Luther has stepped into a metaphysical quagmire from which there is no escape.36 There is no escape because it is the wrong question. Luther should have done better by continuing his earlier posture that asserted the divine will as the only justification for divine presence: “This is the way in which Christ is present. . . . He is there, but he is only there where he reveals himself through his word.”37 Christ is present and active because he chooses to be—there is nothing human reason can add to this account. The Receptive Posture of Faith The last section explains why Bonhoeffer offers no description of how Christ is present. By this omission, he speaks of the inexplicability of Christ’s call. Christ is present with his call as he wills to be. This is to speak of Christ’s immediacy.38 The content of Christ’s call is the death and resurrection of those who receive it. Discipleship, therefore, forces attention to one final theme: The church receives this authoritative call in baptism. Reception is not pure passivity. The transformation that baptism effects is not mechanical but dynamic, born from the recurrent dialogue between the baptized and the Holy Spirit who teaches the Christian and makes her faith sure.39 This transforming call is only genuinely received when it is acknowledged in deed that the call contains a response: “In calling the disciples, Jesus demanded a visible act of obedience. To follow Jesus is a public act. In just the same way, baptism is a public act, for in baptism Christians are incorporated into the visible church-community.”40 Bonhoeffer leaves off discussion of the actual form this response takes until subsequent chapters of Discipleship.41 However, here it is only necessary to take away the point that reception is a beginning, not an end.

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However, it is important, too, to qualify that it is the church that receives the call: “The sacrament should be administered only where it is certain that the act of salvation already accomplished once and for all will be repeatedly remembered in faith. And that can only be the case in a living churchcommunity.”42 This qualification rests on the reflections on reflective and direct faith that shaped Bonhoeffer’s epistemological proposal in Act and Being. The description of baptism offered until this point, correlated as it is to Jesus’ call to discipleship, makes little sense when baptizing an infant unless there is a community in place that is also receiving the call this child receives, and unless that community is responding to the call with and for the child. As argued in the last chapter, the child suffers baptism unconsciously and receives the church community with no self-reflection whatsoever. The child’s unreflective reception embodies a truth that the community has already received but must hear time and time again: Nobody knows what she is getting into when Christ calls her. However, the community that receives this child who suffers baptism does so conscious that the actions performed that day contain the future of all involved. As fellow members of the body of Christ, as those who have likewise been put to death and raised again, they accept this child as their own responsibility to love as they have been loved, gladly suffering the presence of this gift from God. Baptism beyond Discipleship The material in the last section largely derives from Discipleship. Other writings shed further light on Bonhoeffer’s theology of baptism. For example, student notes (always to be regarded cautiously) for a catechetical lesson suggest that baptism be regarded as a means of assurance that the Christian belongs to and can, therefore, come to God.43 In suffering the irrevocable and unrepeatable call of baptism, the Christian is claimed by God because “God intended to do something good for us.”44 That “something good” consists of reconciliation between humanity and God. These notes also confirm that death and resurrection continue to be themes in Bonhoeffer’s account of baptism. In a lecture concept for confirmation classes, Bonhoeffer suggests three reasons why the Christian should be confirmed, the first being that she is baptized. Precisely because “God did something with you before you knew or even wanted it,” she should come to know what it means to be Christian that she should become Christian.45 The unreflective suffering of baptism by a child gives way to the reflective faith of a young person prepared to receive God and neighbor in love, and catechesis is the means by which the Christian is prepared for this reflective responsibility. Bonhoeffer does not add catechesis to baptism or suggest that baptism is deficient in any

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way.46 Baptism is complete in itself. Rather, catechesis acknowledges that the Christian is taking on a new role in the baptized community, and this role requires a different epistemic posture. The Christian still comes to inhabit this new epistemic position precisely by receiving the encounter with God—whether through prayer, the sermon, or scriptural meditation—which is no different a posture than the one assumed by the infant at the font.47 Just as in catechesis the Christian receives Christ in a new way, with conscious reflection, the community receives the catechumen back in a new way: as members who have already been instructed and who carry within them the first beginnings of their own voluntary acceptance.48 In this way, the church’s posture of receptivity continues to come to the fore. All of this is in unity with the content of Discipleship even where it is an augmentation or extension of that content. In summary, for Bonhoeffer, baptism serves to instill and locate faith. The Christian’s death in the waters of baptism marks the beginning of her life in the church, and therefore of the church’s life.49 The church’s baptized life is creaturely, life in and subject to Christ as he comes to the church in baptism with the authoritative but inexplicable call to follow him as Lord. The baptized life is also communal life. The Christian is placed into a fellowship of those who bear the crucified Christ’s cross and scars, and thereby are made righteous in him. God instills faith in the Christian that she might receive Christ’s own death and resurrection, the end of self and sin, and the advent of the community of loving hearts. The Christian’s role in that community may change, as marked by catechesis, but the creature’s posture will always be that of baptism: to receive God and neighbor with gratitude. The Lord’s Supper Bonhoeffer saw Christ at work in baptism to instill faith and give rise to a unity of believers located “in Christ.” For Bonhoeffer, the Supper participates in sustaining, locating, and vitalizing the faith of those who receive Christ in bread and wine. As the sacrament of unity, the Supper locates faith spatially and volitionally. Additionally, the Supper sustains and vitalizes faith as Christ turns believers toward one another in love at the Table. The Sacrament of Christian Unity: Which Unity? In Sanctorum Communio, Bonhoeffer follows Luther in recognizing the Lord’s Supper as the sacrament of Christian unity. He writes of the disciples: “Jesus had tied them tightly together with a close bond at the very last hour. This happened in the Last Supper . . . as all of you eat and are filled from one loaf, so too will all of you be saved and united (zusammengefaßt) in me alone. The Lord of the disciple-community grants his disciples community with him

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and thus with each other.”50 This meal does not mark the church’s birth but marks Christ’s will for the church to be and for it to be in him.51 The lecture “Congregational Development and Church Discipline in the New Testament” describes multiple kinds of Christian unity.52 Student notes record: “Baptism constitutes the unity of the body of Christ; the Lord’s Supper constitutes, through repeated use, the community, the koinonia.”53 Baptism unites the church as where Christ’s body is circumscribed. The Lord’s Supper unites the parts of this body to one another spatially and volitionally, creating fellowship where there was once division.54 Bonhoeffer continues: “In baptism through one spirit to one body. In the Lord’s Supper through one body to one spirit.”55 Abraham connects this description of the Supper to the influence of Luther.56 To be united spatially means to be turned toward the concrete community of those who surround the Christian as the Supper is taken. To be united volitionally means that this community through the Supper is moved to will one another in love. Both the spatial and volitional unities are reflected in Bonhoeffer’s claim: “The Lord’s Supper is given to the sanctorum communio as an act that symbolizes God’s effective will for community.”57 This claim, too, is rooted in Luther’s theology.58 The sanctorum communio cannot be other than a concrete community in history which occupies a designated space, and precisely because God’s will symbolized in the Supper is an effective will, the community will be comprised of those who will the community.59 The unities established in the Lord’s Supper are different in kind than the unity brought about through baptism. In baptism, individual and community are recognized by God not as the persons who they were but as one person—Christ—whose righteousness is acceptable and whose resurrection is accomplished. This is an ontic unity of all believers in the one person of Christ. This ontic unity does not obscure the continual existence of each baptized person, however. These distinct persons belong to one another as themselves. The Lord’s Supper is instituted that those who are united in Christ might be directed to one another in love (volitional unity) as often as they take the meal together (spatial unity). Christ’s bodily presence as a distinct and distinguishable person is required for the Lord’s Supper to be effective.60 As argued by both Luther and Bonhoeffer, Christ’s presence is imperative for anything to be called sacrament: “Sacraments exist only because there is a body of Christ. There they begin and end.”61 Bonhoeffer writes: “In both [baptism and the Lord’s Supper], Christ encounters us bodily and makes us participants in the community of his body.”62 The Supper is a sacrament of unity because it unites members of the church in a specific time and place to one another in a relationship of love. This suggests why the Supper might be thought to participate in the sustenance

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and vitalization of faith in a way that was not immediately the case for baptism. The unities the Supper effects are occupied more with sustaining the Christian’s faith than with establishing it. While baptism brings Christians into the community, or instills faith, “[t]he Lord’s Supper keeps us in community with Christ’s body.”63 In baptism, love awakens; in the Supper, love finds its object. Turned to One Another in Love Discipleship offers only a rudimentary sketch for a theology of the Lord’s Supper when Bonhoeffer writes: Church-community finds its place between the word of proclamation and the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. To define the nature of this community in such a way is not by accident, since this community springs ever anew from the word of proclamation, and continues to find its goal and fulfilment in the Lord’s Supper. All Christian community exists between word and sacrament. It begins and ends in worship.64

The Supper continues to turn hearts outward by calling Christians into the eschatological banquet, beckoning them onward to grow in faith and love until that which the Supper anticipates at last comes to pass. The Supper, therefore, becomes the means by which the Christian who lives in Christ is freed to love through giving so that others may receive as they have need. Within this basic description, several questions remain unanswered. Who is the neighbor to whom this Supper directs the Christian, or is the Supper’s vision spatially bounded by the church? If baptism and the Lord’s Supper are practices proper to the church itself, as Bonhoeffer suggests, rather than being administrations of clerical offices before a silent laity, then how are the dual aspects of giving and receiving held together in the Supper?65 Does the Supper turn Christians outward purely by the fact it is practiced, or what might it look like to, as Paul says, take the Supper in vain? Each of these questions deserves more attention to make clear how the Supper sustains and vitalizes the church’s faith. If the Supper turns Christians outward, then the first question this claim evokes is “towards whom?” This is the question of spatial location. Bonhoeffer ties the Supper to the eschatological banquet of which the church received a foretaste in Acts.66 Close attention to Acts necessitates recognizing that the boundaries of the church community are very firmly established. When the author writes that “there was no need among them,” it is clear that “them” is the church (Acts 4:34–35). When property was sold and the proceeds given to the poor, “the poor” are the poor within the church. The actions of the community in Acts are all directed outward to others, but inward with respect

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to the community as a whole. If the community’s response to its property is correlated to their observation of the Lord’s Supper as it is for Bonhoeffer, it would seem that the neighbors to whom the Supper directs Christians are similarly bounded by the borders of the church. Sanctorum Communio does not address the question of the Supper’s referent directly, but it does point in the direction of an answer. Bonhoeffer writes: In the Lord’s Supper the church-community manifests itself purely as a voluntary and as a community confessing its faith, and is summoned and recognized by God as such. It is not a manifestation of the pure sanctorum communio, however; rather it is the smallest of the three concentric, sociologically distinct circles, and is both the source from which all effectiveness of the church-community springs and the focal point, into which all its life flows.67

Sociologically, what does it mean for a community to be voluntary? In material deleted from the published dissertation, voluntary communities are defined as “free religious communities that are held together purely on the basis of and in order to achieve a purpose, and solely through a common religious practice as a means for accomplishing a purpose.”68 Voluntary communities are individualistic and cultic. The voluntary church takes shape around the Lord’s Supper.69 Yet, the question now is asked: Who are these gathered individuals volunteering to serve? Those who practice the Lord’s Supper might constitute the smallest sociological circle of the church, but is their vision summarily limited to those who take the Supper with them? In one respect, that small circle is the reach of the Supper’s vision. The community gathering for the Supper is the visible church community, and this visibility “is not a community of common convictions or based on kindred spirits, but a community of love made up of real human beings.”70 The vision of the Supper is that those whom God calls together, however, distinct from one another they remain, are called to receive one another in love: “we become aware that one person cannot have anything in common with another . . . [and] this very insight makes it clear that divine action alone is able to intervene here, that what sustains the community can be nothing but the love given by God into our hearts.”71 The love God gives the community is gifted so that the community is sustained. The Supper directs the Christian to those she is taking the Supper alongside, people with whom she might share no other bond of interest or affection.72 In another respect, that small circle pales in comparison to those whose vision the Supper reaches. The community of love, because it recognizes love as God’s gift, is also a community of adoration and confession of faith.73 The outward-facing direction of adoration and witness implies a theoretical

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possibility Bonhoeffer must leave open: Persons may exist outside the boundaries of the visible community who are nonetheless Christians.74 These persons have become Christians, however, through preaching, that is, contacts with the visible, concrete community.75 The visible community moved to confession of faith is driven beyond its visible borders, not to coerce others in but with a witness of adoration toward the God who gives good gifts. The Supper’s direct vision is to reconcile one member of the community to another, but in so doing the community’s witness of love and adoration overflows the community. God’s grace is superabundant, unable to be contained even by those to whom this grace is most directly given. The Supper turns Christians toward one another and beyond one another simultaneously.76 In this way, it becomes clear how the Supper spatially locates the community dually in the people who gather around bread and wine and in the world of persons beyond this concentric circle who nevertheless bump up against this circle. The matter of spatial location resolved, it is necessary to ask about how faith is sustained in those who inhabit this space. This is to ask how the dual postures of giving and receiving are held together in the Supper. Creaturely faith, as has been seen, adopts a posture of reception. In the Supper, Christians receive their tangible neighbor from God to give love. The neighbor given to the Christian in the Supper is both a grace and a responsibility. How does this additional responsibility not violate the posture of receptivity? This question poses a problem for everyone who participates in the Supper. At times, one member of the church will turn to the other responsible for saying: “Take and drink.” On other occasions, that same member will kneel to receive, responsible to hear that the body of Christ has been broken for her and receive Christ’s broken body in faith so that she might be strengthened to love it. It might be possible that in the course of the same Eucharistic service, the Christian finds herself in both positions. How does she both take and give so that the integrity of the receptive posture is not violated? The solution to this problem is to receive both postures as gifts. To be able to give is still to receive a gift from God: “Christ gives to each member the rights and obligations to act as priest for the other . . . it is Christ’s gift that one member is able to bear the other and to be borne by the other. By the act of self-giving, Christ gives us the obligation and the strength to love one another.”77

Even the act of giving is the act of receiving Christ as he gives himself in the Supper so that “Christ’s priestly work becomes the basis for our own.”78 The promise conveyed by Christ in the Supper, the promise a Christian receives, contains a responsibility toward others. The promise goes forth indicatively so that Christians are reconciled to God and one another, but

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the promise also goes forth containing the imperative to be reconciled.79 Therefore, Christians must both give to the other and receive from the other because both postures are contained in receiving the invitation to the Table of God. The ability of the Christian to hold together her responsibilities both to give and receive in the Supper is predicated upon her continual suffering and reception of Christ’s call outward. It remains to ask how the Supper vitalizes faith. This question takes the form of wondering what it means to take the Supper in vain. Does going to the Table effect this reorientation outward simply by a Christian’s being at the Table? The answer must be both yes and no. The Supper does not reconcile persons to one another automatically. In some ways, Bonhoeffer presumes that reconciliation through confession antecedes the Table. At Finkenwalde, this practice was encouraged.80 Yet, the Supper’s function is not to effect reconciliation but to effect a redirection outward to the other who God declares one’s neighbor by placing them next to one another while receiving bread and wine. Even so, it is certainly possible to imagine an individual who comes to the Table perversely motivated or blithely (or perhaps willfully) unaware of the responsibilities the Table confers.81 Likewise, Bonhoeffer describes the plight of urban churches where congregations might be so large that those taking the Supper next to one another do not even know one another’s name, much less how they might be an agent of love to this fellow communicant.82 Yet, it is precisely in such moments, Bonhoeffer insists, that the truth of the gospel is most evident: Total strangers are turned to one another regardless of their affections for one another.83 Therefore, the Supper also effects what the promise conveys merely by being received. The witness of the Supper is that “here is a community who is-willed and wills-to-be-for-others.” This witness is proclaimed simply and automatically in the church’s participation in the Supper. Corporately, the church does not take the Supper in vain. In summary, the Supper turns Christians toward one another and beyond themselves (locating faith) with love and gratitude for God’s gift of these, their neighbors (sustaining and vitalizing faith). Love toward others is effected and vitalized simply in turning to hand another bread and wine. Too often, however, the church does not know how to extend that loving witness to the whole of Christian practice. In such cases, there is the sacrament of confession, to which the next section turns. Confession Baptism instills faith and effects the church’s ontic unity. The Lord’s Supper spatially and volitionally locates faith so that lives of faith and love might be vitalized and sustained. Unlike baptism and the Lord’s Supper, it is not obvious that confession belongs to the category of sacraments for

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Bonhoeffer, and therefore in this chapter. This is due in no small part to the ambiguities of Luther’s thought on penance and the way his ambiguity has been refracted in the subsequent Lutheran tradition. Throughout Discipleship, Bonhoeffer identifies only two sacraments and confession is not one of them.84 In other places, however, confession is discussed comfortably in conjunction with baptism and the Supper.85 In one location where the Lord’s Supper is discussed alongside confession, the latter is explicitly referred to as a “means of grace” and a “gift of grace” possessed of a visible sign (for lack of which Luther ultimately rejected confession as belonging among the sacraments), all of which is sacramental language.86 Caught in a traditional Lutheran quandary, Bonhoeffer speaks as if to include confession among the sacraments in some places and as if to exclude confession elsewhere.87 There are many reasons for which Bonhoeffer might at times apply sacramental language to confession and at other times abstain. For example, Bonhoeffer may be conflicted about whether confession should be regarded as a sacrament. Alternatively, his theology may have developed so that confession became included among the sacraments when it was not included before. Or it is possible Bonhoeffer resisted making definitive statements on the matter precisely because of the ambiguity within the Lutheran tradition. He could speak of confession’s great significance without having to formally declare it among the sacraments, and he could speak this way whether or not he personally believed confession was a sacrament. Pastorally, this last possibility has a great deal of explanatory power. Bonhoeffer found it difficult enough to get his Finkenwalde students to practice confession even without giving them the extra layer of theological resistance available once he says confession definitively is a sacrament.88 Nicola Wilkes, on the other hand, does try to answer whether Bonhoeffer considers confession as a sacrament in a definitive manner, and she finds that he does not. This conclusion does not diminish the significance of confession, however. To the contrary, she finds that confession is the gateway to word and sacrament; that is, confession is “the prime moment of revelatory encounter with Christ.”89 In this way, confession cannot be a sacrament because confession grants access to the gifts of the sacraments. This is a fascinating possibility; although those moments where Bonhoeffer does describe confession with sacramental language, ascribing to confession both Christ’s promise and a sign, complicate Wilkes’ analysis.90 She treats baptism and the Supper as “the” two accepted sacraments within Lutheran theology, and she is correct insofar they are the two that are commonly accepted.91 However, determining in advance that only these two practices are accepted as sacraments necessitates that confession must relate to the sacraments as something that is not a sacrament itself. Acknowledging the ambiguity within the Lutheran tradition with regard to confession allows certain texts to be read

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differently than Wilkes reads them, necessitating a less definitive conclusion than Wilkes offers. Therefore, a definitive explanation of Bonhoeffer’s ambiguity is not likely possible. Such a definitive explanation is not required for our purposes. Rather, having noted the ambiguity, a much less ambitious question comes to the fore: Does confession function like a sacrament when Bonhoeffer speaks of it? If confession functions like and among the practices that are clearly sacraments, then it is not necessary for Bonhoeffer to have explicitly named confession as a sacrament to query how the sacraments, including confession, participate in religionlessness. Answering whether confession functions like a sacrament involves attention to three matters. First, does confession take a sacramental form or, in other words, is there a sign and a promise received in faith? Second, does confession indeed turn the Christian outward through an encounter with the person of Christ? Third, does confession function so as contribute to the task of instilling, sustaining, locating, and vitalizing faith with an integrity of its own? In this last question, confession’s function and the distinctiveness of that function are queried together. One will see that at the very least confession functions as a distinct sacrament for Bonhoeffer, since confession turns hearts outward by refusing Christians the option of reversion to life lived from the cor curvum in se. Confession, Sacramental Form, and Christ’s Presence Confession maintains a distinct sacramental form: In its practice a sign (the neighbor) and a promise (absolution) are to be received in faith.92 Every Christian is given the power to serve as confession’s sign to another, even if congregations decide it is appropriate to appoint only one person to this task for the sake of good order.93 The entire church is exhorted to confess at Christ’s command, or in other words, confession is rooted in the power of the keys which Christ shares with the church.94 That confession takes place at Christ’s command indicates that Christ is the authority in and behind confession. In this way, Christ’s authoritative call also indicates Christ’s presence. Formally, there is reason to accept the possibility that confession has a distinctive place in Bonhoeffer’s theology of the sacraments. The question remains: Does confession function like but remain distinct from the other sacraments? Confession and Sacramental Function In baptism, sins are forgiven as the sinner is put to death and a creature is resurrected into the person of Christ, united and reconciled to God and humanity. At the Table, sin gives way to faith as the Christian’s vision is moved from selfish ambition to concern for those who gather alongside them, united

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and sustained in the invigorated will to love. What does confession do that is not merely an extension of these other two sacraments? Whereas baptism instills faith through the forgiveness of sin, confession sustains faith through the forgiveness of sin. In a chapter on “The Saints” from Discipleship, Bonhoeffer describes confession in this way: In the confession of sin before another Christian, the flesh dies together with its pride. It is surrendered into shame and death with Christ, and through the word of forgiveness a new human being who is confident of God’s mercy comes into being. The use of confession thus needs to be part of the life of the saints. It is a gift of God’s grace whose misuse cannot go unpunished. In confession, we receive God’s costly grace. Here Christians become like Christ in his death.95

The reader immediately recognizes the grammar of death and resurrection also appropriate to baptism. It might seem that Bonhoeffer is following Luther at this moment, describing confession as an extension of baptism.96 Yet, this would be to ignore very subtle distinctions at work between justification and sanctification articulated at the beginning of Bonhoeffer’s chapter. Bonhoeffer begins: “The proclamation of Christ’s death is for us the proclamation of our justification,” and baptism is responsible for incorporating persons into Christ’s death and resurrection.97 As an act of inclusion, baptism is final—capable of being recollected but not repeated.98 Not so with sanctification, which “preserves the church-community together with all the individuals.”99 Sanctification and justification belong together: Both come from Christ so that community with and in Christ is possible.100 Yet, confession belongs to sanctification rather than justification. The immediate consequence of locating confession differently than baptism is that these two—however closely related they might be—cannot have their theological content collapsed into each other. Confession cannot be a return to baptism; it must retain its own theological integrity. What is confession’s particular content as a sacrament of sanctification? Sanctification entails “that Christians now are completely oriented toward and preserved unto the day of Christ’s future coming, toward which they travel.”101 This implies that the community of saints is, first, clearly demarcated from the world; second, engaged in action worthy of its calling; and, third, that sanctification is finally “hidden in waiting” while the church continues to sojourn through history.102 With this first implication, the church is marked by the Spirit as the place that affirms the entire world belongs to God and, in spite of all opposition, makes that claim intelligible.103 The intelligibility of this claim is effected by the second point: The church witnesses to God’s reign by acting as proper creatures of God. To this end, it is entirely appropriate for Christians to remember their baptism as the moment in which

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the call of Christ put them to death and raised them to be sinners no longer.104 A Christian remembers baptism to remember that she has been called to righteousness, to be a saint. Furthermore, remembering baptism means to remember that she has been made a righteous saint. Saints recognize that they are not saints in their own rights. Saints are saints in Christ.105 The Spirit marks the church as the place where God’s reign is coming in power precisely by revealing sin.106 By the power of the Spirit, the pretentions of those who would be like God, driven by their own cor curvum in se, are unmasked so that the rupture created within the community by these pretentions can be brought to light and reconciliation can occur.107 The saints may not always know this fruit is growing, but they can trust that it is.108 This description of sinful saints enables a direct answer regarding confession’s unique contribution to the function of the sacraments. Unlike baptism but like the Table, confession is an ethical sacrament: The church is united in recognizing and overcoming sin.109 In this way, confession participates in the vitalization of faith. Yet, different from the Table, in confession Christians acknowledge that their loving is always incomplete and partial. Rather than receiving the neighbor as a gift and a responsibility, in confession the neighbor is received as a gift and a liberator from the “self-deception and self-forgiveness” that might otherwise render grace cheap.110 The Christian is directed outward, away from her own attempts to justify herself, by the presence of a neighbor. Such a neighbor’s presence is condemning. She is the neighbor I have failed to love, the reason I have retreated into myself seeking absolution. Yet, her presence also lays bare that my self-absolutions are utterly inept. That I am still convicted by her presence shows that self-forgiveness did little if anything at all to actually accomplish forgiveness. Nevertheless, this neighbor’s presence is also redeeming: She calls me back into community with her by proclaiming my sins’ death and inviting me back to life. Her redeeming presence and words, Christ’s presence and words through her, sustain my faith. Bonhoeffer shares Luther’s impulse that absolution should be pronounced automatically and unequivocally, but there is also a dialectical tension Bonhoeffer is keen to leave unresolved. The community of saints must be a place “where sins are not only unconditionally forgiven, but where they are also retained.”111 That sin is both bound and released is the lived tension between the Lord’s Supper (participation in the Son’s eschatological gift) and confession (recognition of the immanent work of the Spirit). This tension happens between acknowledging the church as holy and as sinful. Here, the work of Sanctorum Communio on the dual roles of Christ and the Spirit in maintaining the church proves instructive.112 Bonhoeffer writes: In order to build the church as the community-of-God in time, God reveals God’s own self as Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the will of God that gathers

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individuals together to be the church-community, maintains it, and is at work only within it. We experience our election only in the church-community, which is already established in Christ, by personally appropriating it through the Holy Spirit, by standing in the actualized church.113

This passage suggests that the Holy Spirit is the agent by which Christians are summoned into Christ. The Spirit’s role in maintaining the church is to direct the church of inconstant commitment back toward its constant center, toward Christ, who stands ever present to ensure and maintain the church’s righteousness and reconciliation in spite of itself. To acknowledge the church’s maintenance by the Son is to acknowledge that the church is holy.114 To acknowledge the church’s maintenance by the Spirit is to acknowledge the church is sinful.115 As the church proclaims the redemption of the world through both confession (in the Spirit) and the Lord’s Supper (with the Son), the church gives full witness to God’s mercy, holding together the Eucharistic joy that mercy is found and confessional sobriety that forgiveness is still needed.116 Describing the relationship between Table and confession in this way begs one final question. Sacraments are such because Christ is present in and through them. Bonhoeffer’s account of both baptism and Eucharist are formulated in reference to Christ. Does confession’s connection to the Holy Spirit, specifically in relation to the Spirit’s work of sanctification, exclude confession from among the sacraments? In Bonhoeffer’s theology, the Son and Spirit cannot be too rigorously distinguished. For example, Bonhoeffer writes: “Jesus Christ himself is preparing his church-community to stand before him.”117 Bonhoeffer then claims that the church is able to stand before Christ only by the work of the Spirit to seal the church in Christ’s righteousness. The community that exhibits the fruit of the Spirit “remains the church-community of those whose sanctification is Christ alone.”118 It is ultimately through encountering and participating in Christ’s cross that the church is being sanctified.119 The two persons of Christ and Spirit are dialectically related such that “the word of Christ bring(s) the Holy Spirit, and thus does the Holy Spirit bring Christ.”120 The saints are not moved by the Spirit toward confession apart from the presence and call of Christ; neither are the saints moved by Christ toward confession apart from the convicting work of the Spirit. In confession, the Christian lays her sins on Christ and forgiveness takes place in his divine presence at his divine word.121 Bonhoeffer’s theology implicitly insists that confession does belong alongside baptism and the Lord’s Supper as a sacrament in its own right. In confession, the Christian is addressed by Christ through the sign of her neighbor to receive in faith the promise of absolution that her neighbor

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brings. In this way, confession serves both to sustain faith by encouraging saints when the temptation to sin is not immediately overcome and vitalize faith by moving members of the church to overcome sin.

CONCLUSION The Role of Sacraments in the Economy of Grace First, baptism means that the end of a sinner’s life marks the beginning of Christian life: Death in baptism means resurrection to new life in the righteousness of Christ’s body. The church is united ontically as sinners share Christ’s death and resurrection. Second, Christians are drawn to the Lord’s Supper to be together. At the Table, those Christians who Christ makes one in baptism are turned toward one another so that they might recognize one another as a gift. Each person beside the Christian at the Table is a neighbor given to her by Christ. As her neighbors, the Christian acts with love toward these persons without hesitation or qualification. Christians are ethically united to one another in love at the Table. Third, because sin threatens to rupture the community of those God has brought together in baptism and the Table, Christians, by their confession to one another, are united to one another again. Ruptures in community are healed as one Christian approaches another asking forgiveness, and as this other extends forgiveness in God’s name. In the grammar developed from Luther in the first chapter, Bonhoeffer’s theology articulates how baptism instills faith as members of the church are made one with Christ in resurrection. Furthermore, baptism locates faith by uniting the church into one person: Christ. The Supper locates faith when the community becomes concrete, as particular persons become the Christian’s gift, neighbor, and responsibility. The Supper vitalizes faith by evoking acts of loving care from the Christian and sustains faith as the Christian is received at the Table with loving care. Confession sustains faith as sins are forgiven and vitalizes faith by motivating Christians to live lives worthy of the calling Christ first sent forth in baptism. Regarding the function of the sacraments in effecting the church community, Luther and Bonhoeffer stand in agreement: Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and confession each belongs to the category of sacrament because each participates in the task God has given sacraments to perform. Each sacrament does so in its own way and so each practice is perpetually necessary for the life and well-being of the church. Christ has bound himself to the church in these sacraments. In a world of sin, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and confession, instituted and occupied by Christ, enflesh Christ as a community of persons existing for the sake of others.

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This chapter has made explicit the meaning of each of the three sacraments. It has made conscious what the church receives, for Bonhoeffer, as it comes to know and inhabit the world through its encounter with Christ in the sacraments. It is only fitting, therefore, to conclude the last two chapters’ explication of Bonhoeffer’s attention to the sacraments by drawing attention to the final question in a confirmation instruction and the answer Bonhoeffer provides. The purpose of confirmation, as noted above, is that the Christian should be received into the church as a member now conscious of the gifts she has received and the responsibilities she has accepted. The final question in Bonhoeffer’s instruction asks, ‘What does confirmation mean?’ The answer is quite simple: I should confess that I have received the baptismal grace of Christ. I should confess that I have learned what it means to be a Christian. I should confess that I wish to be and to become a Christian through the grace of the triune God in the church community, until my blessed end.122 In other words, I have been baptized, turned outward to those with whom I share the Table, in order that we might together extend to one another the love and grace of God until such a time as we receive in full that which we are promised. To be a conscious member of the body of Christ is to be a creature who knows her life is determined by the call of Christ heard through the practice of receiving baptism, Table fellowship, and confession. Therefore, worship in which these three practices are not routinely present should become inconceivable. Christ calls Christians to and through the sacraments. Sacraments fulfill vital roles in the economy of grace. A faithful Christian life without these practices is impossible. Therefore, the first implication of Bonhoeffer’s theology for American Evangelical worship is that the sacraments must be engaged in far more routinely than they actually are by many evangelicals. Far from making sacraments boring and routine, causing worshippers to simply go through the motions, repetition is the very thing that gives sacramental practices their life. Turning to Christ time and time again, finding Christ hidden in the sacraments as the one who both calls Christians to costly discipleship and gives grace, is what allows sacraments to do the work God intends them to do. Even with baptism rates declining, there are ways to routinely make baptism a part of liturgical praxis. Those traditions and churches that incorporate baptismal vows as part of their service can develop vow renewal liturgies. Some traditions already do something similar when they encourage members to “recommit” to Jesus. However, making the grammar of such recommitment explicitly baptismal benefits congregations by taking them back to the moment where their full communion with Christ and his body

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truly began. Perhaps a congregation could fill the font at least once a year and invite all members present to come forward and simply touch the waters. The great benefit of sacraments is their tangibility. To touch the waters and be reminded of their powers can have a lasting impact. When baptisms do occur, mark them on the calendar and celebrate first birthdays a year later. In no way should churches encourage rebaptism, because baptism is done once and for all. But baptism and its effects must be remembered. While some evangelicals will already do this, particularly evangelical Episcopalians or Catholics, the Lord’s Supper should be received weekly. Good order may require that certain people are tasked with dispensing the elements, but actually there is something very powerful in creating opportunities for every member of the congregation to both give and receive the gifts Christ bears to the church in the elements. Additionally, efforts should be made to visibly display unity with the elements themselves and the way in which they are partaken. To serve the congregation from a single cup and a single loaf is important. If there is significant pushback over hygiene concerns, these concerns can be managed, depending on the size of the congregation, by pouring from a common cup into the individual cups as part of the service. If the Supper affects unity, though, the praxis of the Supper should correlate to that effect. In an age where studies report that humans feel increasingly lonely and divided from one another, this message of unity needs clear, constant reaffirmation.123 Finally, confession must be practiced weekly as well. Congregations must be given an opportunity to confess sin, even if only generally, before one another. Examples of such general liturgical confessions can be found in numerous prayerbooks and denominational liturgical guidelines. Those traditions that do not produce such resources can still look to the resources of other traditions for guidance. The act of confession does not merely remind one of failures, it becomes the opportunity for grace and forgiveness. The saying goes that it’s impossible to stay mad at someone for whom you are praying, but it is likewise impossible to stay mad at someone when worship requires one to take responsibility for one’s own part in causing and perpetuating conflict of all sorts. Christians sin regularly; they must confess regularly. Only God can forgive sin, but God deems to be hidden in our neighbors whose voices can echo tangibly in our ears that our sins are forgiven. Without confession, consistent and clear, there can be no discipleship. For evangelicals who wonder how to deepen the faiths of nonchalant congregation members, confession is an important place to begin. Toward Religion This chapter has demonstrated how the sacraments function within Bonhoeffer’s theology to facilitate the birth and life of a community of persons

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turned to God and one another in love. The church is this spiritual community of loving hearts that Bonhoeffer describes. Nevertheless, the church is not only a spiritual community. The church is a community called together by God, formed into Christ, and motivated by the Holy Spirit to witness to the world of reconciliation and redemption by means of word and sacrament. The church is not only that community. The church is also human—all too human. So when speaking of what the church is, it is necessary to speak of all the church’s divine splendor and all the church’s human fragilities. In an essay entitled “What is Church?” Bonhoeffer writes: “The church is fellowship, the church-community of the saints, freed by God from isolated existence, each one belonging to the other, giving themselves, accepting responsibility because it was placed on them by God.”124 Before that elevated prose is this much less inspiring description: “Church is a union of religiously inclined, interested people who curiously enjoy expressing their religiosity in this form of church.”125 Members of this association are, on the whole, spiritually and ethically ambivalent and largely self-concerned.126 Bonhoeffer is trying to hold together claims that the church is both earthy and spiritual. The dialectic must be maintained if church describes an entity in history and not an ideal.127 To let go of the church’s spiritual character is to reduce church to a phenomenologically interesting set of religious eccentrics. To let go of the church’s earthy character would reduce church to a pure idea of which the earthly community is only a pale reflection when it is a reflection at all. Only recognizing the church as both spiritual and religious, as both outwardly oriented and inwardly focused, provides a theologically adequate description of the historical community that God has called together as church. In light of this both/and, it is necessary to pay attention to the church not only as a spiritual community of the saints but also as a religious community. To that end, one’s attention must shift. Until now, focus has been on developing an account of the church’s spiritual community as it takes form through and around the sacraments. Martin Luther set the tone in the first chapter: Sacraments are those signs through which the promise of God in Christ is conveyed and received. Sacraments are received in faith so as to instill, strengthen, locate, and vitalize faith in the community that receives them. Bonhoeffer operates within this broadly Lutheran paradigm. The second chapter showed how, in Act and Being, Bonhoeffer asserts that the Christian suffers the encounter with God through the sacraments and is ushered into a new community possessed of its own churchy, creaturely way of knowing. What the Christian calls reality is determined by Christ’s labor to redeem and reconcile all of creation under his lordship. This third chapter worked through Bonhoeffer’s broader corpus to show how each of the sacraments participates in revealing the reality of the world to the church as the church encounters Christ in these practices. Christians are put to death and raised

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in Christ in baptism. Christians are gifted to and received by one another as persons to be loved in the Lord’s Supper. Christians refuse to let sin split the community God has established by insisting on extending forgiveness in confession. Each chapter has demonstrated how encountering Christ in this way, in the sacraments, means encountering Christ in history. If sacraments are to be a meaningful category for understanding the being and action of the church in history, then they must be explained not only from the perspective of the spiritual community established in Christ but also from the perspective of the human religious community. Therefore, the next chapter turns to trace the concept of religion through Bonhoeffer’s work, paying special attention to how sacraments fit within this concept. After establishing what it means for the sacraments to participate in the church’s religion, one can finally examine how sacraments serve to motivate Bonhoeffer’s vision of a religionless church.

NOTES 1. DBWE 2, 151. 2. Ibid., 108–9. 3. Ibid., 157. 4. DBWE 12, 318–19. That Bonhoeffer should be willing to refer to creation as sacramental only in a prelapsarian setting suggests that, for him, locations where God is present only occasionally, that is, where God is not found reliably by those who seek in faith, these locations cannot be sacraments. 5. See DBWE 12, 319. 6. DBWE 1, 97–106. 7. DBWE 4, 207. 8. Ibid., 57, 62. 9. From Luke 9:57–62. Ibid., 60. 10. DBWE 4, 62. 11. Ibid., 207. 12. Ibid., 207. See also Florian Schmitz, “Nachfolge” zur Theologie Dietrich Bonhoeffers (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 135. 13. DBWE 4, 207. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 208. 16. Ibid., 208. 17. DBWE 14, 367. 18. Emphasis mine. DBWE 4, 208. The German reads stronger on this point than the English because the English editors on occasion translate “is” as “means.” For example: “Der Tod in der Taufe ist die Rechtfertigung von der Sünde,” is rendered “The death of baptism means justification away from sin.” DBW 4, 223; DBWE 4, 209. Means is more open to anagogical interpretation than is. This translation is all the

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stranger when one observes the litany of “ist” that proceeds and follows this particular sentence, a litany the translators respect with this one exception. 19. Ibid., 208. 20. In a lecture on pastoral duties, Bonhoeffer notes: “This child is given over to the first death upon baptism. Only by doing so does one give thanks properly for the child. It is in precisely this surrendering that genuine gratitude comes to expression.” DBWE 14, 737. Two things about this passage are noteworthy. The first is that the child’s death instructs the community on how the child is to be received. In the face of death, the community becomes grateful. The close relationship between what is transpiring in the child and what is transpiring in the community is a playing out of the actus reflectus/actus directus that was so significant to Act and Being. The is also reflected on Ibid., 475, 738. The second observation worth making is that baptism as the first death could have important suggestions for understanding Bonhoeffer’s critique of Heidegger. For Heidegger, dasein is being on the way to death, thus prompting a nihilistic response to finitude. Bonhoeffer was open to this understanding of dasein as a way of describing humanity in Adam. Baptism, however, moves one past this death; dasein in Christ is no longer a being on the way to death but a being on the way to creaturely life. 21. DBWE 4, 210. 22. Ibid., 57–58. 23. Ibid., 208. 24. Ibid., 209. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 214, 235. 27. DBWE 12, 301–2. 28. Ibid., 307. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. LW 27, 47–57. 33. Zwingli, Writings, 266–68. Zwingli also offers the objection that the physical is of no avail, only the spiritual. Luther objects strongly to this claim in LW 37, 79–101. 34. Ibid., 64. 35. Ibid., 68–69. 36. DBWE 12, 320–22. 37. Ibid., 321. Luther said as much against Zwingli’s supporters, only without seeming to realize how the doctrine of ubiquity participated in the mode of inquisition Luther was eager to avoid. LW 37, 103. 38. Amy Plantinga Pauw, “Attending to the Gaps between Beliefs and Practices,” in Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life, ed. Dorothy Bass and Miroslav Volf (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2001), 36. 39. DBWE 4, 209–10. 40. Ibid., 210. 41. Ibid., 285–86.

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42. Ibid., 212; Glenn Borreson, “Bonhoeffer on Baptism: Discipline for the Sake of the Gospel,” Word and World 1 (1981): 20–31. 43. DBWE 14, 377–78. 44. Ibid., 377. 45. DBWE 14, 782. 46. See also DBWE 1, 241–42, fn. 109. 47. DBWE 14, 784. 48. DBWE 1, 242. 49. DBWE 4, 208. 50. DBWE 1, 150. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 815–24. 53. Ibid., 118–19. “Taufe konstituiert die Einheit des Leibes Christi, das Abendmahl konstituiert durch wiederholten Gebrauch die Gemeinschaft, die koinonia.” DBW 14, 823. 54. For Bonhoeffer’s acknowledgment of the limits to using baptism as a boundary, see DBWE 14, 661–62. 55. Ibid., 819. 56. Abraham, Wort und Sakrament, 146. 57. DBWE 1, 242. 58. Ján Ligus, “Das Verständnis der Kirche,” in Bonhoeffer-Studien: Beiträge zur Theologie und Wirkungsgeschichte Dietrich Bonhoeffers, ed. Albrecht Schönherr and Wolf Krötke (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1985), 119. 59. Bonhoeffer’s importantly distinguishes between willing a community and willing for community, the latter of which is responsible for the destruction of community. See DBWE 5, 34–36. 60. DBWE 1, 243. 61. DBWE 4, 216. 62. Ibid., 228. 63. Emphasis mine. Ibid., 216. 64. Ibid., 232–33. 65. Ibid., 229. Reginald H. Fuller, “Liturgy and Devotion,” in The Place of Bonhoeffer: Essays on the Problems and Possibilities of His Thought, ed. Martin E. Marty (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009), 171–72. 66. DBWE 4, 232–33. 67. DBWE 1, 247. 68. Ibid., 132. 69. Ibid., 242. Emphasis Bonhoeffer’s. 70. Ibid., 229. 71. Ibid., 229. The unitive force of the Supper is not to be used to spiritualize away historic distinctiveness. This would fail to hold together the individual and the corporate person together in the way Sanctorum Communio advocates, opting for a totalitarian, consumptive corporate Geist. See Ibid., 192–203. Only eschatologically does the ethical unity of the church cohere with the church’s ontic unity as a community of one mind, one will, and one being.

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72. Fuller, “Liturgy and Devotion,” 177–78. 73. DBWE 1, 229. 74. Ibid., 228. 75. Ibid. 76. See Ibid., 245–46. 77. DBWE 1, 243. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80. DBWE 14, 747. See also DBWE 5, 108–18. 81. Similarly for baptism, see Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass, “A Theological Understanding of Christian Practices,” in Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life, ed. Dorothy Bass and Miroslav Volf (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2001), 13–15. 82. DBWE 1, 245–46. 83. Ibid., 246. 84. DBWE 4, 228. Bonhoeffer describes baptism and the Lord’s Supper as “emanat(ing) from the true humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ,” and refers repeatedly to both (beide) sacraments, a grammar that resists more than two referents. He is aware, however, of the Lutheran tradition including confession as a sacrament in its own right. DBWE 14, 746. In this vein, Discipleship contains passages that discuss confession in relation to baptism and the Supper and describe confession with language reminiscent of these sacraments. For example, see DBWE 4, 270–71. 85. For example, DBWE 14, 812–14. 86. Ibid., 746. 87. At best, Bonhoeffer displays an unqualified disinterest in the number of sacraments, as in DBWE 12, 319. 88. Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, rev. edition, rev. Victoria J. Barnett (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 465. 89. Wilkes, “Private Confession of Sin,” 101. 90. DBWE 14, 746. 91. For example, see Wilkes, “Private Confession of Sin,” 136. While Wilkes does accurately take note of the way Luther disregarded penance as a sacrament, she does not observe fully how the subsequent tradition has regarded Luther’s movement on the issue. Ibid., fn. 132, 38–39. 92. DBWE 14, 747. 93. Ibid., 749–50. For Bonhoeffer’s justification of orders and the polyvalent forms such orders can and must take, see DBWE 4, 230–31. 94. DBWE 14, 749. 95. DBWE 4, 270–71. 96. LW 36, 124. 97. DBWE 4, 258. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid., 259. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid., 261.

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102. Ibid. 103. Ibid., 261–62. 104. Ibid., 263. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid., 264–66. 108. Ibid., 266, 68. 109. Wilkes, “Private Confession of Sin,” 136–37. 110. DBWE 4., 269–71. 111. Ibid., 269. 112. On the relationship between the Holy Spirit and the church see Michael Mawson, “The Spirit and the Community: Pneumatology and Ecclesiology in Jenson, Hütter and Bonhoeffer,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 15 (2013): 453–68. 113. DBWE 1, 143. 114. DBWE 1, 144. See also DBWE 4, 221. 115. Myles Werntz, Bodies of Peace: Ecclesiology, Nonviolence, and Witness (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014), 47–48. 116. DBWE 4, 270. 117. Ibid., 276–77. 118. Ibid., 275. 119. Ibid., 269. 120. Ibid., 454. 121. DBWE 14, 813. 122. Ibid., 814. 123. Cigna, “New Study Reveals Loneliness at Epidemic Levels in America,” Cigna Newsroom. Accessed June 31, 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.cig​​na​.co​​m​/new​​sroom​​/news​​ -rele​​ases/​​2018/​​new​-c​​igna-​​study​​-reve​​als​-l​​oneli​​ness-​​at​-ep​​idem​i​​c​-lev​​els​-i​​n​-ame​​rica.​ 124. DBWE 12, 263. 125. Ibid., 263. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid., 264. See also DBWE 5, 34–36.

Chapter 4

Faithful Habitation of a Religious World

Until now, the argument has focused on developing an account of the sacraments from within the Lutheran tradition, with particular reference to Luther and Bonhoeffer, to demonstrate how the sacraments can be employed to motivate and sustain Bonhoeffer’s critique of religion. Yet, what is this religion so in need of rejection? “Religion” has a long conceptual history in theology, even if only a short history as a category. This chapter focuses first on Bonhoeffer’s own contribution to the discussion on what religion is to understand where sacraments might fit into his account. It is necessary to do this to discern whether the cultic, and the sacraments along with it, might be properly excised from the religionless church or if the cultic might prove a more enduring feature of the church’s life. By paying attention to the distinction between religious structures and religious dispositions in Bonhoeffer’s account, this chapter demonstrates how the sacraments are a creaturely and corruptible structure for governing human life in the world. Even so, because Christ is present in the sacraments, their continued efficacy is secured from above rather than below. Because the sacraments’ efficacy is ensured in this way, there is no immediate reason to think the church could need to inhabit the world from the posture of faith established apart from the church’s continual reception of the sacraments. Bonhoeffer’s account of religion is more nuanced than many of his interpreters have always recognized. Early interpreters of Bonhoeffer often proceeded as if when he writes about religion he always writes about the same thing. Therefore, for them, when Bonhoeffer criticizes religion, he rejects it in full. This led to the conclusion that the Tegel theology with its talk of religionlessness was merely the result of the church’s failure and/or liberation from the ecclesial bounds his theology had operated with previously.1 95

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This is not the case; such a reading is an under-systematization of his work.2 This is not to say that Bonhoeffer is not partly to blame for this misreading. Though he was capable of careful and very subtle theological and philosophical distinctions, it is often necessary to parse out the distinctions that exist on Bonhoeffer’s behalf with regard to “religion.” Bonhoeffer appears to use the same word to apply equally both to the phenomena of religious structures and religious dispositions. Structures and dispositions are undoubtedly linked together. This link must be seen as a link and not a synonym: Religious structures engage persons possessed of dispositions, and a person’s dispositions shape the structures she engages. This chapter’s task is to explore how structure and disposition interact within the phenomenon of religion. It is correct that Bonhoeffer becomes more and more critical of religion as his life progresses. It must be equally emphasized, as this chapter will show, that his criticism is narrowly directed at religious dispositions: ways in which persons adopt a wrong posture toward God and life in the world and so inhabit the world poorly. These dispositions, true, have a way of corrupting the religious structures they entangle. Yet, Bonhoeffer longed to engage with these structures even as his “suspicion and fear of ‘religiosity’” became ever greater inside Tegel prison.3 Unless this longing is psychologized, suggesting that Bonhoeffer is clinging to a crutch he wishes he were not, religious structures as such cannot be the direct target of his prison polemic. Such structures can be inhabited faithfully. There must be a way to inhabit religious structures, including the sacraments, with a disposition of religionlessness. Religion is comprised of two equally significant factors: structure and disposition. These two are always held together, but there is an empirical primacy to the structures themselves, though not necessarily to any particular manifestation of a particular structure. Structures exist prior to the dispositions of those who engage them until those structures are a part of history.4 The disposition with which a person engages the structures then determines whether either the proper purpose of a given religious structure is achieved or if the structure is violated by human sin and thereafter in need of criticism, reform, or even dissolution. Bonhoeffer makes a consistent place for religious structures throughout his theology. Their significance for ordering creation is established from the beginning of Bonhoeffer’s corpus in Sanctorum Communio and persists up through the Tegel correspondence. Religion takes on a negative connotation in Act and Being, Creation and Fall, and the lectures on Christology because each addresses religious dispositions in their discussion of religion. Bonhoeffer’s sincere hope is that these dispositions can, by God’s directing of the heart beyond the self, give way to a disposition of faith.

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THE PHENOMENA OF RELIGIOUS STRUCTURES Bonhoeffer begins his academic career predominately concerned with religious phenomena or structures, not all of which would be readily identified as religious. This section will outline the purpose of religious structures to order human communities by mediating relations before God, and demonstrate how the sacraments are situated within the logic of such structures. This section does this to make way for the next section to describe religious dispositions and the (sometimes irreversible) damage they can cause to religious structures, damage that Christ’s presence resists in the case of the sacraments thereby preserving sacraments as a necessary means for ordering the church before God. In Sanctorum Communio, Bonhoeffer’s primary purpose is to understand structures; his working definition of sociology, “the study of the structures of empirical communities,”5 accords with this purpose. In his thesis, Bonhoeffer seeks to “gain a systematic understanding of the community-structure (Gemeinschaftsstruktur) of the Christian church.”6 It is striking that Bonhoeffer should speak in the singular. How does he speak of “the” sociology as if the church supported only one such set of structures? How can a group, even a Kollectivperson with such diverse organizational patterns, practices, and prohibitions as has the church be reduced to a single sociology? Bonhoeffer recognizes that important differences are in play.7 He therefore commits himself to one very important theological claim to undertake his project: The unity of the church must be presupposed rather than observed. In this way, theology drives sociology.8 He writes: Christ has created, out of two, a single new person in himself, and has made peace; but this continues to be a peace that passes all understanding. For the contrasts remain, they even become more acute. . . . But—to put it paradoxically—the more powerfully the dissimilarity manifests itself in the struggle, the stronger the objective unity.9

The church’s unity is real, a given, the state of things with or without it being so willed by Christians. This theological unity is not some ideal toward which the church strives but is the character of its empirical existence.10 This unity is what Christ has done in baptism. Even so, church unity “must be believed, and will always remain invisible to our eyes.”11 The presence of divergent empirical structures does not distract from the unity God bestows. Because the church is “what it [is] when it ‘is’,”12 these divergences can be held within the will of God.13 Assertions of unity, however, cannot pass over what is clear to the eye. Churches are not sustained by the same liturgies or practices. Churches

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do not believe the same things. Churches do not embody the same ethical commitments. A singular structure of the church is impossible to identify. Why would God construct the church with the facade of a tower of Babel? Bonhoeffer explains this by appealing to the purpose of religion proper: Religion is “the touching of the human will by the divine will, and . . . the overcoming of the former by the latter to enable free action.”14 Religion exists to mediate relationships between the divine and humans and between humans with each other. These relationships are not abstract; they are historically embedded—and history is diverse. History is carried out and carried on by various peoples in distinct places and circumstances. God must be mediated to all these people and locales. Each concrete time and location requires a means of mediating between persons. Numerous structures come into existence to accommodate the diverse circumstances into which the unified and unifying God arrives to establish the one church.15 Religious structures mediate relationships. How do these structures come into existence? It is too easy to identify them as solely God’s work, and such an answer educes an unhelpful rigidity or intransitive-ness. If God has created and ordained these structures, it would be a great human presumption to change or adapt them. For Bonhoeffer, sociology complicates the question of origin and works toward a more robust answer. He writes: “The concern of sociology is to trace the many complex interactions back to certain constitutive acts (gewisse geistige Wesenakte) of spirit (geistige) that comprise the distinctive characteristic of the structure.”16 The spirit under question is the human spirit. Religious structures come into existence when human beings need some way to mediate and norm their relationships with others. The created-ness of these structures precludes the establishment of a religious a priori. Their natural and inevitable rise does not mean that religion is somehow hard-wired into humanity. Religion is the product of human social embeddedness and religion arises because that embeddedness cannot be escaped. These structures are then taken up by God to simultaneously heal both the vertical relationship between humanity and the divine and the horizontal relationship between humans and each other.17 No structure humans create is more or less amenable to being taken up in this way.18 As the work of human hands, religious structures emerge and remain corrupt. None of these structures possesses the capacity for God to enter the world through them; God’s work through them is a miracle, quite independent of their own nature and their own work. Religious structures mediate God only because God has chosen to work through them. Therefore, God has elected to be mediated through what human hands have made. In traditional Lutheran fashion, the incapax is made capax through election. Religious structures originate in acts of human spirits seeking to order and govern reality themselves and only then are they taken up by God to order reality well.

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Despite Bonhoeffer’s labor being an attempt to work back toward “constitutive acts of spirit,” his concern is not genetic; he is not trying to demonstrate how one structure has evolved from others.19 Rather, his work describes these structures as empirical phenomena. As empirical phenomena, it is clear that these human structures never existed in any pure form which then devolved into the institutions of today. These governing structures were always already complicated by sin. Yet, Bonhoeffer’s method of description is genealogical, suggesting devolution of these structures as humans pass from one stage in the biblical narrative to another. The reason for this genealogical facade is a characteristic “ellipse” in Bonhoeffer’s anthropology and ecclesiology.20 On one side of the ellipse is the church: “Any theological interpretation of the church as a community, he claims, has to include the actual, empirical, outward, and visible structures of community.”21 Humans are the other side of the ellipse. Bonhoeffer’s theology describes human beings narratively: “Theology’s interpretation of the human being in creation, fall, and reconciliation must be related to the church as the community of believers.”22 This anthropological narrative of humans passing through creation, the fall, and culminating in our redemption colors Bonhoeffer’s description of religious structures, giving rise to the latter’s genetic appearance without suggesting that these structures ever actually existed uncomplicated by sin. The basic intent of religious structures was always to facilitate the I–You relationship between beings. Bonhoeffer does not always delve as deeply into this relationship as one may hope, and for this reason leaves significant questions unanswered.23 Still, Bonhoeffer describes the basic form as follows: It is a Christian insight that the person as conscious being is created in the moment of being moved—in the situation of responsibility, passionate ethical struggle, confrontation by an overwhelming claim; thus the real person grows out of the concrete situation (of encountering the other). . . . The Christian person originates only in the absolute duality of God and humanity; only in experiencing the barrier does the awareness of oneself as ethical person arise. The more clearly the barrier is perceived, the more deeply the person enters into the situation of responsibility. . . . From the ethical perspective, human beings do not exist “unmediated” qua spirit in and of themselves, but only in responsibility vis-à-vis an “other.”24

In other words, when the Christian encounters another being, God or neighbor, this being makes an immediate claim on the Christian. The occasion for free and responsible action arrives with this claim. Hearing and responding to this other’s claim makes the Christian into a person.25 Only when a being is encountered who cannot be assimilated or explained by the self, when a being truly remains outside the Christian’s own attempts to secure the world for and

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toward herself, can the Christian become an actual person, a creature rather than a sinner posing transcendently as sicut deus. According to Bonhoeffer, human beings, empirically, exist in a social nexus. The individual is an abstraction, even if a necessary one.26 Yet, human persons only exist as humans, even within a social nexus, when they are responding to the claims of one another in love. From this summary, it is clear that religious structures are not the product of the spirit of single, isolated individuals. Rather, the “human spirit (Geistigkeit des Menschen)”27 is “possible and real only in sociality.”28 When these structures facilitate religion proper, instead of being the work of God alone or humans alone, these structures are the work of God and humanity in conjunction with one another, mediating the I–You encounter. They enable persons to serve one another in love without seeking to overcome or subsume the other person into one’s own will. Bonhoeffer’s use of Geistigkeit is interesting here. Rather than using the simpler Geist, translated alternatively into spirit or intellect, Geistigkeit implies a kind of aptitude: spirituality or intellectuality. It is clear that the very capacity for becoming human, and not merely actual becoming, is contingent on social embeddedness. It is not simply that one becomes socially embedded and thereby becomes human; rather, one becomes socially embedded and thereby gains the capacity to become human but this becoming does not happen necessarily. The actual creation of human spirit, of Geist, comes one step behind creation of Geistigkeit in sociality. This relationship between You and I does not always function so ideally. Because “[t]he natural human being has a cor curvum in se,”29 these structures are as open to facilitating religion as they are oppression.30 When engaged in selfishly, the I–You relationship and its structures that mediate acts of love between persons devolves: Whereas the previous spirit-form (geistform) grew out of love, the fall replaced love with selfishness. This gave rise to the break in immediate community with God, and likewise in human community. With this change of direction the whole spiritual orientation of humanity was altered. Morality and religion in their proper sense disappear from human nature, and are now only formally visible in the structures of legal order and in natural religion.31

An untainted I–You relationship has never been instantiated, and therefore Bonhoeffer’s statement that morality and religion “disappear” is a bit misleading: What never was cannot disappear. Rather than an ideal creation in the garden, Bonhoeffer holds that, “The doctrine of the primal state is hope projected backwards.”32 And rather than a literal Adam and Eve, Bonhoeffer uses Kollectivperson to maintain that “all humanity falls with each sin, and

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not one of us is in principle different from Adam; that is, every one is also the ‘first’ sinner.”33 Yet, precisely because there was no time where humanity was pure and untainted, religion and morality do disappear from the lexicon for addressing empirical human beings. Without grace, she is not “religious” and she is not “moral” in any proper sense. Not where religion means freed by God to love and serve and moral means able to transcend right and wrong to simply listen to the call of Christ.34 Instead, Bonhoeffer writes: “All the natural forms (Naturform) of community remain, but they are corrupt in their inmost core.”35 While religious structures are naturally arising means of mediating and norming human relationships that may be taken up by God to the end of enacting service and love through them, religion proper cannot exist in a world characterized by sin. Religion falters when twisted to make others serve oneself. Describing religious structures in this way makes something abundantly clear: These structures are themselves empty and devoid of content. They are taken up and given meaning, and the manner in which they are taken up determines whether these structures are used for good or ill. To take Bonhoeffer’s examples, the same structure facilitates both religion and natural religion, only the latter lacks a certain kind of content, namely, grace. The same structure makes both morality and law possible depending on whether through it persons engage God and one another in service or merely assert themselves. When taken up in grace by God, who inverts the cor curvum in se, these structures facilitate love and worship; they aid religion proper. Bonhoeffer is thinking alongside Barth here who writes: The real crisis of religion can only break in from outside the magic circle of religion and its place of origin, i.e., from outside man. . . . This is what happens in the revelation of God. But to the extent that it does not happen in any other way, religion and religions are left at peace. There is development, but there is also a certain continuance, so that religion and religions are always there.36

When humans are left to their selfish devices, that is, when God is not present with revelation, religious structures just as readily become tools of coercion or even tyranny. How persons engage these structures determines if these structures facilitate either the worship of God and love of neighbor or if they aid idolatry, and these structures bear the full moral force of the manner in which they are engaged. Christopher Holmes describes this when he writes: One cannot simply assume that reality is what comports with the here and now. But that is precisely what sinners do: Sinners assume that their way of being, seeing, living, loving and judging is in accordance with how things are. Bonhoeffer issues a profound challenge to such an understanding. The fallen actualities in

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which we find ourselves, Bonhoeffer argues are so very often actualities indicative of our propensity toward self-Lordship. And yet, they are surrounded by reality, the reality, a reality which is profoundly expansive: Through the person and work of Jesus Christ all of our pasts, presents, and futures are situated and enclosed.37

Christians perceive the world through the lens of Christ’s lordship and their own creatureliness. This lens is the “churchy way of knowing” that forms as the Christian receives Christ in the sacraments in faith. From this, it is evident why it is so important that the next section analyses the disposition with which a person takes up these structures. Any disposition other than that of a loving creature before its lord will despoil religious structures and the communal relations such structures facilitate. For now, it is necessary to query what counts as religious structures. Bonhoeffer has already given two, neither of which is sufficient for Christian life: legal order and natural religion.38 These two map on the logic of Luther’s orders of creation and what Bonhoeffer later calls orders of preservation. Other such orders—such as marriage—share the same purpose of religious structures.39 As readily as they can be used to other ends, these structures or orders are still meant to facilitate loving relationships between humans before God. Bonhoeffer writes: “All orders of our fallen world are God’s orders of preservation that uphold and preserve us for Christ. . . . They have no value in themselves; instead they find their end and meaning only through Christ.”40 These orders are not fixed, but maintain order in a world plunged into selfish chaos without eternal warrant or guarantee of efficaciousness.41 The orders themselves are contingent and impermanent concessions to human sin. They are allowances to often inhuman beings who are themselves in need of being transcended by God and opened to love. When these orders fail to serve this purpose, when they are corrupted for lesser uses, they need to be torn down and an order reasserted that properly fulfills the original’s telos. In Ethics, Bonhoeffer describes the situation thus: Only insofar as its being is subjected—consciously or unconsciously—to the divine task is it a divine mandate. In the concrete case, persistent, arbitrary violation of this task through concrete forms of work, marriage, government, and church extinguishes the divine mandate. . . . Specific faults do not give the right to abolish or destroy what exists. They rather prompt a return to a true ordering under the divine mandate, and a restoration of true responsibility for the divine tasks.42

To illustrate, when religious structures like the state produce nationalism, when law serves precedent, or when the family becomes the locus around which the church operates, reformation is required.

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The structure of church arises from certain constitutive actions. In the language of Augsburg, the church is the church when the word is rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administrated. Activities such as preaching, ritual meals, services of induction into community, and rituals of reconciliation necessarily settle into the logic of this structure.43 Theologically, however, there is a distinction to be made between this set of structures within the church and those structures belonging to the orders of preservation more broadly. The latter structures, by the Holy Spirit, mediate the presence of other beings—through them one being encounters another and they interact in mutual love. The former structures do not merely mediate a human presence but may, in Lutheran understanding, be Christ’s presence. Bread and wine are simultaneously the body and blood of Christ; or a preacher’s words are the words Christ speaks. Like the church is by grace more than a religious community but is a religious community, so are word and sacrament more than religious structures but also religious structures. Without Christ’s presence in word and sacrament, the church is simply a religious society, no remainder. With Christ, the church transcends its being as religious society and becomes Christ-existing-as-community—the church’s structures becomes the tangible presence of Christ.44 To model the difference, government mediates human relationships and is accountable to God while the church in God mediates human and divine relationships. God is lord of the state, but God is lord in the church.45 The church’s structures remain as susceptible to corruption as their counterparts, including family and government. Bonhoeffer noted this possibility of corruption as regards prayer in Discipleship.46 Paul noted that a person could eat and drink the Lord’s Supper unto judgment (1 Cor. 11:29). One of the Reformers’ problems with the Catholic mass was its implication that by way of priestly invocation, God would be at the beck and call of the priest rather than the other way around.47 These examples only reify that the dispositions of those who engage religious structures might profoundly influence the ability of these structures to govern their domain well. The next section examines the religious disposition and its deleterious effects on religious structures, positing faith as an alternative disposition with which Christians can inhabit the world. THE RELIGIOUS DISPOSITION Religious structures are one half of the bifurcated religious whole. The last section examined how these structures come into being and are taken up by God to mediate loving relationships between beings. As human acts, religious structures are impermanent and corruptible. These structures can

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become distorted, and they can distort those who engage them until at last the structures must be overthrown and reasserted for the sake of their true telos. The manner or disposition of those who engage these structures can corrupt them. Religious dispositions are the second half of the whole. Bonhoeffer finds the religious disposition incredibly problematic. When a person navigates the world’s religious structures with the disposition of the “religious person,” these structures are perverted. This perversion explains why the prison correspondence would explore how to engage these structures in a “religionless” way, so that religious structures, including the sacraments actually facilitate loving relationships as they are meant to do. The alternative disposition to religion, an alternative necessary for inhabiting a religionless form of life, is a disposition given by God to the Christian in the sacraments: faith. Bonhoeffer’s anxieties about the religious disposition begin early in his career. The lectures during the winter semester of 1932–1933, later compiled and published as Creation and Fall, state that the serpent’s faithless inquiry in the garden constituted the pious, religious question that invites persons to assume an uncreaturely, religious posture toward God.48 The Christology lectures describe the question a person poses to Christ—“who are you?”—as simultaneously the proper question of faith and the “quintessential religious question.”49 These two works warrant closer attention. Within them, faith serves as the religious disposition’s foil. To be a person possessed of faith is to inhabit a religious world in a religionless way.50 Religion in Creation and Fall Bonhoeffer’s lecture series comments extensively on the first few chapters of the Genesis narrative. In Genesis, creation exists in a state of mediated fellowship at the start, described in the pro creatio relationship between God and creatures.51 The harmonious ordering of creatures with one another under the word and purview of God is also narrated.52 Details about the specific structures that govern creaturely life in Eden are lacking. The closest Bonhoeffer comes to a governing structure, as described above, is the word of God, which on its own suffices to demonstrate that Bonhoeffer conceives of harmonious relations as being ordered or structured relations.53 Whatever orders these relationships, whether solely the word of God or some other structures alongside, is efficacious enough until the serpent asks its provocative question. What is striking about the serpent’s question, in Bonhoeffer’s estimation, is that the question appears to have a form of godliness while denying the power behind that form (II Tim. 3:5). That is, the question is posed in the service of God, an invitation to creaturely acknowledgment of the creator’s ordering of

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creation. Yet, to answer the question, Eve must adopt a very non-creaturely disposition. Instead of receiving the word of God, Eve must stand in judgment over God’s word, deciding for herself what God did or did not say.54 The serpent’s question “does not dispute [God’s] word, but opens the eyes of the human being to a depth of which the human being has until now been unaware.”55 Human beings are invited to adopt a posture of judgment over what is or is not God’s word.56 Such a posture violates God’s structural lordship that all of creation has heretofore acknowledged. Bonhoeffer contends: “Through this question the idea is suggested to the human being of going behind the word of God and now providing it with a human basis.”57 Adam and Eve are invited to ask whether God’s command comports with their own “idea of God.”58 This invitation is, in Bonhoeffer’s language, “evil.”59 He gives his reason for using such strong language: “Where human beings use a principle, an idea of God, as a weapon to fight against the concrete word of God, there they are from the outset already in the right; at that point they have become God’s master, they have left the path of obedience, they have withdrawn from being addressed by God.”60 Adam’s and Eve’s creaturely freedom under God is replaced by their presumptuous lordship over God and God’s word.61 That usurping is the hallmark of a religious disposition. More should now be said on this. The religious disposition rips relationships asunder. Human relationships to God are inverted, but their relationships to one another are also twisted.62 Hearts are turned inward and the cor curvum in se becomes normative. The creaturely limit, once regarded with love, divides the community of loving hearts into a mass of homo sicut deus, each person attempting to subsume creation under herself.63 The remedy is revelation—for God to reestablish the creature as such—but humans are not eager for revelation and reconciliation to occur. Aware of their transgression, yet resisting God’s word that can heal the relationships humans have ruptured, humans rely on their conscience, what Act and Being calls “primarily . . . the human being’s own voice”64 and humans’ “final grasp at themselves, the confirmation and justification of their self-glorifying solitude.”65 The human appeal to conscience justifies the human’s sinful stance over and against God. Conscience wrongly accepts that it rightly possesses knowledge of good and evil. A new structure must be introduced to cope with Adam’s fallen state. Confession, rather than conscience, is the way back to creatureliness: “Confess who you are, do not lose yourself in religious despair, be yourself. Adam, where are you? Stand before your creator. This challenge goes directly against the conscience.”66 “Stand before” denotes God’s immediate presence in history, as necessary for one to think of confession in this passage as a sacrament. “Creator” indicates the manner in which God is present, that is, bound to the creature by the promise to sustain her. This fulfills the other

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criterion for a sacrament: that there be a promise which effectually reorients the person. Adam, however, does not embrace the promise. When Adam finally does confess, he does not do so by standing before God but by hiding behind Eve and so does not confess at all.67 Similarly, Eve hides behind the serpent.68 In the end, Adam and Eve “pass the buck”; they use their conscience wrongly to suggest that God is responsible for their sin.69 Confession, on the other hand, names sin as one’s own. Confession invites the creature back to faith by disavowing knowledge of good and evil and taking up the posture of faith. Confession entails receiving God by being present to God once again; creatures accept the word of God that says to live in fallenness, but there to live.70 God establishes other orders to sustain creation in this new position of faith on the far side of sin.71 These orders, as was shown earlier, correspond to religious structures that mediate relationships between beings. Though Bonhoeffer has not been so explicit, according to him the only way to inhabit the world faithfully is for Christians to confess before God that they are sinners and take up these religious structures as creatures, not peers or superiors, of God for so long as these structures maintain the ability to direct hearts outward. When engaged from the posture of faith, a posture adopted in confession, these structures are indispensable; put otherwise, they are contingent and yet mandatory. By way of these structures, “God’s new action with humankind is to uphold and preserve humankind in its fallen world, in its fallen orders, for death—for the resurrection, for the new creation, for Christ.”72 The way forward for creatures in a fallen world is through their attention to God by way of the orders, or religious structures. To summarize, in Creation and Fall religious structures mediate the peaceful and ordered relationships that govern creation at the start. The religious disposition adopts a presumptuous posture that places a creature in place of its creator. As a faulty structure, conscience facilitates a person’s flight from God by perennially asserting self-lordship, presuming to be in a position where she is right to judge. In contrast, when confession becomes the mediating structure between a person and God, that person returns to the posture of creaturely obedience, to faith, to trusting and receiving what God says to be true. Religion in the Christology Lectures The Christology lectures, given only shortly afterward, offer much of the same assessment as in Creation and Fall. Within these lectures, everything turns on the kind of question the person puts to Christ when she is encountered by him. Three questions more or less exhaust the options. Within the university environment, Bonhoeffer locates the first two questions as the “scholarly”

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or scientific enquiries.73 The natural science department asks: “What is the cause of X?”74 The humanities department asks: “What is the meaning of X?”75 The first question asks “how” something comes to be and the second asks “what” something means in relation to its context. Common to both of these questions is a false desire to categorize and classify, to control or lord over. The problem with these two questions is that “[i]n both cases it is necessary to understand a classification of relationships; how does this object X fit into the classification that I already have at hand.”76 The Barthian objection is obvious: God, even God as Christ, is never the object of study.77 Bonhoeffer’s own objection is different, though rooted in Barth’s observation.78 Because God is always other, radically other, no classification already at hand will be adequate. These two academic questions, with their desire to force Christ into a pre-existing image or idea, inevitably end in heresy.79 Therefore, a different question altogether is needed. Faith and religion are both associated with the third line of inquiry regarding Christ, which Bonhoeffer locates in the church. Describing the effect of this “who” question, Bonhoeffer writes: It is no longer possible to fit the Word made flesh into the logos classification system. Here all that remains is the question: Who are you? This is the question asked by horrified, dethroned human reason and also the question of faith: Who are you? Are you God’s very self? . . . the existence of this Logos means the end of my logos.80

By asking “who,” the Christian acknowledges and respects the otherness of the being she encounters while posturing to receive a word from this other being.81 “Who” receives revelation. When God answers “Are you God’s very self?” with “I Am,” the Christian is driven to her limit and transcended by God. Her heart has been opened up from the cor curvum in se to love God and neighbor as they are given and encountered.82 Yet, “who” is not only the question of faith; “who” is also the question of religion.83 That is, there are ways of asking the “who” question that merely disguise the “how” question.84 This potential disguise is what makes the “who” question also religious: Like the question the serpent put to Eve, it undermines the word of God’s claim as if for the sake of God. In its piety, the “who” questions appears as one thing, but still functions to reassert the human as lord.85 Therefore, Bonhoeffer writes: Strictly speaking, the “who question” can be asked only within the context of faith, and there it will receive its answer. As long as the Christological question is one asked by our logos, it always remains within the ambiguity of the “how

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question.” But as soon as it stands within the act of faith, it becomes a form of knowledge, which has the possibility of posing the “who question.”86

Faith is a gift from God, not a natural human possibility.87 Having been opened to faith, however, the end to which the Christian asks “who” makes all the difference. Sinners may ask of their own volition “who are you?” as a way of dismissing Jesus. These are those who, with Dostoyevsky’s Rogozin, would call Jesus an idiot, a fool.88 Such sinners ask “who” religiously and find Jesus wanting. Faith, on the other hand, properly respects the lordship of Christ in creation. To be in faith is to be content with lacking certain kinds of knowledge. In Bonhoeffer’s lectures on Christology, that particular knowledge relates to the “what” and “how” of Christ’s becoming human. The Christian is content to lack this knowledge because she recognizes that the attempt to attain such knowledge is really her own attempt to master and control God.89 False posturing that a person could ever lay hold of such knowledge makes it possible to engage others with an idea of God while claiming to have encountered the living God and survived the encounter unscathed.90 Christians who ask “who” in faith, already confronted by the God who reveals their creatureliness, find the question turned back on themselves.91 The question undoes the asker. In being undone, the heart is turned outward; asking “who” becomes an opportunity to love the God who answers “I am.” Religion and Faith as Alternative Dispositions Having examined Creation and Fall and the Christology lectures, three oppositional pairs identify two distinct dispositions: conscience and confession, avoidance and encounter, and religion and faith. Each disposition has a unique way of inhabiting and affecting the religious structures it engages. The religious disposition maintains a negative connotation for Bonhoeffer. Like Midas’ fingers, it turns everything it touches shiny and simultaneously ruins it all. Religion appears shiny insofar as it looks like an attempt to encounter and love God and others. However, loving encounters require a posture of openness and reception to the other. A religious disposition is not open; these dispositions remain a product of the cor curvum in se. The person acting from within a religious disposition actually attempts to bring others under the control of herself. She seeks to avoid the risk of a being that stands outside her own ability to explain, know, and manage. Religion mitigates the risk that another person might make a claim that requires a costly response. The ways in which religious persons seek to mitigate the risk of genuine encounter are manifold, though conscience becomes a rather vexing

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one for Bonhoeffer.92 These avoidance maneuvers always tread on religious structures already in place to mediate relationships and thereby corrupt these structures. For example, conscience corrupts morality: The conscience sets aside the claim of the other in favor of one’s own claim but maintains the veneer of morality. A religious disposition never permits the self to escape itself. The person remains trapped and turned inward. In summary, loving relationships cannot occur between religiously disposed persons because religion insists on avoiding the encounter with others while appearing to embrace them. Such double-mindedness is rightly distasteful. Love must be risked to be love.93 Risk requires faith. Bonhoeffer regards the disposition of faith positively: “Having been wrought by God, faith runs counter to natural religiosity.”94 Faith becomes possible when the Christian “has been encountered and overwhelmed in its existence by an other.”95 This description of faith being instilled tracks closely with the description of the Christian’s encounter with Christ in the sacraments. Once the Christian is turned outward, a genuine encounter with another being becomes possible, an encounter that respects the otherness of the other. Those who have been placed in this position of faith are able to engage religious structures for their true purposes. These structures finally mediate relationships between persons because both parties are actually regarded as persons. Rather than falsely legitimating attempts to control others with conscience, a Christian confesses her sin to the other. Reconciliation occurs thereby, and love can grow in faith. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DISTINCTION This chapter has examined the constitution of both religious structures and religious dispositions. Together, structure and disposition form the whole of what Bonhoeffer normally means by religion. Religious structures are inevitable, the natural product of humans mediating relationships with one another and God. Yet, persons can participate in those structures with one of two alternative dispositions. The first disposition is the religious disposition, which remains a product of the cor curvum in se. This disposition corrupts religious structures and turns them into tools for egotistical dominance of others. God, however, can turn hearts outward and make possible a second disposition: faith. For Bonhoeffer, this turning outward is a result of the Christian’s encounter with Christ in the sacraments. The sacraments are religious structures in which Christ is present to move persons from false lordship maintained by religious dispositions to lives of creaturely faith in Christ. When religious structures are inhabited from a disposition of faith, they order relations of love and service.

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The schema for which this chapter has argued provides a great deal of conceptual clarity to what Bonhoeffer is doing, and proves comprehensive enough to explain Bonhoeffer’s disparate comments on religion. On its own, however, that clarity may not be enough to warrant the adoption of this schema within the larger aim of this thesis to relate the sacraments to religionlessness. This section will address the ways in which this schema significantly precludes certain interpretive possibilities regarding the interpretation and extension of Bonhoeffer’s theology of religionlessness. Doing so makes it possible to see that religionlessness does not necessarily entail either the rejection or margination of the church, and therefore the church and the sacraments can feature significantly in Bonhoeffer’s theology of religionlessness. The following section will make it clear that relating the church and its sacraments to religionlessness does not establish an inner/outer binary that would have the church exist independently of the dispositions of those who engage it. Together, these two sections clarify how religious structures and dispositions relate to one another within Bonhoeffer’s theology and in his Lutheran context to clarify how the sacraments are justifiably retained in a theology of religionlessness. Two poor interpretations and extensions of Bonhoeffer’s theology can follow from reading his work precisely because he so muddles the distinction between structure and disposition that he does nevertheless make. Such a misuse, first, includes the manner in which Bonhoeffer was appropriated by the death of God theologians to promote an anti-ecclesial Christian atheism. Second, it is possible to misuse Bonhoeffer’s theology and relate various religious structures to one another improperly. Regarding the misinterpretation of Bonhoeffer, it would be one thing if Bonhoeffer were intentionally trying to blur structure and disposition together because he is cognizant that they are linked, and the danger of separating structure from disposition too rigorously is addressed below. Even so, it does not seem that Bonhoeffer’s intention was to be blurry. On the contrary, he does not linguistically hold apart structure and disposition, despite them functioning distinctively for him theologically. As a result, it is possible to appeal to Bonhoeffer’s corpus to justify positions that Bonhoeffer would likely find abhorrent. Bonhoeffer’s linguistic failure problematically permits either condemning religion in toto or else marginalizing religious discourse in the public sphere, advocating for a “functional secularism.” Maintaining this distinction on Bonhoeffer’s behalf helps preclude this problematic set of interpretive possibilities. Utter Condemnation of Religion Contingent as they are, religious structures have an enduring value for Bonhoeffer that religious dispositions do not. This gives rise to the first

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problem with failing to maintain this difference: Everything even loosely connected to the phenomenon of religion is condemned and excised. In the haste to be rid of the religious disposition’s dishonest piety, valuable and formative structures are needlessly abandoned. In the haste to leave behind a false spirituality, the church community and its habits of worship are also deserted. This was perhaps the earliest misuse of Bonhoeffer. In his discussion of the “Radical Bonhoeffer,” Haynes details the way in which Bonhoeffer was first used.96 Haynes quotes Thomas Altizer as saying that a theologian’s future “must exist outside of the church: He can neither proclaim the Word, celebrate the sacraments, nor rejoice in the presence of the Holy Spirit.”97 Bonhoeffer’s words, out of context, can inspire exactly what Altizer is describing. Yet, leaving the church and its ecclesial structures behind is a move that Bonhoeffer would have found troubling—and it is a move he never made.98 As a Christian, the church is a society from which Bonhoeffer could not have extracted himself even had he wanted to do so. The church, after all, is “God’s new will and purpose for humanity.”99 One cannot distinguish between Christianity and religion to try and preserve the former.100 Haynes rightly concludes that “the antiecclesiastical orientation of AngloAmerican radical theology makes it difficult to understand the movement’s claim on Bonhoeffer.”101 Of course, these theologians had little interest in Bonhoeffer’s work but rather in the ideas his language inspired.102 The church’s ecclesial and sacramental structures, however, are not all that gets thrown out in this approach. They are not the full range of religious structures. All orders of preservation are categorized here. Dissolving religious structures along with religious dispositions entails losing not only the church but also family, government, labor, and the like, which were all described as belonging to religious structures. When the most obvious of religious structures are revoked in the public sphere, these other means of social mediation are bound to suffer if not collapse. Perhaps, the oft-cited functional breakdown of contemporary government, family, and work is a result of the radical impulse to oust religion from the public sphere.103 This, of course, is not because the church and its structures somehow sustain these others. They all exist independently of one another but are tied together in that they all exist to relate human beings to one another and God.104 Therefore, family and other religious structures are the unsuspecting collateral damage of post-Enlightenment societies’ critical posture toward religion writ large and of its proclivity for individualism.105 One danger of obscuring the distinction between religious structures and religious dispositions is that the religious structures get caught up in the rush to be rid of religious dispositions. As a result, structures that order the life of communities are needlessly abandoned, and other such structures are weakened by the loss of their matches. By obscuring the distinction between

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structure and disposition, there is the chance that those who are working from Bonhoeffer’s theology may leave behind the church and its cultus in a rush toward some strange, new, post-religious future, a future stripped of a great many structures that have heretofore facilitated life together.106 This would not be a faithful interpretation or application of Bonhoeffer’s theology: “Bonhoeffer does not . . . identify religion-less Christianity with the elimination of cult and prayer, but rather asks about their proper place in a future, more specifically, in a religion-less Christianity.”107 Bonhoeffer does not wonder if religious structures have a place within religionlessness; he only wonders where that place may be. Unreflective Marginalization One danger associated with obscuring the difference between religious structures and religious dispositions is that the former are uncritically dismissed along with the latter. A second danger would be that religious structures are not dismissed, but are improperly ordered in relation to one another. That is, if the distinction between structure and disposition is not clearly articulated, then they may be held together in ways unhelpful for future human flourishing. For example, wariness toward what is rightly unsettling about the religious disposition causes that which is most obviously “religious” to be pushed toward the tolerated margins of society in favor of a secularized state. Behind this lies the Enlightenment impulse wherein religion is privatized and only allowed to enter public discourse in the form of ethics, or as Wüstenberg puts it, “the actions of the righteous.”108 Bonhoeffer envisions a religionless future. Religionlessness does not mean unbounded secularism.109 Granting religion an enduring presence of some kind, such as the religious structures described in this chapter, another danger can arise for how that religionless future is envisioned. It may be the case that if structure and disposition are held together poorly that religion becomes unduly managed in public space.110 In this way, the religious disposition is not resisted; the religious disposition is conflated with the religious structure and both of them are treated as equally unwelcome, albeit tolerated to a limited degree, in the public sphere. As a result, the piety for which religion might be rightly rebuked is never directly confronted; bad piety may even be celebrated and encouraged so long as religion is content to remain marginal. Bonhoeffer describes how this simultaneous celebration and marginalization takes place. He writes: To the nineteenth- and twentieth-century mind, religion plays the part of the so-called parlor into which one doesn’t mind withdrawing for a couple of hours, but from which one then immediately returns to one’s place of work. However,

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one thing is clear, namely, that we understand Christ only if we commit to him in an abrupt either-or. He was not nailed to the cross as an ornamentation or decoration for our lives.111

When the difference between religious dispositions and religious structures is obscured, a privatizing impulse can emerge that risks relating various structures to one another improperly, placing the state over rather than alongside the church. On occasion, this impulse is said to operate from concern for the good of society: Religion has a place in society, but it ought to limit itself to that role and not interfere elsewhere. This concern, manifest in this way, is objectionable because God claims whole persons.112 God does not divide a person’s personality so that she can operate as one person, a religious one, in her home and church and a second, secular person when she enters the public space governed by the state.113 Moreover, this ignores that religious structures are meant to sustain the ordering of public life because they order relations between persons. Other times, this privatizing impulse arises under the auspices of concern for the structures themselves: to avoid them being profaned by those who engage them idolatrously.114 Bonhoeffer does not encourage withdrawing religion from public life.115 This must be returned to in the next chapter. For now, it suffices to acknowledge that this concern for profanation is misguided, particularly as regards the sacraments. As this chapter has argued, because Christ inhabits (rather than merely engages) the sacraments of church, they alone among religious structures can avoid profanation. Aside from the religious structures of the church, there is little use secreting away other structures to protect such structure’s purity. They each already exist as some mixture of sacred and profane whose purpose is to help persons and social bodies navigate the world while avoiding the transgressions of either too much order or too little.116 Rather than dispensing with religion, or managing its forays into the world, an account of religionlessness that takes seriously the distinction between structure and disposition outlined in this chapter develops “a modus vivendi that is capable of preserving its identity and integrity while pursuing the goods of everyday life it shares with the penultimate social order.”117 Religion has a significant role in ordering the public space in its own right, but does this in the company of other religious structures that are equally vested in maintaining the good order of life together. Summary The first hazard associated with obfuscating the distinction between structure and disposition that this chapter has sought to maintain is that the church,

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with its distinct structures and practices, becomes a relic of the past. These structures are no longer necessary, or so it is posited, to sustain the life of faith. The second hazard is religious structures become improperly related to one another; for example, the church can be marginalized in the public domain and placed in service of the state. In this example, the structures of church and state are no longer complementary to one another and jointly accountable to God, but one has superimposed itself over the other in the place of God. Even where this superimposition is performed as if to protect the church from profanation, it must be remembered that only Christ and his presence can secure the church’s holiness. The two ways of dealing with religion in modern society outlined in this section, each of which could be (incorrectly) attributed to Bonhoeffer on account of his hope for a religionless future, both lack the explanatory power to envision the kind of religionless Christianity for which Bonhoeffer actually hopes. Describing Bonhoeffer’s theology, Nielson writes: “Religion does indeed have some role to play, even in a Christianity that yields a place to a critique of religion.”118 The role of religion in this future in best ascertained through vigilant attention to the distinction between empirical religious structures, through which the divine-human encounter is mediated in faith, and the religious dispositions that can corrupt these structures.119 A DANGER IN THE DISTINCTION? The next chapter will detail the particular shackles of the modern manifestation of the religious disposition in the church from which the church needs to escape according to Bonhoeffer. Before leaving the current discussion, another important question needs asked about the relationship of the schema relative to the larger argument: Does the distinction between religious structures and dispositions reassert a problematic inner/outer binary? That is, does this distinction separate out the form of religion from the thoughts and desires of those who engage religion? Such a binary could prove problematic at two levels: first, with regard to the schema itself and, second, with regard to the overall argument. With regard to the schema, such a binary would mean that the Lord’s Supper or baptism could sit abstractly outside the inner thoughts and desires of those who participate in them. The solution to this binary is to insist that religious structures are corruptible. They are intimately linked with the dispositions of practitioners.120 This link has been acknowledged throughout this chapter. This leaves a larger problem for the purposes of this thesis, however: If these structures are corruptible, how is it possible to insist that some such structures are to be preserved? How can the claim that the church and its

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structures are meant to be preserved even within religionlessne be privileged over the claim that religionlessness marks the occasion to dispense with the church? Occasions do arise when corrupted structures must be torn down for another structure to be established that better mediates relationships.121 The world of religionlessness could mark a time for tearing down the church and upsetting the altars. For this not to be the case, it must be explained how the church is torn down and opened back up even as it is preserved. It must be shown that the church does not somehow sit outside the dispositions of those persons who engage and corrupt the church. Fortunately, such an explanation is possible. Within the Lutheran context, the sacraments are the location in which this tearing down and building up of the church are held together. It is no stretch to think of the sacraments as places of simultaneous death and resurrection. In fact, that is the very grammar of baptism. To make this argument, the Eucharist makes an illuminating case study. In one respect, Luther teaches that “ardent engagement in practices can become a form of self-securing, an effort to win one’s own salvation apart from God.”122 Bonhoeffer was keenly aware of this possibility: “A merely personal sanctification which seeks to bypass this openly visible separation of the church-community from the world confuses the pious desires of the religious flesh with the sanctification of the church-community, which has been accomplished in Christ’s death and is being actualized by the seal of God.”123 Because of this possibility, it should be maintained that the attitudes of those persons who receive the Lord’s Supper shape the work the Supper performs. It is hard to see how the Table can be a place for receiving God’s grace when persons attend the Table so as to take grace by force, thereby replacing grace with works.124 The Table may be an example, but Amy Pauw rightly notes that “it is a key Christian belief that no form of earthly religious life entirely escapes disfigurement.”125 Human persons engage religious structures. Each person is a mixture of dispositions and intentions, selfless and selfish. As such, these structures are always themselves corrupted by and corrupting of those who interact through them. While the Table mediates relationships between humanity and God and between humans to each other by extending grace, the Table is also often used to deny grace to others who are different or do not share one’s own opinions.126 For example, many Christian traditions deny Table fellowship even to other Christians because of differences in theological belief.127 Those who use the Table in this manner only become more and more bound within their cor curvum in se. In such circumstances, the Table ceases to function as intended. Because the Table can cease to function as intended, it is not inconceivable that the Table could need replaced by an alternative structure. In another way, however, the Table is a place where God has promised grace can be found. That promise stands prior to any of a Christian’s own

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ambitions for the Eucharistic meal. The “is-ness” of the sacraments’ function within the Lutheran tradition, guaranteed by Christ’s presence, ensures that overwhelming grace can be found at the Table even for those who presume to use the Table to justify themselves. A person’s own disposition toward the Table becomes secondary to the disposition of the Lord of the Table.128 Pauw is helpful yet again, writing: In their palpable imperfections, less exemplary believers point us away from notions of heroism and mastery in religious practice; they draw our gaze instead toward the gracious God who works in and through them. Any excellence in their religious lives is less a matter of dogmatic precision or moral virtuosity than a readiness to repent and a keen awareness of their dependence on God.129

Through God’s grace in Christ’s presence, the sacraments are restored time and time again. Sacraments are opened up from the selfish purposes in which humans too often employ the sacraments for their true purpose of opening up humans to selfless love. Therefore, insisting upon the enduring significance of the sacraments in Bonhoeffer’s theology does not have to maintain an inner/outer binary. The continuing efficaciousness of the church as a religious structure is not guaranteed ignorant of the human disposition’s corruption of the church. Unlike other structures, the church’s continued efficaciousness is guaranteed not by human righteousness but by Christ’s holy presence. Christ is present in the sacraments to resist human corruption with his superabundant grace. Christ’s real and effective presence makes the difference. The church is given to know God’s disposition: The church learns from revelation that God is pro-nobis. The church is also given to know God’s actions: God became human, dwelt among us, was crucified, dead, buried, and resurrected to bring the entire world back to grace. God calls to the church through the sacraments, beckoning it to follow in faith. During his life in first-century Palestine, Jesus once turned to the disciples with bread and wine. He told them: “This is my body. Take. Eat.” Christ’s body was broken then as now to effect both the transformation of Christian’s hearts and the development of a community of loving hearts. The Lutheran notion that Christ’s command contains a promise means that the person who makes the promise will see it done.130 Whatever the merit of their intentions when taking the Supper, Christians find Christ at the Table and are transformed. The Lord’s Supper continues being served, even though it is open to corruption, by the grace of the Christ whose very being is given over in the Supper. This discussion about the Lord’s Supper reveals why, within Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran context, it is necessary that the church and its sacraments continue to persist even within religionlessness. Christ is faithful to the promises he

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made when he instituted the sacraments. Christ’s personal presence in the sacraments ensures the sacraments’ continual efficacy. The other sacraments can be preserved for the ongoing life of the church in the same way as the Supper—but only in that way. Jesus’ assertion that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church is less the church’s triumphal claim and more Christ’s promise of the triumph of grace. RETURNING TO “WHAT IS CHURCH?” This chapter argues for a specific schema to describe Bonhoeffer’s theology of religion. That schema is predicated on a distinction between religious structures and religious dispositions. The last two sections of this chapter have discussed the benefits and risks that might be associated with adopting this schema. The benefit is that this schema precludes certain interpretive impossibilities for reading and extending Bonhoeffer’s vision of religionlessness. The risk is that this schema might establish a binary that Bonhoeffer would roundly resist: This binary would permit the structure of the church to exist outside of the dispositions of those who engage the church. The way in which this binary is overcome is by connecting the structure of the church to the dispositions of those two persons who engage it: both the human person and Christ. Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran context suggests how Christ’s presence in the sacraments can ensure the sacraments ongoing efficaciousness even in the face of corruptive human influence. Christ’s presence in the sacraments turns people who are religiously disposed into persons who are faithfully disposed. As opposed as the dispositions of faith and religion may be, there is still a danger, of which Bonhoeffer is keenly aware, in setting up faith as an ideal toward which the church strives. Returning to Bonhoeffer’s essay, “What is Church?” suggests how one overcomes the danger of idealization. This danger is that, when the community of faith becomes an ideal, the church becomes its own idol.131 Somehow, the church becomes an idea the Christian has of what church should be rather than the concrete community God has called into being by turning outward the hearts of the church’s members to love and serve the world however imperfectly they achieve that end. Alternatively, Bonhoeffer insists: “What church ‘is’ can only be said if we say both what it is from the viewpoint of human beings and what it is from the standpoint of God. . . . Thus we are talking about not . . . what we should make of the church today, but rather what it [is] when it ‘is.’”132 The church remains “part of the world,”133 caught up in idol-making and sin. Yet, church is also “qualified world, qualified by God’s own entry into it and for it”134 so that those within it are sheltered and redeemed by God. The church is “a union of religiously inclined, interested people”135 in all their bourgeois complacency

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and self-obsession, but it is also “a fellowship, the church-community of saints, freed by God from isolated existence, each one belonging to the other, giving themselves, accepting responsibility because it was placed on them by God”136 with all its active commitment. For Bonhoeffer, religious and faithful dispositions continue to exist alongside one another in the church. Christians accept the presence of their false religion. Resisting the presence of religion (pejoratively) in the church only perpetuates that religious impulse by setting up an idol of what the Christian thinks the church should be that is distinct from the community God has actually called together.137 When this material from “What is Church?” was discussed at the end of the last chapter, this material suggested the necessity of understanding the church’s earthy character in the face of the church’s description as a spiritual community of persons whose hearts were turned outward by Christ’s presence in the sacraments. At the end of this chapter, this material reinforces how the church’s spiritual character can be posited without becoming an ideal even in the face of the church’s religious corruption. As persons who are turned to faith, the church seeks to listen to the voice of God and follow where that voice leads. The church is always aware of its own propensity for mishearing—if not creating—that voice. The church operates fully aware both of its faith and its religion, as simul justus et peccator. The church cannot be too boastful about its faithfulness, because the church cannot be certain it truly acted in faith. As often as the church repents of its religion, the church remembers also that Judas betrayed Christ and by so doing God’s purpose was fulfilled.138 The distinction that has been drawn between religion and faith is a formal one, but not an epistemic one. The church’s fidelity remains hidden from itself.139 In Matthew 25, the sheep and the goats are equally surprised that the work they have done should be regarded well or poorly. Accepting religion does not stop the church from trying to listen more attentively and follow God more closely while displacing the idols the church has established to prevent its hearing and doing of God’s will. Yet, accepting religion does insist that the church’s action be characterized by humility and that its action never be placed beyond the need for repentance and forgiveness. The church accepts its need to be governed by religious structures, namely the sacraments, to resist its own religious dispositions and the structures these dispositions have fatally corrupted. CONCLUSION Bonhoeffer’s both praise and critique of religion do not necessarily suggest a change in his thinking, but rather his development of a functional distinction between religious structures and a religious disposition. The former serves

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the role of mediating human relations to God and to one another so that the heart God has turned outward may remain so directed. These structures are the natural and inevitable result of human sociality. They are not, however, permanent. They exist as concessions to sin and to the end of resisting sin; they also exist prone to misuse and sin. When inhabited poorly, from religious dispositions, these structures become corrupt and no longer serve to direct hearts outward. Instead, religious structures can be used to facilitate the sinful reorientation of the world toward to the sinner’s own ends. When this reorientation happens, Bonhoeffer sees how the time has come for existing structures to be resisted and, if necessary, torn down. Another structure will rise to fulfill the original structure’s purpose—human relations require mediating—but that structure may look entirely different. The church is one such religious structure. Within the church, the sacraments also belong among religious structures. Because the church and its sacraments are religious structures, they retain the possibility that they should need to be torn down and replaced. However, this chapter has argued that from within Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran context it is clear to see how the sacraments ensure the church differs from other religious structures in at least one key element: The church is not only a structure that God has ordained, but also a structure that God as Christ has come to inhabit in the sacraments. As such, God is in the continual process of turning outward and reorienting the structures within the church that the church’s own members are in the continual process of corrupting. This makes it clear how the sacraments can be retained even within religionlessness without establishing an unhelpful inner/ outer binary. Bonhoeffer, read within his Lutheran context, is clear that God is simultaneously tearing down and rebuilding the church by means of the sacraments. Christ’s presence makes the difference. Because Christ is present, as Lutheran theology holds in faith, the church continues to participate in the sacraments so as to continue learning to inhabit the church and the world in faith. Therefore, it is possible to see how, for Bonhoeffer, the church’s faith stands opposite and opposed to religion, but not in such a way as to negate or neglect that Christians are always both faithful and religious. Whereas religion hears the word of God, but questions and resists it by raising idols, faith hears the word of God, confesses, and obeys. Christians, in the church, are simultaneously religious and faithful. Religionlessness is a perennial project of tearing down the idols raised by religious dispositions. By examining themes central to Bonhoeffer’s critique of religion, the next chapter exposes how Bonhoeffer sees that various religious structures have been distorted beyond further use. Moreover, it begins the process of exposing how certain practices in American evangelicalism might participate in those idols, so that a final chapter can suggest alternative practices more in keeping with what religionless, faithful

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Christian worship might look like today. Certain habits may need reformed to more helpfully guide worshippers toward Christ and the sacraments. Other habits may need dispensed with altogether. Either way, with these idols laid bare it becomes possible to examine how faithful reception of Christ in the sacraments gives rise to a new, creaturely form of life, instead—one where the relationships between God and humans and humans with the world are ordered in a more faithful manner. NOTES 1. James McClendon, for example, opts for the former explanation. James McClendon, Systematic Theology: Ethics (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1986), 204–08, 211. Paul Spanring relies heavily on McClendon’s assessment. Paul Spanring, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Arnold Köster: Two Distinct Voices in the Midst of Germany’s Third Reich Turmoil (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013), 14–30. Matthew Kirkpatrick argues similarly. Matthew Kirkpatrick, Attacks on Christendom in a World Come of Age: Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and the Question of “Religionless Christianity” (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), 195–97. Hamilton, Altizer, and the death of God theologians are prime examples of those who positively regard a belief that religionlessness marks liberation from the church. See William Hamilton, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” in Radical Theology and the Death of God, ed. Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1966). 2. Ralf Wüstenberg and Tom Greggs both try to account for Bonhoeffer’s polyvalence on this point. Ralf K. Wüstenberg, A Theology of Life: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity, trans. Doug Stott (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1998), 26–27. Tom Greggs, Theology against Religion: Constructive Dialogues with Bonhoeffer and Barth (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 42–54. See also Charles C. West, “Barth, Kraemer, and Bonhoeffer on Religion: A Reflection,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 49 (2014): 56–58. 3. DBWE 8, 189. For Bonhoeffer’s longing to participate in these phenomena, see Ibid., 179. 4. It is a genuine question whether structures or dispositions are granted primacy. This question of primacy is an enduring one, both in general and for Bonhoeffer studies. In his Politics, Aristotle first describes the naturalness with which human beings establish means by which to order their relationships to one another, the preeminent of which is the polis. Aristotle, “The Politics,” in The Great Political Theories, ed. Michael Curtis (London: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), 65–67. Only after he has established the naturalness of these orderings does Aristotle illustrate how human beings inhabit them with differing dispositions, for example, the “clanless and lawless and heartless” existence of the one who seeks to exist outside a polis, or the virtuous man so made by his engagement with the polis. Ibid., 65–66. Within Bonhoeffer studies, Jennifer McBride seems to argue the contrary: People variously disposed find ways to enact and inhabit structures from within that disposition, creating the structures that facilitate the dispositions of their

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will. Jennifer McBride, The Church for the World: A Theology of Public Witness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6. Her ethnographic work would seem to bear this out: Persons now aware of their complicity in sins of a certain kind find ways to relate to one another and the world that acknowledge that sin while simultaneously looking to restore fractured fellowship—a disposition of confession crafts structures to facilitate the work of repentance. McBride may be correct, at least regarding human experience. That the schema offered in this chapter explains the work Bonhoeffer is doing does not mean that Bonhoeffer’s system has fully accounted for all the vagaries and complexities of human life. Yet, in response to McBride, it may be rightly asked how sin is recognized and confessed without there being some understanding of how these relationships are meant to be ordered that exists prior to adopting the posture of confession. That is, there is a vision for how these relationships can work naturally, with the grain of the universe as it were, that is presumed by most accounts of how these relationships are currently mis-ordered. Those who look at injustice to say that “Human beings are not meant to live like this” assume a way in which human beings were meant to live. This is at least part of what Bonhoeffer had in mind when he wrote, “Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease.” DBWE 8, 43. Again, in Ethics, “Genuine acknowledgment of guilt does not grow from experiences of dissolution and decay but, for us who have encountered Christ, only by looking at the form Christ has taken.” DBWE 6, 135. There is a form, already present and experienced in the world as Christ, which gives rise to anxiety and prompts a sense that the present order needs revision. Therefore, the structures generated out of the posture of confession unto repentance are in fact reestablishments of structures corrupted by those, including those now confessing, who had wrongly engaged these structures before. 5. Emphasis mine. DBWE 1, 30. 6. Emphasis mine. DBWE 1, 21. 7. DBWE 1, 269. 8. Christiane Tietz, “Bonhoeffer on the Ontological Structure of the Church,” in Ontology and Ethics: Bonhoeffer and Contemporary Scholarship, ed. Adam Clark and Mike Mawson (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013), 33. 9. DBWE 1, 192. 10. Ibid., 199. For the political effect of this presumption, see John Moses, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Prioritization of Church Unity,” Journal of Religious History 24 (2000): 196–212. 11. DBWE 1, 200. 12. DBWE 12, 262. 13. DBWE 1, 198. 14. Ibid., 131. 15. Ibid., 125. 16. Ibid., 30. 17. Ibid., 145. “Taken up” is deliberate language, placing Bonhoeffer within a broadly Barthian understanding of religion. See Karl Barth, On Religion: The

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Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion, trans. Garrett Green (London: T&T Clark, 2006). 18. DBWE 1, 269. As such, these structures retain the same kind of ontology as the humans who engage them—they are simul Justus et peccetor. Eva Harasta discusses this ontology in light of eschatology as consistent and enduring throughout the Bonhoeffer corpus. Eva Harasta, “One Body: Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the Church’s Existence as Sinner at Saint at Once,” Union Seminary Quarterly 62 (2010): 17–34. She finds it less plausible, however, that Bonhoeffer speaks consistently of structures as simulus. Eva Harasta, “Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran Ecclesiology and Inter-Religious Dialogue: A Dogmatic Reading of Bonhoeffer,” in Bonhoeffer and Interpretive Theory: Essays on Methods and Understanding, ed. Peter Frick (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013), 243–44. 19. DBWE 1, 30. 20. Kirsten Nielsen, “Community Turned Inside Out: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Concept of the Church and of Humanity Reconsidered,” in Being Human, Becoming Human: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Social Thought, ed. Jens Zimmerman and Brian Gregor (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010), 91. 21. Ibid., 94. 22. Ibid., 92. 23. Lisa Dahill, Reading from the Underside of Selfhood: Bonhoeffer and Spiritual Formation (Eugene, OR: Wifp and Stock, 2009), 36. 24. DBWE 1, 49–50. 25. Ibid., 48, 57. 26. Ibid., 51. 27. Ibid., 33. 28. Ibid. 29. DBWE 2, 58. It is significant that the “natural” human being is thusly disposed. It is another clue this is not a genetic argument. He appears to be treading on both of the classical uses of natural to demonstrate that these structures and the humans who engage them have always been corrupted by sin. In one sense, natural refers to the state of things apart from grace or revelation. When graced, then, humans become for the first time something other than cor curvum in se; they become both saint and sinner. Yet, in another sense, natural refers to the way in which things were created. By saying that humans are naturally cor curvum in se Bonhoeffer escapes the trap of a historical fall event and its corollary that human relationships ever possessed a pre-lapsarian purity. The narrative of creation/fall/reconciliation remains a descriptive tool rather than an actual genealogical account. 30. Richard Cumming, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Concept of the Cor Curvum in Se: A Critique of Bonhoeffer’s Polemic with Reinhold Seeberg in Act and Being,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 62 (2010): 118–23. 31. DBWE 1, 107. 32. Ibid., 61. 33. Ibid., 115. 34. For religion, see Ibid., 131. For moral, see DBWE 3, 87–88. 35. DBWE 1, 108.

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36. Barth, Church Dogmatics 1.2, 324–25. 37. Christopher Holmes, “‘The Indivisible Whole of God’s Reality’: On the Agency of Jesus in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 12 (2010): 284–85. See also Tom Greggs, “Religionless Christianity and the Political Implications of Theological Speech: What Bonhoeffer’s Theology Yields to a World of Fundamentalisms,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 11 (2009): 299. 38. DBWE 1, 107. 39. DBWE 11, 353. 40. DBWE 3, 140. See also DBWE 6, 358. 41. Jordan Ballor, “Christ in Creation: Bonhoeffer’s Orders of Preservation and Natural Theology,” Journal of Religion 86 (2006): 7. 42. DBWE 6, 70. 43. DBWE 1, 226–31. 44. DBWE 1, 229. 45. DBWE 16, 512. What it means for God to be lord of government perhaps requires some qualification, particularly given the theocratic politics of many cultural conservatives who try and lay claim to Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer is by no means interested in governments that pass laws that privilege Christians and Christian theology. In fact, when such laws go into effect with the adoption of the Aryan paragraph, Bonhoeffer insists that this is a time of status confessionis in which the church must resist the government. DBWE 12, 372, 425–32. In traditional Lutheran theology, government is not accountable to God for having enacted “God’s righteous decrees” as laws of the state—that would involve the church stepping beyond its limits (in the case of the Moral Majority) or the state beyond its limits (in the case of the Aryan Paragraph)—but is accountable to God for whether it has balanced order and freedom such that human beings can flourish and justice can thrive. Ibid., 364. If the state is concerned with the Decalogue at all, it is only with, Bonhoeffer insists, the second half. DBWE 16, 514–17. For Bonhoeffer’s specific thoughts on the relationship between church and government, see Ibid., 521–26. 46. DBWE 4, 153. 47. LW 35, 88–90. 48. DBWE 3, 103, 106–7. 49. DBWE 12, 302–3. 50. Kirsten Nielson, “The Concept of Religion and Christian Doctrine: The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Reconsidered,” Systematic Theology 57 (2003): 4–19. 51. DBWE 3, 41. 52. Ibid., 58–59. 53. Ibid., 40–44. 54. Ibid., 109. 55. Ibid., 106. 56. Ibid., 106, 113. 57. Ibid., 106.

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58. Discipleship associates this language with “cheap grace.” DBWE 4, 43. Though previously this language was deployed positively in two of his Barcelona lectures. DBWE 10, 352, 365. 59. DBWE 3, 107. 60. Ibid., 108. 61. Ibid., 108–9. 62. Ibid., 118. 63. Ibid., 122–23. 64. DBWE 2, 155. 65. Ibid., 139. 66. DBWE 3, 129. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 129–30. 70. Ibid., 139–40. 71. DBWE 3, 139–40. 72. Ibid. 73. DBWE 12, 301. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Barth, The Word of God and Theology, 27. 78. For Bonhoeffer’s critique of Barth’s use of the subject-object categories, see DBWE 2, 125. 79. DBWE 12: 331–53. 80. Ibid., 302. 81. Ibid., 303. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid., 307. 87. Ibid., 303. See also DBWE 2, 54, 58. 88. DBWE 12, 306. See Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, ed. Alan Myers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 89. DBWE 12, 305–6. 90. Ibid., 306. 91. Ibid., 307. 92. Bonhoeffer’s professor, Karl Holl, placed strong emphasis on the conscience in his interpretation of Luther. See Holl, The Reconstruction of Morality, 1979. Also, DeJonge, Bonhoeffer’s Theological Formation, 118–28, and Barker, The Cross of Reality, 59. 93. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996), 118–26.

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94. DBWE 2, 58. 95. Ibid., 54. 96. Stephen Haynes, The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004), 13–35. Haynes, of course, might resist the language of misuse. 97. Ibid., 33. Found in Thomas Altizer, “America and the Future of Theology,” in Radical Theology and the Death of God, ed. Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1966), 15. 98. DBWE 8, 27. McClendon also states that by engaging in conspiracy, Bonhoeffer demonstrated he had rejected the church as the primary society from which he viewed the world during those years—operating instead within the society of the Bonhoeffer family—and that conspiracy represents a failure to believe in the aims and methods of the church as a unique polis. McClendon, Systematic Theology, 204–8. More recent work (Sabine Dramm, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Resistance [Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009]; and Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony G. Siegrist, and Daniel P. Umbel, Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013]) can complexify McClendon’s narrative, particularly regarding Bonhoeffer’s role in the conspiracy. 99. DBWE 1, 141. 100. Nielson, “The Concept of Religion and Christian Doctrine,” 6. 101. Haynes, The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon, 32. 102. Ibid., 21–22. 103. Therefore, the increasing openness to religion, both culturally and academically, in the West discussed by Zimmermann may mark the beginnings of a renewal of all these structures together. Jens Zimmermann, “Beyond Fundamentalism and Postmodernism: Bonhoeffer’s Theology and the Crisis of Western Culture,” in Religion, Religionlessness, and Contemporary Western Culture, ed. Stephen Plant (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), 15–20. 104. DBWE 6, 388, 393. 105. The Enlightenment model of an autonomous, reasonable self seems to grind against the religious model of persons in community. Where the Enlightenment model is given free reign, structures of community break down. Bonhoeffer was never uncritical of a supposedly secular, self-governing existence. See DBWE 10, 343 where he hopes to de-secularize Christ for his modern listeners; DBWE 4, 50 where he charts secularism as the path of cheap grace; and DBWE 12, 434 where he chastises students for taking pride in their status as secular, cultured despisers of religion. 106. Barry Harvey, “The Narrow Path: Sociality, Ecclesiology, and the Polyphony of Life in the Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” in Being Human, Becoming Human: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Social Thought, ed. Jens Zimmermann and Brian Gregor (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010), 103. 107. Sabine Dramm, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: An Introduction to His Thought, trans. Thomas Rice (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 2007), 200.

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108. Wüstenberg, A Theology of Life, 29. Bonhoeffer specifically warns against this privatizing impulse. DBWE 1, 227. He suggests a more faithful way of relating the two orders in DBWE 12, 265. 109. Green concurs. Clifford J. Green, “Bonhoeffer’s Contribution to a New Christian Paradigm,” in Interpreting Bonhoeffer: Historical Perspectives, Emerging Issues, ed. Clifford J. Green and Guy Carter (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), 215. 110. Harvey, Taking Hold of the Real: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Profound Worldliness of Christianity (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015) is very concerned with the ways in which modern society has sought to manage its members’ lives and the ways in which Christian faith can resist management by any lord other than Christ. 111. DBWE 10, 342. 112. See DBWE 1, 27; DBWE 4, 57–66; DBWE 6, 76–102; DBWE 8, 324. 113. DBWE 4, 135–36. 114. Wüstenberg, A Theology of Life, 29. 115. Barry Harvey, “The Body Politic of Christ: Theology, Social Analysis, and Bonhoeffer’s Arcane Discipline,” Modern Theology 13 (1997): 322, 341. 116. DBWE 12, 364. 117. Harvey, “The Narrow Path,” 122. 118. Nielson, “The Concept of Religion and Christian Doctrine,” 6. 119. Ibid., 8–9. 120. LW 36, 175–76. 121. DBWE 6, 70. 122. Dyskra and Bass, “A Theological Understanding of Christian Practices,” 23. 123. DBWE 4, 262. 124. For examples, LW 35, 91–99. 125. Pauw, “Attending to the Gaps,” 34. 126. DBWE 1, 229–30. 127. Various examples of this are offered in Jeffry Vanderwilt, “Eucharistic Sharing: Revising the Question,” Theological Studies 63 (2002). 128. LW 36, 45–46; DBWE 15, 540. 129. Pauw, “Attending to the Gaps,” 34. 130. Jenson, Visible Words, 20–21. 131. DBWE 12, 264. 132. Ibid., 262. 133. Ibid. 134. Ibid., 263. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid. The distinction between society and church community was first articulated in DBWE 1, 88–92. 137. DBWE 12, 264. 138. DBWE 12, 307. 139. DBWE 4, 149–50.

Chapter 5

Among the Iconoclasts Un-conceiving God

The last chapter outlined a schema for Bonhoeffer’s various comments on religion. Religious structures order and mediate relations among creatures and between creatures and their God. These structures are necessary. Every society has some set of mechanisms in place for mediating relations. Religious structures can be inhabited more or less well. When these structures are engaged with a religious disposition, the structure’s mediating purpose is twisted so that others become means to a person’s own ends. Only the disposition of faith, itself a gift from God, permits genuine and loving encounters with others. This schema permits the claim that receiving the sacraments motivates religionlessness; this as opposed to a more often heard claim that the sacraments are victims of religionlessness. Locating the sacraments among religious structures, as opposed to dispositions, demonstrates how sacraments can endure in a religionless setting. The sacraments, like all religious structures, could be corrupted beyond recognition. In such circumstances, religionlessness could mean that the sacraments would need to be replaced by some other mediating structure to order what the sacraments can no longer order well. Christ’s presence and agency in the sacraments, however, resists this potential outcome. The sacraments are not corrupted so thoroughly that Christ who is present and active in the sacraments cannot affect their function even in the face of the most horrendous human distortions. Instead, religionlessness, as a faithful form of life before God, can only be instantiated among those who gather to receive an encounter with the God who is present in the sacraments to overcome the false and self-securing idols that those gathered in the church bring with them. This chapter focuses on five such false and self-securing idols. Ethics and the prison correspondence unmask five key religious dispositions exposed by Bonhoeffer’s critique of religion. In place of these dispositions and the 127

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structures they corrupt, religionless forms of life emerge that are faithful to the reality the church comes to know through the sacraments: Christ is Lord.1 Through Bonhoeffer’s reflections on religion and religionlessness, he finds that the church embodies beliefs that (1) the world is in a position to accept creaturely responsibility for itself; (2) the conscience is a poor substitute for the voice of the living God heard in the church; (3) this world is the proper place for Christian witness and action; (4) receptivity and outwardness should be normative Christian postures; and (5) Christian witness to the world is comprised of prayer and action. In contrast, the religious dispositions Bonhoeffer describes either resist or misapply these beliefs. This chapter argues that, for Bonhoeffer, when read within his Lutheran context and the context of his earlier theology, only receiving the God who is given to the church in the sacraments overcomes the temptation to resist or misapply the five Christian truths just identified. As an example, across the modern world, “religion” was reconceptualized into a category for classification. This reconceptualization often underwrote horrendous political and social projects, even if unintentionally. Bonhoeffer bore witness to the effects of these projects during his life. Religionlessness marks the time for such projects and the structures that undergird them to be set aside and more faithful structures and dispositions instantiated that better conform to the truth Christians come to know through encountering Christ in the sacraments. The last chapter demonstrated how the church can be corrupted by sin and then restored by the God who is revealed through the sacraments. Through attention to Christ in the sacraments, the church is formed to see reality truthfully and live more faithfully. This chapter will, in four parts, describe how Bonhoeffer understands reality and the way in which a Christian should faithfully inhabit the world. The first section examines how the fabrication of religion as a category or genus for phenomena would have detrimental effects when applied among marginalized communities. Bonhoeffer witnessed these effects in America among blacks in Harlem.2 He witnessed these effects in Germany as hostilities escalated against Jews.3 Bonhoeffer’s witness of these atrocities necessitated both his plea to reject religion as it had come to be applied and his call to be religionless. The latter call echoes forth from behind prison bars. Religionlessness means displacing the idols, even those of religion, that secure Christians against and at the expense of others so that Christians can attend to Christ as he is present today: as and among the weak and despised. A second section defends the claim that God is received qua God in the church. The prominent place given to the church in both Ethics and the Tegel letters shows how Bonhoeffer was firmly convinced that his project could not be completed outwith the church. This observation permits the third section to expand on five problematic manifestations of religious

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dispositions and how Bonhoeffer develops alternatives that take form in the church. When located in the context of Bonhoeffer’s corpus and his Lutheran background, the faithful dispositions associated with religionlessness are clearly effects of the sacraments performing the functions which Bonhoeffer believes sacraments to accomplish. This makes it possible to see why Bonhoeffer would explicitly connect religionlessness to the occasion of baptism, as he did in the case of his reflections for his godson’s baptism. For Bonhoeffer, the practice of baptism and the other sacraments make his religionless form of life intelligible. MODERNITY’S USE OF “RELIGION”: RELIGIOUS RELIGION To understand Bonhoeffer’s criticism of religion, it is necessary to see how religion had been deployed in the decades immediately preceding Bonhoeffer’s theological formation and career. It is necessary to acknowledge both that the theological generations immediately preceding Bonhoeffer diverged widely from the tradition, using religion as a genus or category, and that this new category was deployed with great success toward heinous ends.4 Friedrich Schleiermacher characterized religion broadly as that naturally occurring feeling in “every better soul”5 by which a person knows her being to be wholly dependent on the whole of the universe, a feeling only recognized as “religious” once stripped from all particularity even if it is only ever found bedecked in its particular trappings.6 Albrecht Ritschl’s Instruction in the Christian Religion did not follow Schleiermacher in conceiving of religion in the broadest possible, non-particular terms, but it spoke of hierarchies of religion: Christianity claims to be the perfect religion through which “perfect knowledge of God is possible.”7 Other religious expressions are “dim” and “imperfect” attempts to discern what Christianity expresses so well.8 Ritschl treats religion as a category of expression with only a loose account in this essay of what unites these expressions. Adolf von Harnack follows Ritschl. Harnack’s question “What is Christianity?” is offered in service of a larger question: What is religion?9 Christianity remains for him the only religion that continues to stir the depths of our hearts.10 In contrast, Wilhelm Herrmann began his Systematic Theology by making the case for a broad phenomenon of religion of which Christianity is a particular expression.11 He suggests that various instantiations of religion are connected by “seeing the working of a God in the events of life.”12 Each account tries to get behind the concreteness of the Christian tradition to a religious idea that sits behind this tradition. The temptation to get behind the tradition is similar in kind to the temptation faced by Eve to go behind the

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word of God.13 These accounts together reveal why Martin Heidegger might have felt compelled to develop his critical description: Religion in any form is a means by which being seeks to secure itself against history; that is, religions are self-assertions against finitude.14 Religion was created as a category to try and preserve oneself at the expense of others. These pillars of modern theological and philosophical reflection, among a host of others, participate in the broadening of religion into a category from which certain human expressions can be either included or excluded. Paul Tillich is more blatant about this than some. He admits that his task of constructing a category of religion must include the task of articulating a “Protestant principle” not only so that the Protestant principle falls within the category, but also so that such a principle might offer something of a definitive word to other religions when they encounter one another. He is largely untroubled that he is setting up his tradition to win necessarily.15 Being able to name what is or is not “religious” and which religion wins served to protect the interests of the naming party in numerous colonial endeavors, securing parties against history precisely because “what counts as religion and what does not in any given context is contestable and depends on who has the power and authority to define religion at any given time and place.”16The power to categorize can be wielded like a war hammer by others.17 Will Sweetman describes how British colonials used the category of religion to make political space for their own shadow rule in India.18 Japan was compelled to invent State Shinto to combat Western forces seeking to divide the religious and the secular to gain political dominance.19 In contemporary settings, Islam has found itself subjected below Christianity in the hierarchy of religions, and those who inhabit the Muslim world find themselves dehumanized and characterized as barbaric, backward, and violent when contrasted against the so-called peaceableness of Christians and the secular nations they occupy, the United States included.20 The category of religion, invented during the modern era, has been wielded by the powers that be to solidify power and secure the ends of one being against encounters with others. Bonhoeffer was not immune to using religion categorically and in empirical and hierarchical ways, particularly early on.21 However, Bonhoeffer was witness to much of the human tragedy that followed from the state’s deployment of the religious category. During his time in America, he became interested in the plight of the black church.22 African Americans knew what it was to have religion wielded against them as a weapon because for generations they had been whipped, beaten, and even killed as a master’s sacred duty to instill discipline and faith into the African heathen. He also took a particular interest in India and Ghandi’s peaceful revolution against British colonial rule, where Britain had used religion to divide the country to maintain its own shadow rule.

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Yet, Bonhoeffer witnessed tragic uses of religion at home, too. The German Evangelical Church did function (often quite explicitly) to support the monarchy until the Kaiser was exiled after the First World War.23 Mark Correll documents extensively the way in which certain strands of Christianity were levered to bolster specific ideas about what Germany was and should be at the expense of more progressive impulses.24 In the Weimar era, religion and theology did not always help Germans to see past self- or national interest.25 Instead, the Nazi party rose to power in part because of its ability to manipulate such interests using religious language. For example, early on the Nazi party tried to co-opt the Evangelical Church through the German Christians and the concept of a “volk” theology.26 The party did not necessarily pursue this end because Nazi leaders were Christian. On the contrary, evidence suggests a high degree of animosity existed between Nazi leadership and Christianity.27 Rather, the Nazi party found that religion invites hierarchical rhetoric with which a person or social group can place itself over others.28 If x and y are both religions, no necessary barrier exists to prevent comparative religious discourse moving beyond the descriptive to the evaluative. The Nazi party could use this evaluative possibility to dehumanize Jews and other “undesirables” within the public consciousness.29 If this genus concept of religion was constructed, and if it was constructed toward selfish, self-securing ends—a brace against finitude as Heidegger noted—then such a concept and the structures it undergirds are in fundamental opposition to the faithful purpose of religious structures as Bonhoeffer envisions them.30 The genus concept of religion permits, if not encourages, habitation of the world with a religious disposition. Invested in this category of religion, the church too often lacked the resources to resist ideologies of hatred and violence that exploded on the world stage in the twentieth century.31 A new way forward was needed in which the Christian allows her own being and beliefs to be deconstructed, guided by the God manifest in word and sacrament.32 Ethics and the prison correspondence elucidate how Bonhoeffer sees the church inhabiting the war-torn world from faith sans the self-securing, religious impulses that bred such chaos in the first place. It is to this that the next section turns. THE CHURCH IN ETHICS Ethics, to which Bonhoeffer’s book on religionlessness would be a precursor, makes clear that the form of life Bonhoeffer envisions takes form in the church.33 The church’s complicity in idolatry, described above, has not rendered the church’s return to faithful living impossible. Christ’s presence in

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the sacraments preserves these practices from total corruption and therefore the church from utter collapse. Even in the face of the church’s failures in the nineteenth and twentieth century, Bonhoeffer is still counting on renewal. The chapters drafted for Ethics suggest deep ecclesial commitments on Bonhoeffer’s part: “Ethics as formation is possible only on the basis of the form of Jesus Christ present in Christ’s church. The church is the place where Jesus Christ’s taking form is proclaimed and where it happens.”34 Two particular chapters of Ethics, “Heritage and Decay” and “Guilt, Justification, and Renewal,” demonstrate Bonhoeffer’s belief in the ongoing significance of the church and its structures to the mission of Christ to redeem the world. This ongoing belief permits subsequent claims that the practices that shape and form the church are the practices that explain Bonhoeffer’s vision of religionlessness. A Church-enabled Future in “Heritage and Decay” “Heritage and Decay” reads as a litany of the dissolution of religious structures that heretofore governed life in Germany and the West. A secularized misappropriation of Luther and the horror of the French Revolution both witnessed to the Enlightenment “liberation” of human persons to set themselves against others.35 Technology aided humans in their desire to secure themselves against nature.36 Yet, the witness of history is clear: “The desire for absolute freedom leads people into deepest servitude.”37 Such a witness is grounded in a theological point: By liberating herself from others, a person finds herself bound to the violent desire, if not compulsion, to secure herself. Bonhoeffer deems the Western world characterized by its desire for selfsecurity at the expense of others to be “antichurch.”38 This world cannot abide the presence of a community that denies the world is lord of itself.39 Of course, this sort of “godlessness is not the only way to be critical of the church: There is also a “promising godlessness that expresses itself in antireligious and antichurch terms.”40 This latter antichurch expression is disposed differently than the former. Those engaged in this second form of godlessness act in a way that seems to preserve faith—they protest that the church has become too concerned with its own security and survival. They leave the church to act on behalf of another. Even these, however, have not necessarily pressed through from their godlessness to faith. Bonhoeffer senses that beneath this “promising godlessness” lurks a hidden self-righteousness.41 While these godless people leave the church because the church has become corrupted by self-interest, their departure is no less motivated by self-interest. In their godlessness, such people desire to save themselves and remain pure. Faith, in contrast to such godlessness, enters into the church to bear the church’s sin.

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Faith promises, as Bonhoeffer did as a youth when he first proposed to study theology, to see the church reformed.42 Whether godlessness is promising or not, it is godless nonetheless. Only two things may overcome this godlessness, and the second not in full: “the miracle of a new awakening of faith; and the . . . ‘restrainer.’”43 Only Christas-the-church and the state can keep people from throwing themselves into the void of self-interested depravity and nihilism. Yet, only the church creates new life in the face of the void. Despite all the times that the church has given itself over to self-preservation, and all the times the church has failed to speak out on behalf of others, Bonhoeffer declares: The Christian churches stand in the middle of the dissolution of all that exists . . . above all as witnesses to the miracle of God in Jesus Christ “yesterday, today, and forever.” . . . The church must bear witness to Jesus Christ as living lord, and it must do so in a world that has turned away from Christ after knowing him. As bearer of a historical heritage, the church, while waiting for Judgment Day, has an obligation to the historical future. Its vision of the end of all things must not paralyze its historical responsibility. . . . In sticking to its calling—that is, preaching the risen Jesus Christ—the church deals a deadly blow to the spirit of annihilation.44

The church is not somehow ancillary or outside Bonhoeffer’s vision for how the postwar world can be inhabited well. Instead, the witness of the church teaches the world to live well again. A Church-enabled Future in “Guilt, Justification, and Renewal” How, though, does the church learn to live well again, itself? Bonhoeffer summarizes “Heritage and Decay” succinctly: “The counterimage to the human being taken up into the form of Christ is the human being as selfcreator, self-judge, and self-renewer; these people bypass their true humanity and therefore, sooner or later, destroy themselves.”45 Bonhoeffer then asserts that “[t]here is only one way to turn back, and that is acknowledgment of guilt toward Christ.”46 Confessing individual misdeeds is not the aim; rather, a Christian must confess to a general disposition of turning away that breeds dissolution and decay of order and relations.47 She recognizes this decay only when confronted by the truly human form of Christ. Only because Christ is acting to preserve the world can the world come to recognize the folly that would lead to its destruction.48 The encounter with Christ that results in confession takes place is the church.49 Bonhoeffer writes:

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The church is today the community of people who, grasped by the power of Christ’s grace, acknowledge, confess, and take upon themselves not only their personal sins, but also the Western world’s falling away from Jesus Christ as guilt toward Jesus Christ. The church is where Jesus makes his form real in the midst of the world.50

There is no hope for the future of human order and sociality apart from the church in which Jesus Christ is making himself manifest so as to reveal the void of current dis-orderings to turn persons to God and neighbor again in acts of love and service. In recognizing the church’s own sin, as made possible by the sacramental encounter with Christ, the church recognizes simultaneously both the sin around it and its own responsibility for this sin. The church cannot sit and judge the world but regards the world’s sin as its own because that sin is its own: “Looking on this grace of Christ frees us completely from looking at the guilt of others and brings Christians to fall on their knees before Christ with the confession: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”51 Recognizing its complicity in the sin of the world, the church goes to the sacrament: It confesses. Where sin is confessed, reconciliation can occur. Perhaps, even the reconciliation of all things.52 The litany of confession that constitutes the next few pages of Bonhoeffer’s chapter is an effort toward the reconciliation of the church to a great many structures that ought to govern life but which were mangled by sin.53 This confession begins by acknowledging Christians are the sinners: “I cannot pacify myself by saying that my part in all this is slight and hardly noticeable . . . I must acknowledge that my own sin is to blame for all of these things.”54 Each Christian recognizes her own sin as the root of systemic evil. These individuals are collected in the confessing church.55 The church confesses it failed to resist the West’s slide into godlessness in any number of ways.56 In total, the church has betrayed its duty to the structures of state, family, economy, and even church. In the church’s confession, both the church and the individuals in the church are forgiven and justified as Christ takes form among them, directing them outward to re-habituate and rehabilitate the structures the church had betrayed. In this way, “[t]he renewal of the West lies completely in God’s renewal of the church, which leads it into community with the resurrected and living Jesus Christ.”57 The only way for nothingness, the breakdown of sociality into the chaos and nihilism of war, to be overcome is for order and sociality to be resurrected by the presence of Christ in the church. Ethics claims that history and the world are lost without Christ’s presence in the church that confesses guilt in order to turn hearts outward to God and neighbor once again. The church presented in Ethics is one in which religionlessness has

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taken hold already. Religionlessness is what the church looks like shorn of its own lordly pretentions, properly confessing and inhabiting its creatureliness as it looks forward to the reconciliation of all things.58 The fact that the letters on religionlessness post-date the Ethics manuscripts does not change that Bonhoeffer viewed his book on religionlessness as a preface to Ethics.59 The world is renewed through the church, but the church itself needs constant renewal. “Guilt, Justification, and Renewal” makes no explicit mention of sacraments, referencing only the “form of Christ.” The argument to this point is that the church can look in faith to find Christ’s form in the sacraments. There, Christ renews his people. The prison correspondence can then be explained by Christ’s form concretizing in the sacraments to evoke religionless life. RAZING IDOLS AND RAISING THE CHURCH ANEW: SACRAMENTS AND THE TEGEL CORRESPONDENCE The theological letters between Bonhoeffer and his friend and confidant Eberhard Bethge range over a wide number of themes. All these themes converge around one question: Who is Jesus Christ for us today?60 There is not the room in this chapter to trace all these themes. Instead, this chapter will focus on five themes that feature in the prison correspondence: (1) the world-coming-of-age, (2) the failure of conscience, (3) this-worldliness, (4) outwardness, and (5) the suffering Christ at the center of creaturely existence. Each of these themes suggests where Christ is making himself known and the work he is effecting as he reveals himself. Interpreters familiar with Bonhoeffer’s work may wonder at certain omissions on that list. Bonhoeffer repeatedly develops the idea of non-religious interpretation of scripture, for example, and this idea seems very central to the religionless program. However, this idea focuses on Christ as he is present as Word, not as sacrament. Therefore, it will not feature here. The five selected themes demand to be treated as observations for the church regarding its own failures and its return to fidelity via Christ who is found in the sacraments.61 They are meant for the church being conformed to the Christ who gives himself over to the church.62 Evangelical interpreters of Bonhoeffer have often balked at the grammar of religionlessness because it sounds like a kind of anti-pious secularism. Insofar as the prison letters disparage certain habits or forms of life that are common, particularly among conservative evangelicals, their uneasiness with this portion of Bonhoeffer’s theology is appropriate. Therefore, evangelicals have habitually embraced Bonhoeffer as he lays out the demand for total commitment in Discipleship and then subsequently turn aside at the prison

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letters. However, the unity of Bonhoeffer’s theology does not permit this: Discipleship means commitment to Christ whose call is the substance of religionlessness. Far from laying out a secularized Christianity, Bonhoeffer is describing Christ taking shape in the church in the world as the church is formed through word and sacrament. Evangelicals must stop averting their gaze from this segment of Bonhoeffer’s writings; they must learn to hear him again even if he calls them to the painful work of upsetting idols in their midst and engaging in reform. If evangelicals want to claim Bonhoeffer, they must listen too to the claim he makes on them. Little is gained by attempts to read the letters chronologically. Bonhoeffer’s letters are much more ad hoc and occasional than this. Instead, this section lays these themes out as systematically as possible with minimal regard for when letters were written. The hope is that such an approach makes possible a fuller appreciation for the complex of ideas associated with religionlessness. Certain historical instances—such as bombing raids, visits from family, death of friends, or news of his students—do influence what Bonhoeffer is writing about, but more so in a manner that prompts a particular theme rather than determining the content of that theme. Sacraments make only occasional appearances in the prison correspondence, and even rarer still in reference to religionlessness or the theological program Bonhoeffer is undertaking.63 While Bonhoeffer acknowledges that the cultus is caught up in this theological program in some way, this is far and away the least developed trajectory of the extant prison correspondence.64 However the role of the cultus is parsed, and whatever is made of Bonhoeffer’s lack of direct and open speech about the sacraments in these letters, the arcane discipline factors in because the church’s public witness does not appeal to the sacraments as if they should be genuinely and publicly accessible; the church simply lives from what it knows as a result of encountering Christ in the sacraments.65 The prison letters are not directly about the sacraments; nevertheless, given Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran context and his own churchy way of knowing, the sacraments make the theology they contain—and the life they envision—intelligible. The argument of this section is that the church’s engagement of the sacraments invites Christians back to creaturely reflection and faithful habitation, the likes of which serve simultaneously to convict the world and invite the world in from its godlessness. Each subsection to this part of the chapter includes an account of how the content of religionlessness is born out of the church’s engagement with the sacraments and demonstrates how themes of religionlessness follow from faith being instilled, sustained, located, and vitalized by reception of the sacraments. Doing this lays the ground for the next chapter to unpack how Bonhoeffer talks about religionlessness in light of the message he sends his godson on the occasion of baptism. A sustained

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analysis of that particular message will make a more direct case for the ability of the sacraments to explain religionlessness. Despite assertions to the contrary, Metaxas is unlikely correct that Bonhoeffer would have left prison, “sobered up,” and left this way of thinking behind.66 In what follows, Bonhoeffer succeeds in exposing with piercing clarity some of the many idols that led to the failure of the church in Germany and the West. To the degree that the American Evangelical Church may still be complicit in worshipping at the feet of some of these idols and thereby perpetuating a poor Christian witness, Bonhoeffer challenges the American church to confess and so come to faith again. Accepting Responsibility for Itself: The World Coming of Age From Ethics it becomes clear that the church’s act of confession serves as the only way back to God for a world falsely confident enough to assert its own lordship.67 That misplaced self-confidence is what Bonhoeffer denotes from prison as the world’s coming of age.68 In acknowledgment of their failure as lords, Christians confessed their rebellion against God and their idolatry. Bonhoeffer believes that it is by means of the sacramental encounter with Christ in confession that Christians are confronted with the God who is, not the god of their willing. In this encounter, Christians’ faith is instilled in the only deity worthy of faith: the Triune God who, in Christ, overcame death and who can therefore fulfill the promises of redemption and reconciliation which sacraments bear. For Bonhoeffer, only confession—an event in which the Christian is turned outward in faith through an encounter with the God who is—can open up the possibility of faithful autonomy in a world bent on rebellion and self-assertion. If the central question of the prison letters is “who is Jesus Christ for us today?” then the central phenomenon which gives rise to this question is the world’s coming of age. Bonhoeffer scholarship can generally agree on what it means for the world to come of age, but it divides sharply on how this happening is to be regarded. First, this section will discuss what it means for the world to have come of age and the fallacious God the world rejects in its maturation. Second, it will discuss whether this maturation is a positive or negative development, arguing that it might be both simultaneously depending on the disposition with which a person inhabits the world coming of age. The Shape of the World Coming of Age and the Deus ex Machina Who Made It Possible The world’s coming of age is occasioned by its recognition that the world no longer needs God to function or explain itself.69 Science, politics, and culture

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all order life without the need to invoke God either to justify themselves or to perform their duties.70 Even so-called “religious” questions—death, guilt, and so on—can now be explained to the satisfaction of many without the God hypothesis.71 Humans have achieved a degree of conscious autonomy, functioning perfectly well without God. This autonomy means that the idea of God that previously dominated Christian relations with these social structures or ultimate questions is no longer necessary. Bonhoeffer calls this God the “god of the gaps”: Religious people speak of God at a point where human knowledge is at an end (or sometimes when they’re too lazy to think further), or when human strength fails. Actually, it’s a deus ex machina that they’re always bringing on the scene, either to appear to solve insoluble problems or to provide strength when human powers fail, thus always exploiting human weakness or human limitations. Inevitably that lasts only until human beings become powerful enough to push the boundaries a bit further and God is no longer needed as deus ex machina.72

God, as the church has employed God, has existed at the boundaries humanity established. In coming of age, the world has pushed through those boundaries and therefore pushed God, thusly conceived, out of the world.73 This phenomenon, of course, says nothing about God; even so, it says a great deal about the posture of those who conceived such a god. God has never intended to be the solution to human problems. God intends to be Lord. Assessing the Phenomenon Now, is this coming of age to be regarded positively, negatively, or both of these together? This question is necessitated precisely because its answer will determine how God’s lordship is conceived in relation to this world. Bonhoeffer scholarship has a long history with this problem. More recently, Matthew Kirkpatrick brazenly declares that “[f]or Bonhoeffer, the concept of the ‘world come of age’ is clearly positive.”74 This has not always been so clear to others. Barry Harvey, on the opposite side, mourns that the world’s insistence on autonomy is a disastrous breach of what it means to be human.75 Other treatments split the difference or attempt to sidestep the question.76 The assertion that Bonhoeffer unconditionally accepted the world’s coming of age as a positive development is misguided. Harvey’s work sufficiently devastates the possibility of those interpretations by demonstrating the negative implications of this development as Bonhoeffer perceives them.77 Yet, Harvey’s negative account of the historical phenomenon is not nuanced enough. Opportunities for faithfulness abound.78

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A more nuanced understanding of Bonhoeffer’s assessment of the world’s coming of age is needed. Noting the distinction between religious and faithful dispositions affords the opportunity to offer such an account. The world has learned to live autonomously, and there is no getting back behind that development. Yet, that autonomy may take two forms: either religious, sicut deus autonomy or faithful, free, creaturely autonomy.79 The former manifestation of autonomy, by and large the dominant manifestation in the world come of age, is unadulterated godlessness. But the possibility remains for an autonomy that acknowledges God’s lordship of creation, recognizes Christ’s place at the center of all creaturely encounters, and acts autonomously from the freedom Christ’s lordship enables. This kind of autonomy faithfully engages the structures that order life together. Both autonomies coexist within Bonhoeffer’s description of the new world. The World Coming of Age; the World Falling Away The world coming of age no longer takes recourse to God to explain what the world cannot explain or to do what it cannot do. The world finds that it has pushed the boundaries of its existence such that it can explain and do what needs said and done for it to get by perfectly well without resorting to the God hypothesis.80 The world has reached a tipping point where human activities can be conducted more or less as if God did not exist. There is a way for this tipping point to be regarded positively, but this tipping point can also reveal a sinful breech between humanity and God that should not pass unacknowledged and unconfessed. In Creation and Fall, Bonhoeffer describes humans posturing as if they were sicut deus, like God.81 Echoes of this anxiety can be found in the letters about the world’s coming of age, too. Bonhoeffer describes this posturing and the church’s common response to it. Where Bonhoeffer criticizes the church’s response and where he does not are both very telling. Bonhoeffer writes: “The historical views of both Catholics and Protestants agree that this development must be seen as the great falling-away from God.”82 If Bonhoeffer were to follow Dilthey unreservedly, as for Wüstenberg and Kirkpatrick, Bonhoeffer would raise his objection here.83 Yet, this is not a point Bonhoeffer chooses to dispute. Instead, he continues: “The world, now that it has become conscious of itself and the laws of its existence, is sure of itself in a way that it is becoming uncanny (unheimlich) for us.”84 Even when the world no longer seems to function—as certainly seemed the case for Bonhoeffer writing from a prison as the Second World War raged, and Jews and other so-called “non-persons” were systematically annihilated—the world refuses to give up its optimism.85 From the “uncanny” perspective of the godless world, these are mere failures, imperfections, or bumps in the

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road.86 What they are not is something for which the world might need to confess. Instead, the world continues oblivious to its transgressions as it seeks more knowledge, more technology, or more progress of any kind. All in the vain hope to secure the world against the God who confronts it both with the law of its finitude and the promise that the future will be secured by God. The unbridled commitment to progress and autonomy that Bonhoeffer describes here is the homo sicut deus writ across the world stage. That Bonhoeffer should term this a “self-confidence” (Selbstsicherheit) is direct evidence of godlessness.87 Confidence is only rightly vested in God. Even when Bonhoeffer acknowledges that “the world come of age is more god-less and perhaps just because of that closer to God than the world not yet come of age,” he still speaks only of the possibility for godlessness to turn into faithfulness.88 He does not endorse godlessness as such. Therefore, the world’s coming of age is not to be de facto regarded as a positive historical development, even if it cannot be reversed. The world must proceed from its brokenness on to reconciliation.89 Reconciliation is made possible by confession.90 A letter dated July 16 again takes up the theme of responding to the world coming of age. Bonhoeffer now acknowledges the possibilities afforded to the church by this historical moment. The way forward is “through repentance, through ultimate honesty.”91 The way forward is through confession. The Christian learns from confession that she is God’s creature.92 It is by God’s design that Christians live in the world as if there is no God.93 By coming to this recognition through the encounter with the God revealed as a weak and powerless Christ on the cross, a different kind of autonomy is achieved than that of the homo sicut deus. This is the creaturely autonomy of free responsibility—of the Christian set free from the bondage of selfwilling to subject herself to the needs of the world.94 Harvey describes faithful autonomy in this way: The cross sets us free to live in genuine worldliness before God in the middle of this godless world. This profound worldliness, which only exists because of the proclamation of the cross of Christ, liberates us from the delusion that is the self-deifying of the world precisely because it overcomes the tensions, conflicts, and divisions that exist between what is “Christian” and what is “worldly.” The members of Christ’s body are set free to a single-minded action and life in faith within the ambit of what God has already accomplished in the reconciliation made possible by the cross.95

Christians do not need a god of the gaps, a projection of strength in the face of human frailty as Feuerbach so elegantly diagnosed the problem.96 By faith, Christians acknowledge that each exists for the sake of others while

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their own beings are secured by the Christ who exists pro me. Christians witness to Christ not by trumpeting the power of God but by emulating God’s willingness to suffer for the world’s sake, giving themselves over to the world unreservedly to inhabit it with all the strength and vigor they can muster to bear the sin and guilt of the world, and to be present with words of absolution. Conscience: The Last, Desperate Cry of the Self The world’s coming of age is not a purely positive development, even if it does open up the possibility for the church to recognize its freedom to inhabit the world for the sake of others under the lordship of the suffering Christ. The main reason to be skeptical of the world’s coming of age is that the autonomy this development seeks is entirely self-reliant and selfreferential. By freeing itself from God, this world tries to secure itself for the sake of itself. Desiring autonomy of this kind, far from the autonomy of creatures living their lives responsibly before God, is a sinful product of the cur curvum in se. Bonhoeffer has long been aware of the way in which the conscience facilitates these sinful desires for self-security.97 His concern takes on renewed force in the prison correspondence. However, critique is not the last word. While the conscience facilitates the self-reliance and selfassertion of the world’s coming of age, Bonhoeffer offers an alternative moral resource: corporate discernment within the body born from baptism and the Lord’s Supper. As has been shown, Bonhoeffer closely connects conscience and religion. The conscience justified Adam and Eve’s religious, un-creaturely posture toward the lordship of God in Creation and Fall, and conscience continues to facilitate this rebellious religion.98 Such religion has lost its cultural force, however. Acknowledging this loss is not to say that this kind of religion does not still occur. It is all too common for persons to put off the encounter with God by listening to their own ideas, cloaked as God’s voice, heard in the conscience. Anyone who has sat in on many church business meetings knows this to be the case. Even so, Bonhoeffer says that the religion of conscience has lost its force: It is no longer necessary to self-deceptively maintain the conscience’s role as the voice of God.99 Humans can and do own their godlessness with a great deal more self-assurance.100 A person does not need a conscience to tell her to do what she wants as if God were telling her to do it. She can simply assert herself. No one will balk at the demonstration of self-confidence and strength. So the time of religion, the time of conscience has passed; the world is coming of age.101 The conscience and morality are not one of the last remaining gaps into which God can be smuggled. Instead, conscience is one of the last mechanisms by which human beings in their

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godlessness deceive themselves even as the need for self-deception passes away. It is therefore surprising that the overwhelming majority of occasions in which conscience language appears in the Tegel correspondence concern a clean or good conscience. Bonhoeffer’s prayers for prisoners include one reference to a clear conscience as a gift from God for those who do good.102 In addition, Bonhoeffer says that he does not regret the decision to return to Germany from America but that this decision was made with the “best conscience.”103 The presence of such references is unexpected. The conscience has little theological validation from Bonhoeffer until this point. These references require closer attention to the subtleties of Bonhoeffer’s criticism of the conscience. For Bonhoeffer, it is not the case that the religious structure has been corrupted beyond use and must be disposed of. Rather, the time in which godlessness was sustained by a religious twisting of the conscience has passed.104 Bonhoeffer’s positive references to conscience suggest that there is merit in being at peace with yourself and your own decisions, but even if this is the case, the conscience still cannot be regarded as some kind of a priori mechanism by which human beings have in themselves direct, unmediated access to God. Appealing to such unmediated access is the means by which humans set themselves up in place of God.105 Conscience is a religious, mediating structure that is routinely inhabited poorly by those who wish to use it to force their will upon God. Bonhoeffer understands that the conscience is not necessarily inhabited in this manner, but the conscience is markedly susceptible to this kind of manipulation.106 “After Ten Years,” an essay Bonhoeffer wrote for the conspirators, helps explain why. In one section, paralleled in Ethics, Bonhoeffer queries a series of mechanisms for ethical discernment, including conscience, for their ability to both read reality rightly and respond to evil. Bonhoeffer rejects them all save his category of “obedient and responsible action.” In the conscience one is listening to one’s own voice. One person on his own will not be up to the challenge of reading and responding to the times; such a person “is torn apart” by the sheer complexity of the world and ultimately settles for a salved—which is to say, self-deceived—conscience in place of a good one without ever thinking to entertain the possibility that a bad conscience could be the most proper course of all. The conscience can tempt persons to halfmeasures and false ideals rather than encountering persons with the call of Christ. Because of this shocking susceptibility, Bonhoeffer posits that “consent, commission, recognition by another person is more convincing than a good conscience.”107 Acknowledgment becomes the moral mechanism by which the Christian’s religious idea of God is un-conceived. Practicing communal discernment helps to ensure that any Christian’s own idea of God or of God’s

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will does not proceed without inspection. Rather than justifying herself through the conscience, the Christian recognizes that it is the willing reception of her action by another that justifies a deed. Only when the Christian’s love is received and acknowledged as love can the Christian believe she has acted in love. Where loving-kindness is not acknowledged by those who are meant to be loved, the Christian may do well to question whether loving-kindness has indeed been extended. For example, the common maxim that one ought to “love the sinner and hate the sin” seems to breed an atmosphere of selfjustification far too commonly: “I do not recognize that I have failed to love you in the way we have encountered one another, therefore your inability to recognize my love must be a result of your love of sin.” The burden of proof must be shifted, however, such that if love is not received I must confess that I have not learned yet how to love you. Communal discernment, when contextualized in Bonhoeffer’s previous sacramentology, is an effect of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. From baptism, the Christian receives that she has been initiated into a community that shares the responsibility of receiving the word and discerning how to navigate the world. In infant baptism, the Christian is received into this community even prior to the possibility of her having an idea of God that might stand in place of the true deity.108 The Supper becomes the ongoing practice during which God confronts the Christian with God’s own will for a community of love.109 The Supper directs the Christian to those persons, drawn to the same Table, whom she is responsible to love. At the Table, she does not justify herself to God or choose who will be her neighbor but rather receives her commission and its concrete referent. This Lutheran context explains how corporate discernment is borne from baptism and the Supper. This context also suggests how confession determines the manner in which loving relationships are navigated. Too often, the Christian knows she is responsible to love but does not know the way. The conscience, because it remains internal to oneself, is incapable of healing the wounds inflicted by faltering attempts at love; self-satisfaction with good intentions is insufficient. Rather than justifying the Christian’s failures by appeal to intended goods, the Christian confesses her failures to the wounded party before God.110 In confession and absolution, the Christian learns to love the other in a manner he or she can receive.111 American evangelicals structure their worship to appeal to the conscience in any number of ways. Direct appeals to one’s conscience before God are routine components of altar calls. Often, prayer is conducted with eyes closed and ears shut to those nearby so that the individual can be left alone before God. Frustrations are often expressed that “God did not speak to me” on any given Sunday. In light of these habits and beliefs formed in worship, it is imperative that evangelicals reassess how their worship can be made more

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corporate. After all, God does not choose to meet Christians at some quasimystical, unembodied location known as conscience. God chooses to be revealed through Christ. Christ embodies himself in and as the church. God is encountered in hearing and seeing and responding to other Christians gathered for worship. That encounter has to be more than the cordial handshake when welcoming one another or passing the peace, though it should at least be that. Alternative forms of worship that might more fully express the embodiment of Christ to facilitate corporate discernment will be discussed in the next chapter, but for now it is important only to recognize that worship must be a place where ideas and plans are tested and proven or discarded because of the way the body of Christ receives those ideas. And when a Christian is left wondering what God said to her for a service, perhaps a reminder is due that Christians worship to serve, not to be served. While one should want to and expect to hear from God, if one does not then perhaps that Sunday it mattered less what one heard than what one said to another. In summary, ideas of God, reiterated to a person within her conscience, serve to justify a great deal of sin and a woeful lack of love. As a mediating structure, the conscience may retain some utility, but this utility must also be checked against the conscience’s limits. For Bonhoeffer, those checks come in encounters with the true God revealed in word and sacrament, and in the wisdom and discernment of those with whom word and sacrament place Christians in community. Corporate discernment within a community of love that encounters and receives God in the sacraments serves as a necessary complement to the conscience, twisted as it has been by its treatment as a religious a priori. The Christian does not need the conscience when she has the baptized community. This community will challenge the Christian’s own ideas, open her back up to the word and call of God, and help her in the exercise of her responsibility for those she is placed in communion with at the Table. When the Christian fails in her exercise of this responsibility, confession before God restores communion. Confession is preferable to conscience because the latter might be used more readily by the Christian to assert herself against her neighbor and her community instead of receiving the truth that her actions have done harm. This-worldliness The conscience, even the good conscience, is best relativized by practice of communal discernment. Then the Christian’s task is to discern how to navigate this world. Discernment is necessary in this world because it is the church’s responsibility to inhabit this world freely and graciously. For created, creaturely beings, the earth is home and home will never be transcended.112 A desire to leave this world for heavenly bliss, pious as it

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may be, is nevertheless an abdication of responsibility and a mis-location of desire. Indeed, even “what is beyond this world is meant, in the gospel, to be there for this world.”113 An emphasis on this-worldliness is a Eucharistic contribution to a religionless form of life marked both by an appreciation for the good gifts of God in the world and by a willingness to suffer with those who suffer. The logical foundation for Bonhoeffer’s conclusion that even the beyond is there for this world is found in the sacramental elements themselves. Bread, wine, water, and sociality are the everyday elements of life itself.114 These are where God deems fit to be found. Christ’s earthly, all-too-human body is celebrated in Discipleship in explicit connection to the earthly elements of water and blood. These elements are subsequently connected to baptism and the Lord’s Supper as the sacraments that forge and maintain the fellowship of Christ’s body in and for the world.115 All three sacraments have a role to play in describing this-worldliness, and all three will be alluded to. However, the sacrament of bread and wine is a particularly fitting expression of what Bonhoeffer means by this-worldliness. This-worldliness is more than a repudiation of escapism, though it is at least that.116 As a concept, thisworldliness also suggests how this world is inhabited. For Bonhoeffer, proper this-worldliness is marked by gratitude and suffering. Gratitude and suffering combine as the church “becomes a community of prayer, of thanksgiving, and of petition” in the Lord’s Supper as a fractured body is lifted up.117 Bonhoeffer argued throughout his career that Christians should be present to this world. Deciding how Christians should be present proved more frustrating. By Bonhoeffer’s own account, the problem of Christian habitation of the world vexed him from shortly after his return from Union Seminary through to his time in prison.118 Discipleship was written as a means of addressing the problem, though he wished perhaps to modify that answer toward the end of his life.119 Bonhoeffer recognizes how, in Discipleship, faithful habitation of the world is presented as something of a saintly, pious life.120 By striving to become more and more conformed to Christ, Christians learn to have faith, which is to live in the world well. In prison, Bonhoeffer suggests: “One only learns to have faith by living in the full this-worldliness of life. If one has completely renounced making something of oneself . . . then one throws oneself completely into the arms of God, and this is what I call this-worldliness.”121 From the perspective of prison, making oneself into the image of Christ is something Bonhoeffer no longer deems prudent if it is even possible. Like the critique of conscience, this-worldliness is a counter to selfjustifying impulses that undergird the false autonomy of the world coming of age. The invitation to live in the world is an invitation to be remade. The Christian learns to live both with trust in God to secure the present and future,

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and directed outward toward those whose sin and suffering the Christian ignored while on the threshold of sainthood. Living in this world, she is no longer obsessed with overcoming her finitude by her righteousness. She lives with concern for the present suffering of God and neighbor. Bonhoeffer defines this-worldliness as “living fully in the midst of life’s tasks, questions, successes and failures, experiences, and perplexities.”122 That is, the Christian is concerned with the very stuff of life. There is no God at the boundaries of human experience to whom Christians direct attention to escape from the complexities that plague the center of worldly existence. Everything toilsome, everything tedious, everything everyday is a matter of concern: “and this is how one becomes a human being, a Christian.”123 To be Christian is to care deeply about the things that constitute earthy, everyday life. There are two ways in which Christians respond to the world: gratitude and love. Gratitude is born out of acknowledgment of the good gifts Christians receive from God within this world. There is nothing pious or holy about refusing to enjoy that which God gives Christians to enjoy.124 On the contrary, such a refusal indicates a lack of proper piety: By refusing to be grateful, the Christian assumes to know better than God what makes for human flourishing and growth in godliness. By refusing to accept God’s good gifts gratefully, the Christian adopts a religious posture over and against God.125 Proper worldliness does not only accept the good, however; worldliness also accepts the bad.126 To accept only the good would reveal the “shallow and banal this-worldliness of the enlightened, the bustling, the comfortable, or the lascivious.”127 A genuinely Christian this-worldliness remains simultaneously cognizant of both death and resurrection.128 The Christian recognizes and responds to the suffering of God in the suffering of her neighbors. It is significant that others’ sufferings are of primary importance here. Gratitude sits alongside love as opposed to, say, endurance or strength. Bonhoeffer, himself, was quite uneasy when others pointed at his own sufferings.129 It is true that the church community should be no stranger to suffering. Each member was admitted to the church only by death precisely because she suffered the encounter and claim of faith and baptism.130 That said, a community member’s own sufferings are not the member’s immediate concern. As a community of loving hearts, each member’s concern is directed toward the well-being of other members and the world. Each member considers her own sufferings nothing in comparison to the riches gained in Christ, instead considering the ordeals of others her responsibility to bear up to God as all creation waits for its redemption “into the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:18–19). Suffering with and on behalf of others makes one a Christian, Bonhoeffer writes, not some act of religion.131 Dismissing religion in this way is not to

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discount the ways in which cultic acts facilitate the Christian’s awareness of and willingness to bear other’s suffering. From a Lutheran perspective, sacraments should still be understood as the means by which the Christian’s heart is turned outward so that she might love her neighbor received into the church at baptism and located next to her as God calls them both to a common Table.132 Confession reconciles those within the baptized community whose love had faltered.133 Act and Being made the case that Christians can only read the world rightly from within Christ, as those who received word and sacrament in the church and gladly accepted these claims as gifts from God.134 Now it is clear that participation in religious structures does not make one a Christian; the faithful disposition to receive the other as a gift through these structures, a disposition which is itself a gift from God, makes one a Christian. Evangelical piety is prone to other-worldliness, and this must be addressed. Evangelicals struggle to take environmentalism seriously due to an eschatology that insists the earth doesn’t matter anyways. Many evangelical strains struggle, though many more have worked hard to overcome this line of thinking, with a belief that evangelism is strictly about the work of saving souls for heaven and that any work done (or money spent) on helping those with material needs is a wasteful distraction. Unfortunately, evangelical worship has ways of reinforcing those poor pieties, too. Liturgical theologian Susan Marie Smith describes a scenario in which worship leaders were planning a service all about kneeling before God but who were shocked this kneeling might need to be embodied in an actual, physical act.135 The body did not matter, only the posture of the spirit. “Evangelistic” services are often designed to convict sinners of their sin and direct convicted souls to God, but such services rarely think it within their purview to point sinners toward institutions that can help meet material needs. However, the God who calls people together at the Table calls for them to care for one another in every manner. God calls Christians to treat even the most basic and earthly realities as conveyors of the sacred. God, through Christian worship, is calling Christians into the world not out of it. Therefore, evangelicals should strongly probe how their own liturgical habits might conflict with the call of Christ to a discipleship in and for this world, and consider ways in which their praxis can be modified to accord more closely to Christ’s commission. This-worldliness is not reducible to materialism, and certainly not hedonism.136 Christian this-worldliness means to live as though the stuff of this life, the things that shape life for good and ill, is the stuff of God. Thisworldliness is to be concerned about this life because God is concerned about this life, to bear the cares and joys of the world to God and to return to the world with God’s words of blessing and/or absolution. This-worldliness is to throw oneself into the penultimate trusting that God secures the ultimate.137 This knowledge of the future is not obvious, but is known in faith through

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the promises given by God and received in the form of sacraments. Through the sacraments, the Christian comes to believe that God holds the future secure—this is the ultimate promise—and because the ultimate has been determined, the penultimate may be inhabited faithfully at last. The Christian is not trying to escape the world; she is not trying to save the world.138 She merely receives the world as it is, its good and its bad, as the place wherein her freedom is rightly exercised. Bread and wine are gratefully received as gifts. The Eucharistic elements, as with all good things in the world, are received gratefully by the church. The church then shares bread and wine with those who are in need. Bread and wine locate faith back in this world, next to the Christian’s neighbors, because bread and wine are simultaneously the stuff of life and the stuff of God. “Only the Suffering God Can Help” Christians, with gratitude for the good gifts God provides and loving-kindness with and for those who suffer, are thrown back into the world for the sake of the world. This-worldly responsibility takes shape around the suffering of Christ for the world. As those who know the world through word and sacrament, Christians no longer secure themselves over and against the world—whether by means of their own idea of God, their conscience, or their blatant godlessness—but bear witness to God and to God’s promise that the future is held securely in assurance that all things shall be redeemed and renewed. Until the penultimate gives way to the ultimate, the church exists to bind the wounds of the world and to stand in the place of those who suffer.139 In the suffering of God, Christians are drawn back to God and neighbor and given the freedom to suffer themselves. Christians are united one to another. The Lord’s Supper is the place where Christ gives himself over to the world time and time again, the place where suffering and unity are combined. In receiving bread and wine, a Christian receives Christ and is united to the suffering Lord who gives himself to sustain the Christian’s whole self.140 At the Table, the Christian is also united to her neighbor. Receiving Christ, she also receives those who kneel beside her.141 They become her responsibility to love and bear if for no reason other than that Christ loves and bears them. Because they are in the church, all Christians who take the Supper are additionally received as co-laborers.142 These Christians also share in Christ’s suffering in the world. In the church, Christians are doubly bonded as both those for whom one expresses love and those with whom one expresses love. Having found their lives secured by Christ in the form of those with whom the Supper is shared, this united group of Christians moves from the church into the world bearing witness to the suffering of God who is the only hope for the world’s redemption and reconciliation.

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Bonhoeffer intimates to Bethge that the suffering Christ is really the beginning point for a discussion of “worldly interpretation” or religionless Christianity.143 The historical development of the world’s coming of age and all that this development calls into question only serves to prompt the larger question: Who is Christ for us today? Where is Christ located? As whom does he encounter us? Of course, this question is not an invitation to determine or limit where Christ is to be found; rather, it is an invitation to acknowledge where Christ is present to the world even if that location proves unsettling. Christ, in the world come of age, is found “pushed out of the world and onto the cross; God is weak and powerless in the world and in precisely this way, and only so, is at our side and helps us.”144 This is “the God of the Bible, who gains ground and power in the world by being powerless.”145 Christ is the Christ of the cross: weak, marginalized, and brutalized, and redeeming the world even so. The poem “Christians and Heathens” establishes a theological basis for understanding how the suffering of God in the world proves a unitive force.146 Several key points are made in these stanzas. First, the subject of the poem moves from Christians and heathens, to Christians, and back to both. Christians and pagans are united in their attempt to go to God in their weakness. Only Christians find the God who suffers with and for them and do not turn away. Heathens balk when Christ does not comport with their idea of God. Even so, God suffers for both. The second thing to be observed in this poem is the nature of Christ’s suffering: He undertakes his kenosis even unto death on a cross. Christ’s suffering in the world is not his own suffering; his suffering is the suffering of others. Christ’s suffering is the guilt and sin of the world he takes to himself and bears up to God as his own. Christ does not suffer from the edge of human knowing and being but at the very center of human life he is claimed by creation and responds by gifting himself to creation until there is nothing more to give. In the language of the poem, Christ is without bread or shelter. He is the true human. Third, in this poem Christians find that “like Christ, they have to drink the cup of earthly life to the last drop, and only when they do this is the Crucified and Risen One with them, and they are crucified and resurrected with Christ.”147 Christians suffer with and beside Christ. They, too, give themselves in service to the world. This service is their conversion, their metanoia: “not thinking first of one’s own needs, questions, sins, and fears but allowing oneself to be pulled into walking the path that Jesus walks, into the messianic event . . . this life of participating in God’s powerlessness in the world.”148 By participating in the messianic event, the life of God’s powerlessness, the church becomes the means by which, in the language of the poem, “God goes to all people.” The point is not that Christians should be

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like Christ. Christians are not striving to make themselves into this or that.149 Rather, the willingness of Christians to take up the burdens of the world reveals that Christians have been conformed to Christ by Christ already.150 Through Christ, Christians are united to the entire world by following Christ as he is united to the world—not standing apart from it but giving themselves completely over to the world, not to transform it, but to bear it until God transforms it at the last. Here, again, evangelical worship might pause to reconsider certain practices or certain grammars common to evangelical worship. For example, evangelicals speak often of the “power” of the cross, but the powerlessness of the one on the cross bears just as much if not more emphasis. Indeed, churches would do well to present Christ not as the one who solves a Christian’s problems but as the one who enters into and bears that struggle with the Christian. Evangelicals can offer no more powerful message to those who struggle with the complexities and viscitudes of modern living than to say, “Christ is with you, and so am I.” Yet, Christ does not only bear the struggles of the world, he also bears the world’s sin. Here, evangelical grammar might be especially in need of adjustment. Rather than condemning sin from the pulpit, ministers might want to consider how they can use their time in front of the congregation to bear the sins of their congregants. How can those sins be passed from congregants to one another and the minister and ultimately to Christ for absolution? And how can sin be not merely condemned but how can Christians be exhorted to actively sacrifice in the face of these sins? Bonhoeffer famously posited that a time may come when Christians need to fall between the spokes of the wheel to disrupt the status quo. Less frequently noted is that the language Bonhoeffer uses presupposes that Christians will fail in that endeavor and yet their witness, their creative disruption, is precisely what is needed. Christians cannot save the world, but they must sacrifice to make the world more bearable. Part of the task of worship can and must be the work of corporate discernment to discover how Christ is calling Christians to sacrifice and suffer with and on behalf of their neighbors. But they can only do so if they are reminded that they have already passed through death into life through their baptism. More on how evangelicals can worship in a manner that recalls their baptism will be said in the next chapter. Christ binds Christians to this world. Christian responsibility for the world takes the form of participating in the suffering of Christ. Christ deems to be present to and for the world, only to suffer the world’s rejection and be pushed to the cross. All those looking to find relief from the burdens of finitude go looking for Christ. Only Christians see Christ suffering on the cross and are not dissuaded. Instead, they move toward Christ and so suffer alongside him witnessing to the ultimate redemption of the world which

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Christ’s suffering will eventually bring about. Christians find their life in broken bread that breaks them. Thereby they are transformed into creatures who may extend life to others. Contextualizing this aspect of Bonhoeffer’s theology of religionlessness within his Lutheran sacramentology suggests that Christians come to know Christ as broken and powerless through the Lord’s Supper. Because the Lord’s Supper reveals Christ to Christians in this way, the faith of those Christians who take bread and wine is vitalized. Christians are moved beyond themselves to care for the suffering of Christ and the world through their prayer and action. A Time for Prayer and Action Christians must engage the world through their participation in the suffering of Christ in and for the world. Bonhoeffer perceives that acknowledging and sharing in the suffering of God in this world becomes the occasion for free and responsible human action. God is given over to the world, pushed by its godlessness onto the cross, and there acts to redeem and reconcile the world. Christian life means following God into the world and onto the cross in faithful obedience, to the end that faithful habitation of the world reveals the world’s godlessness and Christ’s reconciling love. Christians witness to Christ’s redemptive suffering through their own participation in the world’s ills with prayer and acts of loving kindness. Prayer and action are the last of religionlessness’ essential themes that will be discussed in this chapter. Together, prayer and action indicate the necessity to hold simultaneously to the horizontal and vertical elements of faithful, this-worldly habitation. The manner in which the vitalization of Christian faith is envisioned by Bonhoeffer in the prison correspondence is inconceivable without paying attention to relations in both planes, resisting accounts of prayer that would be private, inward, or “spiritual” at the expense of the outward and worldly. Christians pray with open eyes.151 In his outline for a book, Bonhoeffer concludes that the church is only the church when it exists for others: “The church must participate in the worldly tasks of life in the community—not dominating but helping and serving.”152 Having written early on to his nephew, Hans-Walter, that the most important “question for the future” is what ways people will find to live together again, Bonhoeffer now asks himself how the church will live within the godlessness of the world for the sake of the world.153 Bonhoeffer’s letters conceive of the church’s embodied witness in worship unmasking and resisting the godlessness of the world. Bonhoeffer’s reinterpretation of the resurrection is key. More common accounts of resurrection invite their readers to look beyond death and history toward a better life beyond. Bonhoeffer does not conceive of the Christian

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account of resurrection along such common lines: “The Christian hope of resurrection is different from the mythological in that it refers people to their life on earth in a wholly new way. . . . Christians do not have an ultimate escape route out of their earthly tasks and difficulties into eternity.”154 By interpreting the impact of the resurrection as instantiating a new way of being in this life, Bonhoeffer provokes the question of what this new life may look like. Bonhoeffer has his own ideas about what this life looks like in the particular context of Germany after the war. First, and radically, Bonhoeffer proposes that the church should redistribute all its property to those in need. He does not even say to sell it—he says the church must give it all away.155 Second, ministers can no longer be civil servants, as if the church were an extension of the state, but should live off of free-will offerings. Neither of these proposals were actually implemented.156 Yet, giving away property has particular resonance with the needs of the time when he knows the property of so many Jews has been confiscated.157 Likewise, it seems prudent at this time to move away from the civil service model after the Nazi party tried to control the church through clergy pay and appointments. The ability of the church to resist any future distortions of the state, such as the distortion that destroyed the lives of so many Jews and other marginalized peoples during the war, requires greater church autonomy.158 Pastors who are not dependent on the state for their income may be more willing to resist the state when necessary. The basic instinct behind Bonhoeffer’s proposals is this: The church must be prepared in its worship and worldly life to resist the deformation of life together by the godlessness of those who mal-inhabit the structures that mediate common life. The church must be prepared in both its worship and its worldly life. Both the church’s prayer and action must be reconceived. The first way Bonhoeffer reconceives these two is to recognize that not everything about worship is for consumption by the world. Some aspects of worship belong properly behind what the ancient church referred to as the arcane discipline. The ancient church trained catechumens by refusing to speak of certain things in certain places, or by refusing to speak until certain other ideas or practices were already in place.159 Over a lengthy period of time, catechumens were ushered into the mysteries of the faith in a way that resisted likelihoods that they fail either to understand the coherence of the Christian theological confession or to embody the Christian witness in a compelling manner. Bonhoeffer wonders why the church would ever have given up this ancient practice.160 The arcane discipline means that a Christian must be initiated into a form of life—Christian prayer and action within the church—before she can understand the roots from which this form of life springs.161 The church must return its “higher mysteries” behind the veil, rearticulating the church’s confession and witness as born from within its

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worship and resisting worldly attempts to co-opt this language.162 Only then will the church learn to speak meaningfully about redemption once more.163 In ancient church practice, the sacraments would only have been received as the culmination of the catechumenate. Only after so many months and years of training would one receive baptism and be admitted to the Table. The sacraments were the ultimate mystery, the thing the world could never understand. Appealing to them publicly as a justification or explanation for one’s life was useless. But appealing to them internally as the only explanation for one’s life was perfectly plausible. Redemption happens in the church through its encounter with Christ in worship, as only those in the church can know and appreciate. All that the church can appeal to publicly is the fruit of its redemption. Therefore, Christian confession and witness must be reborn from out of the experience of receiving Christ in word and sacrament within the worshipping community. Bonhoeffer has been of this mind since positing the churchy way of knowing in Act and Being and this belief explains and undergirds his thought now.164 Through the church’s worship, the church encounters God in history and is formed to live rightly in light of God’s lordship. In worship, Christians become creatures whose witness simultaneously reveals the worlds’ godlessness and invites the world back to creaturely living. This is why, before offering Bethge an outline for a book on religionlessness, Bonhoeffer takes comfort that he is not deprived of the opportunity to pray, “which alone allows us to begin and do this kind of work.”165 His work diagnoses where the church is found wanting and invites the church back to faithful witness. The church must then be driven beyond the worshipping community in witness; the church must go forth in free and responsible action on behalf of the world. This action is the example of worldly habitation the church offers to the world. By free action, Bonhoeffer means that Christians are able to be for others, acting with loving-kindness from their own resources, because the promises offered by Christ ensure that Christians are no longer enslaved to desires to secure their own fates.166 Christ is, of course, the one who makes a Christian free. Yet, a free action is an action performed by the individual who Christ has made free and formed to act freely: “[The Christian] is now free to be himself, free from the bondage of both the self and the other, now free to enter into free relationality with the other.”167 Responsible action means that Christians “boldly reach for the real,”168 participating with Christ in bearing up the guilt of humanity to the redemption and restoration of God, following the example of Christ forced to the cross. Contextualizing Bonhoeffer’s call to prayer and action within the framework of his Lutheran sacramentology suggests that to bear guilt, the church must first name guilt as such. As Stanley Hauerwas often says, the church’s

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presence makes the world the world.169 Unlike Hauerwas, Bonhoeffer sees how the church must recognize its own complicity, indeed, its own responsibility for making the world the world. Beyond belief in the church’s purity or distinctiveness from the world is Bonhoeffer’s hope: In revealing the godlessness of the world, godlessness in which the church has participated, the world is invited to its restoration and reconciliation. Christian action in the world, born from its worship around word and sacrament, embodies a set of ordered and reconciled relations mediated under the lordship of God that invite the world to proceed from brokenness into unity. Herein lies perhaps the greatest challenge for evangelicals, but a challenge many are now trying to overcome. Public witness has given way too often to grasping at power to secure the place of the church. Such grasping attempts include leaders of the evangelical right endorsement and sanctification of Republican candidates of scandalous moral quality in the hopes that those candidates will listen to evangelicals on certain key issues when in office. When endorsing and excusing baldly misogynistic and xenophobic remarks, the church becomes complicit in the policies those remarks support. Likewise, the evangelical left too readily embraces Democratic talking points that result in the ridicule and debasement of people made in the image of God. The church becomes complicit in labeling Republicans and rightleaning Independents acting in good faith as evil, callous, or worse. Neither political party nor its platform will save the public witness of the church. Evangelicals are beginning to second-guess these party commitments, but such reassessments must lead to confession of sin and active work to reconcile. By confessing and reconciling with one another, the church can be opened once again to serve God as God appears in all their weak and disempowered neighbors by resisting the powers in which Christians once hoped to share. Summary The five sections in this third part of the chapter argued that the alternative forms of life central to Bonhoeffer’s vision of religionlessness are born out of his previous reflections on the sacraments and have specific implications for evangelical worship. In the face of the world’s uncanny self-confidence, exemplified by the world’s coming of age, the church confesses its sin. By confessing, the church learns to trust in God and is turned outward to inhabit the world in a faithful manner. The conscience often functions to resist God’s call to repentance. For this reason, Bonhoeffer suggests that communal discernment is a more faithful alternative for making moral judgment than is the conscience. These processes of discernment are born from the church community’s reception of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. When the church

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community is tasked with making moral judgments, this is for the purpose of exercising its responsibility to be there for this world. Religionlessness in part, therefore, means the rejection of any otherworldly escapism and an acceptance of both the good and bad of this world as God’s gift to the believer. The Eucharist renders this-worldliness intelligible and sustains the church in its attention to this world. By attending to the Eucharist, the church is also attending to the presence of the suffering Christ whose broken body and spilled blood are received at the Table. At the Table, Christians recognize the Christ who suffers and are turned outward to recognize Christ in the suffering of others. The Supper compels Christians to come alongside these suffering persons and by so doing bear witness to Christ. In this way, prayer evokes righteous action. Prayer and action are the content of Christian public witness in Bonhoeffer’s theology of religiousness. The most significant action the church performs, however, is its confession. This act of confession invites the world away from its fruitless and violent struggle against finitude. The world is invited into Christ’s action to redeem all things. The church, too, must confess. It must confess the many ways in which its worship draws Christians away from faithfulness. Evangelicals in particular have been unsure what to make of religionlessness, and so have habitually turned away from Bonhoeffer’s theology at this point. In truth, evangelicals should feel uncomfortable reading about religionlessness, but not because it results in a secular faith that evangelicals are unwilling to accept. Rather evangelicals should feel uncomfortable precisely because Bonhoeffer’s vision is one that challenges evangelical worship to become more faithful to the central cultic acts of Christian faith. Confession, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper not only need to become more consistent parts of evangelical worship; their worship on the whole needs to be reexamined to more fully accord with the call of Christ that the church hears in faith through those cultic acts. Evangelicals, Bonhoeffer would challenge, need to learn to pray better. Only then can their action, their public witness, more faithfully respond to Christ as he is present today. But evangelicals will only learn to pray better through practicing prayer in faith. CONCLUSION Religionlessness, as articulated in Ethics and the prison letters, is the first gasp of a church liberated from attempts to secure itself through the state or the religious a priori, and freed to serve the world rather than insisting the world serve the church.170 Bonhoeffer’s vision for a religionless form of life is a life birthed from receiving God in the sacraments. Reading Ethics demonstrated that this form of life cannot be conceived apart from the church called to

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participate in God’s work to redeem the world. Within the church, confession prompts Christians away from the self-assertion and self-autonomy that characterize the world’s godless coming of age. No longer reliant on themselves, Christians are initiated into a community of faith and practice through baptism and around the Table. This community works to discern and perform the will of God corporately rather than leaving individuals alone with their conscience. The church is concerned to discern the will of God for this world precisely because this world is where the Supper directs their concerns. In the Supper, Christians come face to face with the suffering God working to redeem the world. Importantly, they also become participants in God’s redeeming activity. Their participation with God concretizes around worship and responsible action. Bonhoeffer is an iconoclast. From within the church and for the sake of the church he tore away at the church’s religious garment until the truth was revealed: The church’s religious disposition had distorted the church’s witness. In many ways, the idols Bonhoeffer exposes are still relevant concerns for the American Evangelical Church. In examining the development of the world’s coming of age, Bonhoeffer discerned that the church was no longer fulfilling its role in mediating relations between God and humans or between humans and one another. This break down coincided with a breakdown of the Western society on many fronts, as seen in Ethics. The only way out of the chaos was confession, located in the only body who knows both what it means to confess and to whom confession is properly directed. By its confession, the church’s religion, which is to say its godless pursuit to stand in place of God, is exposed and the church may return to its proper disposition: religionless, creaturely being before God. In tearing down the idols of other-worldliness, conscience, and the deus ex machina, Bonhoeffer closed off mechanisms by which the church might rest at ease with the god whose strength it had manufactured. Bonhoeffer drew attention to the ways in which a human pursuit of being sicut Deus is replaced by a truly Christian posture of creaturely fidelity. Bonhoeffer invited the church to receive the God who is, however scandalous or feeble a form God takes, and to participate in the life of this suffering Christ. No longer anxious to create or become God, the church waits to receive and be transformed by the God given over and hidden in word and sacrament. Once that transformation is wrought, the church proceeds outward in faith, obediently following Christ into the world to be conformed to Christ through participation in his suffering. The church suffers to be given over to the world and rejected by the world, only to invite the world into itself—into Christ. By contextualizing the theological content of Bonhoeffer’s prison letters within his Lutheran sacramentology, this chapter has demonstrated how Bonhoeffer’s earlier ecclesiological work can help to explain the content of

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the Tegel correspondence and Ethics. The habits that sustain the church’s religionlessness in the face of the world’s vain pursuit at self-security are themselves products of the faith given to the church through its reception of the sacraments. The chapter began by illustrating the devastating effects of creating a genus of “religion,” and the church’s complicity in fashioning this new concept. This established two things. First, Bonhoeffer’s witness to these theological and historical developments leads Bonhoeffer to conclude that the church was a corrupted structure with a corrupting influence. Second, and related, his witness of the church’s corruption prompted Bonhoeffer to recognize that the church needs turned outward again. Bonhoeffer’s vision for life after the war, articulated in Ethics and the prison correspondence, describes a world being set to rights as the church confesses and is turned outward. This reading of Ethics exposed two salient points. First, the church is an enduring feature of Bonhoeffer’s vision because it is through the church that redemption reaches out to the world. Second, the church can stand in this posture of giving only because it first adopted the posture of confession and received the words of absolution. Proper, creaturely order is returned to the church as Christ is present to the church, conforming it to himself. The process of conformation means that the church had to be rid of its idols. This chapter surveyed four such idols—self-autonomy in the worldcoming-of-age, conscience, other-worldliness, and a Christ of power—to demonstrate how encountering Christ in the sacraments puts the Christian face to face with an altogether different God who establishes the Christian in a community characterized by an altogether different form of life. This new community is characterized by attention to God’s suffering so that it might exercise its creaturely autonomy in prayer and action as it works together to discern the will and call of God to make this world new. The church discerns Christ-reality through its encounter with Christ and participates in Christreality as it proceeds forth into the world. Christ-reality is known in faith through the sacraments and the Christian is moved to participate in Christreality through the same. A religionless form of life should be unthinkable apart from the church’s attention to Christ as he comes to the church at font, Table, and confession. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Bonhoeffer should write about religionlessness and faithful life in the world when his godson is presented for baptism. The next chapter demonstrates how the speculations about the future Bonhoeffer offers on that occasion are explained by his theology of the sacraments. Thereafter, the argument concludes with concrete proposals for reconciling trends in evangelical life toward social justice concerns and liturgical, sacramental practices to help evangelical worship better accord to the call of Christ heard in the sacraments. The ambition is to show evangelicals how religionlessness is conceivable even within their congregations.

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NOTES 1. “Reality” is a technical term denoting what is true about the world in light of Christ’s activity to judge and redeem. For more on this see, Kaiser, Becoming Simple and Wise, 2015: 61–76; Ernst Feil, The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, trans. Martin Rumscheidt (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1985), 29–45; and Andre Dumas, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian of Reality, trans. R. M. Brown (London: SCM-Canterbury Press, 1971), 215–35. 2. Reggie Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014). 3. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 607. 4. See Ernst Feil, “‘Religio’ and ‘Religion’ in the 18th Century: The Contrasting Views of Wolff and Edelmann,” in The Pragmatics of Defining Religion: Contexts, Concepts, and Contests, ed. Jan G. Platvoet and Arie Leendert Molendijk (Boston: Brill, 1999), 125–48. 5. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, ed. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17. 6. Ibid., 21–23. 7. Ritschl, “Instruction in the Christian Religion,” 221. This description of Schleiermacher does not ignore the fact that he only spoke of “positive religion,” or religion in the concrete form of some culture or tradition. In developing a theory of religion, however, he was less interested in the concreteness of these forms than in the general way in which these forms cohere. Indeed, the very positivity of positive religion is something “forced” onto true religion, which itself belongs to the heart and not the “civil world.” Schleiermacher, On Religion, 99. 8. Ritschl, “Instruction in the Christian Religion,” 221. See also Schleiermacher, On Religion, 115–16. 9. Adolf von Harnack, What Is Christianity? trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (Mansfield Center, CT: Martino Publishing, 2011), 6. 10. Ibid., 6, 9. 11. Herrmann, Systematic Theology, 15–65. 12. Ibid., 20. 13. DBWE 3, 107–8. 14. Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 24–37. 15. Paul Tillich, The Encounter of Religions and Quasi-Religions, ed. Terence Thomas (Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 3–5 16. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 59. See also Alexander Rocklin, “Obeah and the Politics of Religion’s Making and Unmaking in Colonial Trinidad,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 83 (2015): 697–721. 17. See the essays in Timothy Fitzgerald, ed., Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations (London: Equinox, 2007). 18. Will Sweetman, “Colonialism All the Way Down? Religion and the Secular in Early Modern Writing on South India,” in Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations, ed. Timothy Fitzgerald (London: Equinox, 2007), 117–34.

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19. Jun’ichi Isomae, “The Formative Process of State Shinto in Relation to the Westernization of Japan: The Concept of ‘Religion’ and ‘Shinto’,” in Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations, ed. Timothy Fitzgerald (London: Equinox, 2007). In addition, Jun’ichi Isomae, Religious Discourse in Modern Japan: Religion, State, and Shinto (Boston: Brill, 2014), 1–24, offers a history of both the category of religion’s origin and of scholarly discomfort with the category. 20. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 194–208. 21. Christiana Tietz, “Bonhoeffer’s Strong Christology in the Context of Religious Pluralism,” in Interpreting Bonhoeffer: Historical Perspectives, Emerging Issues, ed. Clifford Green and Guy Carter (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), 184–85. 22. For a fuller treatment, see Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus. 23. Victoria J. Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 11–17. Stayer, Martin Luther, German Saviour, 24–25. 24. Mark R. Correll, Shepherds of the Empire: Germany Conservative Protestant Leadership 1888–1919 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014). 25. Plant observes that theology does not and cannot always function to help a theologian make clear-cut moral decisions. On the contrary, theologians rest on the horns of a dilemma: they must learn from history how moral and theological mistakes were made while embracing the riskiness of moral and theological decision-making in the present. Plant, Taking Stock of Bonhoeffer, 27–41. Plant’s specific desire is to see what role, if any, theology played in the decision-making process for how theologians regarded the recently formed Third Reich. Plant concludes: “It is not clear that theology was the decisive factor.” Ibid., 41. More commonly, he sees, those already excluded by Nazi ideology made theological cases against Nazism. That said, Plant’s use of Paul Tillich as an example of this illuminates a complexity largely ignored by Plant’s essay. Plant says that Tillich was excluded from Nazi ideology by virtue of his being a socialist, and so Tillich went on to articulate theological reasons for resisting Nazism. Ibid., 40. Yet, Plant does not observe that, for Tillich, being a socialist is already a theological decision. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology: Volume One (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1951), 92–93. Tillich is a socialist for theological reasons, and so his rejection of Nazism on the basis of socialist ideology is already a theological decision. Rather than Tillich’s exclusion provoking theology, it would seem that his theology provokes his exclusion. Ergo, for some, even for those about whom Plant was dubious, theology does seem to be a motivating factor in their rejection of Nazism. When the motives of these theologians are reassessed in this way, it becomes less clear that theologians must rest on the horns of Plant’s dilemma. His essay, while complicating the role played by theology in decision-making, does not necessarily adequately reflect the character of some Nazi resisters. Tillich seems like an example of those who resisted Nazi ideology for theological reasons in a way that resists Plant’s purposefully ambiguous conclusions. Further research into Tillich’s resistance efforts, such as the sermons complied in Ronald H. Stone and Matthew Lon Weaver, Against the Third Reich: Paul Tillich’s Wartime Radio Broadcasts into Nazi Germany, trans. Matthew Lon Weaver (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998); could serve to either confirm or deny this assessment. One of Tillich’s

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persistent concerns in these sermons is to assuage German fears that surrender will lead to a repeat of the widely loathed Treaty of Versailles. It could prove useful to analyze the character of Tillich’s engagement with this German concern in these sermons against the essays analyzed by Plant that treat the treaty as well. 26. Barnett, For the Soul of the People, 26–27. 27. Ibid., 26. 28. Hugh Nicholson, Comparative Theology and the Problem of Religious Rivalry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–9. 29. As detailed in Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); and Barnett, For the Soul of the People, 32–33. 30. See Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, 24–37. 31. Bonhoeffer’s teacher Adolf von Harnack is testament to this. Christian Nottmeier, Adolf von Harnack und die deutsche Politik 1890-1930 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004). See Willis Rudy, Total War and Twentieth-Century Higher Learning: Universities of the Western World in the First and Second World War (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991); for the way the larger Germany university system, including its theology departments, was involved. 32. John Cobb aptly describes Bonhoeffer’s later work as proclaiming “The king is dead; long live the king.” John B. Cobb Jr., God and the World (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2000), 41. 33. Steven M. Bezner, “Understanding the World Better than it Understands Itself: The Theological Hermeneutics of Dietrich Bonhoeffer” (PhD diss., Baylor University, 2008); reads this material ecclesially. Even Feil has to conclude that religionlessness takes place within the church. Feil, The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 175–77. By contrast, Hamilton reads these letters non- (if not anti-) ecclesially. Likewise, de Lange says that the Tegel letters reflect a chasm brought on by years of conspiracy: “The bond between the Word of God and proclamation by the church . . . was severely tested to the breaking point.” Frits de Lange, Waiting for the Word: Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Speaking About God, trans. Martin N. Walton (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2000), 119. Thus he suggests that the context for the Word now shifts out of the church and into the world, having been “reduced to its essence and lost all the trimmings.” Ibid., 122. 34. DBWE 6, 102. 35. Ibid., 111–15. 36. Ibid., 116–17. 37. Ibid., 122. 38. DBWE 6, 124. 39. Ibid., 128. 40. Ibid., 124. 41. Ibid. 42. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 36. 43. DBWE 6, 131. 44. Ibid., 132. 45. Ibid., 134.

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46. Ibid., 135. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. The taking on of other’s guilt is the central theme for Larry Rasmussen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Reality and Resistance (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005); and Christine Schliesser, Everyone Who Acts Responsibly Becomes Guilty: Bonhoeffer’s Concept of Accepting Guilt (London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008). Admittedly, both works adopt a lens of pragmatic Realism to interpret Bonhoeffer, a lens of more and more dubious merit. New monograph treatments of this theme would be helpful if they could adopt a lens more in line developing scholarly consensus regarding the most significant influences on Bonhoeffer’s thought. 51. DBWE 6, 136. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 138–41. 54. Ibid., 137. 55. Ibid., 142. 56. Ibid., 138. 57. Ibid., 142. 58. Greggs, Theology against Religion; and Harvey, Taking Hold of the Real; both argue similarly. 59. Ibid., 518. 60. DBWE 8, 362. 61. For Bonhoeffer’s suggestion that this book be read as anticipating Ethics, see Ibid., 518. 62. Christian Gremmels makes this much-overlooked point. DBWE 8, 588–89. Observations about the lack of secularity in the West, such as those cited by Jennifer McBride (McBride, The Church for the World, 8–9), miss the point entirely. Tom Greggs is closer to the point in his discussion about breaking down the sacred-secular divide. Greggs, Theology against Religion, 70–72. See also Heinz Eduard Tödt, Authentic Faith: Bonhoeffer’s Theological Ethics in Context, trans. David Stassen and Ilse Tödt (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2007), 40–55; and Greggs, “Religionless Christianity and the Political Implications of Theological Speech,” 295. 63. When they appear, Bonhoeffer is generally expressing his desire to participate in the sacraments, usually alongside Bethge. For example, DBWE 8, 181. 64. Ibid., 502. 65. Alternatives for understanding the arcane discipline can be found in each of the following: Harvey, “The Body Politic of Christ”; Roger Poole, “Bonhoeffer and the Arcane Discipline,” in Ethical Responsibility: Bonhoeffer’s Legacy to the Churches, ed. John D. Godsey and Geoffrey B. Kelly (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982); Kenneth Surin, “Contemputus Mundi and the Disenchanted World: Bonhoeffer’s ‘Secret Discipline’ and Adorno’s ‘Strategy of Hibernation,’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53 (1985); John W. Matthews, “Responsible Sharing of the Mystery of Christian Faith: Discipline Arcani in the Life and Theology

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of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” Dialog 25 (1986); and Jonathan Malesic, Secret Faith in the Public Square: An Argument for the Concealment of Christian Identity (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2009). The latter is to be preferred for its ability to recognize the discipline as a regulatory tool for ordered, constructive learning and its ability to articulate the utter bafflement those outside the Christian faith can and must experience if confronted by certain Christian claims that can only make sense within the context of Christian thought and praxis. 66. Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 432–74. Metaxas’ uneasiness seems characteristic of many conservative, American evangelical engagements with Bonhoeffer overall. In part related to these anxieties, Richard Weikart observes a pattern of distortion by evangelical engagement with Bonhoeffer in his review of Metaxas’ biography. Richard Weikart, “Metaxas’ Counterfeit Bonhoeffer: An Evangelical Critique.” Accessed March 5, 2016, https​:/​/ww​​w​.csu​​stan.​​edu​/h​​istor​​y​/met​​axass​​-coun​​terfe​​it​​-bo​​nhoef​​fer. See also Haynes, The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon, 89–90. 67. DBWE 8, 135. 68. Ibid., 426. 69. DBWE 8, 425–26. 70. Ibid., 425. 71. Ibid. 406. 72. Ibid., 366. 73. See DBWE 2, 45. 74. Kirkpatrick, Attacks on Christendom in a World Come of Age, 191. A major influence on Kirkpatrick, Ralf Wüstenberg offered the same conclusion. For him, Dilthey’s account of autonomy is largely synonymous with Bonhoeffer’s own, and both accept that creaturely autonomy is to be affirmed. Wüstenberg, A Theology of Life, 52–53. 75. Barry Harvey, “Preserving the World for Christ: Toward a Theological Engagement with the ‘Secular,’” Scottish Journal of Theology 61 (2008): 64–82. He also wonders this uncritical acceptance of the world’s coming of age is a form of supersessionism in which secularization has fulfilled and surpassed Christianity. Harvey, “The Narrow Path,” 113–14. 76. Jennifer McBride’s reflections are more circumspect. She acknowledges that the world’s coming of age makes a positive contribution to Christianity insofar as it clears away the relic of a manufactured and false deus ex machina, but she does not offer a final analysis on the development as a whole. McBride, The Church for the World, 68–70. Sabine Dramm attempts to bypass the problem by detailing how this historical phenomenon cannot be turned back but does have a silver lining. Dramm, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 204–11. For Mark Lindsay, the world slips the shackles of the deus ex machina as it comes of age but “it is nonetheless not, at heart, a world that wishes to be without God.” Mark Lindsay, “Bonhoeffer’s Eschatology in a World ‘Come of Age,’” Theology Today 68 (2011): 298. Yet, nothing about the development necessitates that the god the world now seeks is the God made known through Christ. 77. Harvey, “Preserving the World for Christ,” 64–82.

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78. Greggs is actually closest to the mark in his understanding of how religionlessness is anti-fundamentalist. For Greggs, the church is not anxious that some space is carved out of the secular sphere so that God might have room to dwell. Neither is the church anxious that God is somehow pushed from the world and so “dead.” Instead, the church recognizes its Lord present in the weak and powerless Christ and thereby both proclaims that this is the God who stands at the center of life and moves outward in all its strength to witness to that God. Greggs, Theology against Religion, 67–69. 79. Selby recognizes that Bonhoeffer has two side-by-side accounts of comingof-age. Selby does not directly observe that one of these accounts should be considered godless. Peter Selby, “Christianity in a World Come of Age,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. John W. de Gruchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 235. 80. DBWE 8, 406. This mirrors the logic of act accounts that Bonhoeffer critiqued in Act and Being as insufficient for revelation. In this way, the godlessness of this new order already established. 81. DBWE 3, 122–23. 82. DBWE 8, 426. 83. Wüstenberg, A Theology of Life, 52–53; Kirpatrick, Attacks on Christendom in a World Come of Age, 191. Cf. Wilhelm Dilthey, Dilthey’s Philosophy of Existence: Introduction to Weltanschaungslehere, trans. William Kluback and Martin Weinbaum (London: Vision, 1957). 84. DBWE 8, 426. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. See Ibid. Bonhoeffer’s outline for a book also relates the world’s coming of age and false attempts at self-security. Ibid., 500. 88. Ibid., 482. 89. DBWE 1, 61–62. 90. DBWE 3, 128–29. 91. Ibid., 478. 92. 3, 129. 93. DBWE 8, 478. 94. This corresponds to Luther’s understanding of the freedom of a Christian. Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian, ed. Mark D. Tranvik (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008). 95. Harvey, Taking Hold of the Real, 30. 96. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2008). Bonhoeffer writes: “It always seems to me that we leave room for God only out of anxiety. I’d like to speak of God not at the boundaries but in the center, not in weakness but in strength, thus not in death and guilt but in human life and human goodness.” DBWE 8, 366–67. 97. See DBWE 2, 139, 155. 98. DBWE 3, 128–30. 99. DBWE 8, 362–63.

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100. Ibid. 101. Ibid. 363–64. 102. Ibid., 196. 103. Ibid., 236. The correspondence from Bethge also includes such references. See Ibid., 248, 255. 104. Ibid., 452. 105. Ibid., 39–40. 106. Ibid., 38–40. Even so, a right use of conscience might be tenable because Bonhoeffer is concerned in this passage for the person whose sole recourse is conscience; this passage is not a consideration of a conscience in Christ, as was found in DBWE 2, 156. 107. DBWE 8, 452. 108. DBWE 2, 160–61. 109. DBWE 4, 216. 110. DBWE 3, 128–29. 111. DBWE 4, 269–71. 112. DBWE 8, 51, 447–48. See also DBWE 12, 285–97. 113. DBWE 8, 373. 114. DBWE 2, 123. 115. DBWE 4, 215–16. See also Greggs, Theology against Religion, 137. 116. DBWE 12, 289. The element of gratitude is less explicit in this essay, but gratitude rings through nevertheless in Bonhoeffer’s discussion of the promises God is acting to fulfill. Ibid., 295–96. 117. DBWE 14, 445–46. 118. DBWE 8, 485–86. 119. Ibid., 486. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid. 124. Ibid., 228. 125. Ibid. 126. Since Creation and Fall, Bonhoeffer has been clear that the two (tov and ra) never actually exist independently of one another. See DBWE 3, 88. Dilthey may have influenced Bonhoeffer on this point. Jos de Mul, The Tragedy of Finitude: Dilthey’s Hermeneutics of Life, trans. Tony Burrett (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). However, given the limits of the historical horizon Dilthey employs, the same criticism Bonhoeffer levels at Heidegger in Act and Being might also be directed toward Dilthey. Surely a Christian concept of bearing life’s good and bad must have recourse to cross and resurrection simultaneously. 127. DBWE 8, 485. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid., 323. 130. DBWE 2, 160–61; DBWE 8, 515. 131. Ibid., 480.

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132. LW 35, 54. See also Gritsch, “Lutheran Theology,” 267. 133. LW 35, 17. 134. DBWE 2, 159. 135. Susan Marie Smith, Caring Liturgies: The Pastoral Power of Christian Ritual (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), 79–80. 136. Though Merold Westphal makes a compelling case for why Marxist materialism is compatible with this account. Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 154–58. 137. DBWE 6, 159. 138. Ibid., 153–57. What Bonhoeffer calls “radical” in Ethics relates to the “apologetic” responses to the world’s coming of age in the prison correspondence. Both aim to make everything sinful and everyone judged and wanting. Bonhoeffer describes both in terms of “law.” See Ibid., 153; and DBWE 8, 427. He contrasts this approach to Jesus’ own habit of calling people out of sin rather than making them into sinners. Jesus’ habit, contrary to the radical or apologetic manner, embodies the gifting of the gospel. Ibid., 450–51. 139. See also DBWE 12, 361–70. 140. DBWE 8, 482. 141. DBWE 1, 243. 142. DBWE 4, 233–34. 143. Ibid., 480. 144. Ibid., 479. 145. Ibid., 479–80. 146. DBWE 8, 460–61. The translation offered by John Bowden better renders the poetry. See Bowden’s work in Bernd Wannenwetsch, ed., Who Am I? Bonhoeffer’s Theology through His Poetry (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 177. 147. DBWE 8, 448. 148. Ibid., 480–82. 149. Ibid., 480. 150. Joseph McGarry, “Formed While Following: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Asymmetrical View of Agency in Christian Formation,” Theology Today 71 (2014): 106–20. 151. Jenson, Visible Words, 46. 152. DBWE 8, 503. 153. Ibid., 409. 154. Ibid., 447–48. 155. DBWE 8, 503. This goes beyond even what Acts records as the practice of the early church. Luther gave much the same admonition to the churches of his day. LW 35, 96–97. 156. It must be noted that Bonhoeffer is not the first to call for greater church independence. Schleiermacher argued in favor of such a church, creating a great deal of animosity between the Prussian state and liberal elements of the Prussian church. Robert M. Bigler, The Politics of German Protestantism: The Rise of the Protestant Church Elite in Prussia, 1815–1848 (London: University of California Press, 1972), 162–67.

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157. Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern, No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters against Hitler in Church and State (New York: New York Review Books, 2013), 3. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 704. 158. Thus, these orders operate distinct from but still for one another. Stephen Plant, “The Evangelization of Rulers: Bonhoeffer’s Political Theology” in Bonhoeffer, Christ, and Culture, ed. Keith L. Johnson and Timothy Larson (Nottingham: Intervarsity Press, 2013), 85. Nazi attempts to exert control on the church are detailed in Barnett, For the Soul of the People, 33–39. See also Eberhard Bethge, Friendship and Resistance: Essays on Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 16; and Eric Gritsch, A History of Lutheranism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 226. 159. A. Barnes, “The Discipline of the Secret,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909). Accessed May 13, 2016, http:​//​www​​ .newa​​dvent​​.org/​​cathe​​n​/050​​​32a​.h​​tm. 160. DBWE 8, 373. 161. DBWE 8, 390. In this way, this chapter shares an affinity with Malesic, Secret Faith in the Public Square, 141–49. 162. Ibid., 373. See also DBWE 4, 45, 229; Barry Harvey, “Ransomed from Every Language: The Church as a Community of Word-Care,” Review and Expositor 112 (2015). 163. See Harvey, “The Body Politic of Christ,” 319–46. 164. DBWE 2, 32, 161. 165. Ibid., 499. 166. DBWE 8, 513. 167. Root, “Practical Theology as Social Ethical Action in Christian Ministry: Implications from Immanuel Levinas and Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” International Journal of Practical Theology 10 (2006): 68. This freedom is possible because of Christ’s historical being and the Spirit’s active work. Ibid., 68–69. 168. DBWE 8, 513. 169. Stanley Hauerwas, “Citizens of Heaven,” in The Freedom of a Christian Ethicist: The Future of a Reformation Legacy, ed. Brian Brock and Michael Mawson (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 14. 170. Vigen Guroian, Ethics After Christendom: Toward an Ecclesial Christendom Ethic (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1994), 110–15.

Chapter 6

Sacraments against Religion Receiving the God Who Is Given

Following the theological impulses of Luther, Bonhoeffer conceives of the world through the lens of the encounter with Christ in word and sacrament. Chapters 2 and 3 showed how this encounter with Christ in the sacraments is determinative for the way in which the church perceives reality. This encounter is determinative for the way in which the church inhabits the world. Inhabiting a creaturely, encountered, determined form of life is what it means for Christians to proceed from a churchy way of knowing. Chapters 4 and 5 showed how this encounter with Christ in the sacraments was no less determinative when reading Bonhoeffer’s theology of religion. The sacraments are religious structures responsible for mediating relations between God and humanity and humans with one another. Unlike other such structures, Christ is personally present in history in the sacraments. Christ’s real presence in the sacraments, known by the church only through faith, means that these structures ensure an encounter with a genuine other who cannot be transcended or assimilated into the self. The self is therefore transcended and opened up. Lives of genuine love and faith are made possible through encountering Christ in these religious structures. Without Christ, none of that is true.1 Humans can approach the sacraments with malformed intent, seeking to use the sacraments religiously. Christ’s real presence resists this intent, so that the church can, in faith, reliably seek the hidden Christ in the sacraments, be redeemed, and be moved to witness to redemption as the church embodies the promise Christ embodies in bread, water, and forgiving neighbors. Thereby, the church and the structures with which it is continually confronted by God become indispensable to the divine mission to make all things new. Religionlessness cannot mean the end of the church, or the church’s restriction to some small “religious” sphere so that the secular might order what the church failed to order. Religionlessness means that Christ is claiming all of life, and he is doing 167

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so through the church that is being conformed to him by receiving him as he truly is: weak, on the cross, the servant of all, in bread and water. In light of this, the task of this final chapter is twofold. First, this chapter seeks to flesh out what a religionless, sacramental, Christ-encountered life looks like in Bonhoeffer’s theology. Bonhoeffer’s “Thoughts on the Day of Baptism” offers this description of the Christian’s life in the world coming of age. This series of reflections is born from seeing and inhabiting the world as those who are baptized. Bonhoeffer does not make continual reference to baptism in his reflections, and yet he operates with a presumed sacramentology as he describes a life only intelligible when lived out of encountering Christ in baptism, as evidenced by Bonhoeffer’s choice to treat the theme of religionlessness for the occasion of baptism. Each of the five reflections Bonhoeffer offers on this occasion rest on and extend his earlier ecclesiological work, including his sacramentology. A close examination of how these reflections have been interpreted before, and the weaknesses of that interpretation, also makes it clear why it is necessary to re-read these reflections with more sustained reference to Bonhoeffer’s sacramentology. When read in this way, it becomes clear that the religionless life is nothing other than the life of those who have had their faith instilled, sustained, located, and vitalized by receiving Christ as he makes himself known in the sacraments. Second, this chapter describes ways that evangelical worship today could itself take on a more religionless, sacramental character. Whereas the last chapter suggested how religionlessness might offer a substantial critique to the theologies reflected in evangelical worship, this chapter suggests ways in which those critiques can be addressed. In this way, Bonhoeffer’s vision is used to bring together two developments in evangelical life. Growing momentum among evangelicals for engagement in social justice practices and growing interest in more historically liturgical and sacramental practices can be encouraged together when one realizes that it is precisely meeting Christ in the sacraments that propels one out to serve and sacrifice for one’s neighbor. The work of both Robert Webber and Rachel Held Evans demonstrates how the movements toward sacramental engagement and social justice practice already circle one another, though neither figure is actually able to hold both strands equally at once. For this, Bonhoeffer’s theology becomes necessary. BONHOEFFER AND THE RELIGIONLESS LIFE THEN In lieu of his presence, Bonhoeffer sends his godson and namesake, Dietrich Bethge, a series of five reflections on the occasion of Bethge’s baptism. These reflections have been the source for many discussions about religionlessness,

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though only rarely have they been treated as a discrete unit with an internal logical coherence. One of the few attempts to treat these reflections as such is by Fritz de Lange. The problems this reading encounters further clarify why sacraments and religionlessness need brought back together. The burden of the second section in this chapter is to bring religionlessness and the sacraments back to bear on one another within Bonhoeffer’s baptismal reflections. Religionlessness and the Church’s Competence to Speak about God Frits de Lange offers one of the more extensive treatments of these baptismal reflections in his book, Waiting for the Word. He reads the reflections as part of his interest in exploring Bonhoeffer’s concepts of speech and silence, specifically the competence of the church’s speech about God. This onedirectional concern about speech—thinking predominately in terms of human speech about God to the neglect of God’s own speech—proves problematic when interpreting the baptismal letter precisely because baptism is an encounter between two persons. By neglecting that human speech about God is competent only to the degree that God’s own speech has formed the human speaker, and even then this human speech is effective toward different ends than is God’s speech, de Lange expects things of the church that Bonhoeffer would never have expected; consequently, de Lange’s criticisms of the church do not adequately reflect either Bonhoeffer’s own critique of religion or his proposal for religionlessness. Reading de Lange reveals the need to read “Thoughts on the Day of Baptism” in a manner more cognizant of the fact that the church is a community that only knows the truth about itself and the world because it first suffered being baptized, or, it first suffered to be encountered by and conformed to the call of God heard in the sacraments. Bonhoeffer’s reflections should account for how, like the sacraments, the form of life to which the sacraments give rise is the result of an encounter between two agents who participate in the encounter as themselves to thrust Christians out into the world in a faithful manner. De Lange’s work interacts significantly with speech-act theory, particularly the work of J. L. Austin.2 His reading is contingent on the claim that speech, particularly God’s speech, is performative rather than constative.3 When God speaks the reality being spoken about becomes real as it was not before. God’s speech is not merely descriptive but evocative, powerful, and transformative. When God speaks, something happens to those who receive that word. Outwith the purview of de Lange, in reference to the sacraments, this performative and transformative character of God’s speech corresponds to the claim that faith is instilled and sustained by God’s effective presence

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and promise. God’s speech pardons sin and inverts the cor curvum in se, transforming a person from being in Adam to being in Christ.4 However, de Lange’s focus on speaking about God, that is the church’s own speech, at this point obscures that there must be a difference between the type of performance possible when God speaks and when the church speaks. In response to the life-altering, reality-making Word, human speech can only acknowledge what has been done. Human speech about God is constative, descriptive, in a way God’s speech (either about Godself or about humanity) is not. Giving human speech any greater power than this—particularly regarding speech about God—is an invitation for humans to conceive the God they want, to invoke a God of their choosing, an invitation to a posture sicut deus contra deus. God’s speech alters reality; faithful human speech acknowledges the reality it receives from God’s speaking and thereby participates in the reality being spoken. Bonhoeffer’s observation in the letter, de Lange insists, is that the church’s language has lost its performative, transformative power.5 According to him, Bonhoeffer diagnoses a need not for the church to better describe reality but for the church to more fully transform reality through the power of its speech about “redemption” and “reconciliation.” The difficulty here is that the church’s language has never been transformative in itself. De Lange seems to acknowledge this point by saying that the gospel’s effective language “occurs by means of a concrete confrontation with the person of Jesus and the appeal that issues from him,”6 where the church’s speech is presumably the medium by which this encounter occurs. A different set of claims immediately undercut this, however. De Lange writes that it is “the proclaiming church itself that makes its proclamation incredible.”7 He continues: “The act of proclaiming the gospel is still performed from the pulpits, but the language fails. It has no effect. The speaker lacks competence.”8 De Lange understands competence as a quality bestowed upon a speaker by her audience that confirms her ability to perform the act she is speaking.9 To take and expand on his example, a priest who utters a benediction is competent at effecting this blessing only when the audience recognizes this priest has the authority and ability to bless. Where competence in this sense is lacking, a spoken blessing is an occasion for derision. “Who is this priest to bless me?” asks a congregant; or a Nazarene might object: “Is this not Mary’s son, and do his siblings not live among us?” (Mark 6:3). A failure of competence means that a person cannot be believed to do what she says. De Lange offers three circumstances in which competence can be compromised.10 First, the speaker might not perform in herself that which she would wish to perform in others through her speech—or at least the person being spoken to perceives this to be the case. In such circumstances, those speaking the gospel have not been transformed by it themselves.

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They do not follow Christ in obedience to his speaking, and therefore prove ineffectual and un-credible in inviting others to follow. Their lives have not been conformed to Christ. This lack of transformation is indeed troubling. Immediately, however, it is important to ask whose speech is absent. Theologically speaking, a lack of transformation is a result of God’s silence, not the church’s failed speech; contrary to de Lange, the church does not transform itself or the world. The church witnesses to and participates in the world’s transformation by God.11 De Lange elides the speech of God and the speech of the church by failing to distinguish what speech is proper to either party. When the breakdown in competency is cast back entirely on members of the church, this fails to acknowledge how the church’s promise, its competency, is a hidden reality realizable only in faith. The church’s promise is uttered on behalf of another. For example, no matter how many times a priest utters “you are forgiven,” only God forgives sins.12 This is the limit of speech-act theory theologically: The world cannot find the church’s speech competent because the church’s competence is hidden. Attempts to appear competent before the world will always fail. Rather, those in the world must be given eyes to see the church’s hidden competence. They must be transformed by God’s speech before they can recognize the claim of the church’s speech. Individuals speaking about God cannot be deemed competent in their own right. The second circumstance in which competency can be compromised is the institutional framework and practices that support speech. One step above the individuals spoken about in the first context, now the breakdown occurs when the systems and structures that these persons inhabit and by which their speech is illuminated fail to properly legitimate the speech claims. To take an example, when a church’s policy restricts those who can come to the Table for reasons of race, politics, denominational affiliation, and so on, then a pastor’s claims about hospitality might no longer be deemed credible and the competence of such a church to speak on the gratuitous welcoming of God would be compromised. Bonhoeffer indicates that such an institutional breakdown has occurred in his time: The church has been acting from within the cor curvum in se to the degree that it has fought only for its own preservation in the previous years.13 The church cannot speak credibly of the God who is for others when it has existed solely for itself.14 As such, those outside the church are not interested in a God who has no concern for them. This is a failure of the church. This specific sin must be confessed. Bonhoeffer admits that the church should confess, and confesses for it himself.15 De Lange, however, goes further in his criticism of the church than does Bonhoeffer: “The word of the church has been shattered by the church’s actions. The proclamation of the word has become incredible due to a lack of personal faith and to the shape of a church focused on self-preservation.”16 De Lange concludes that

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because of this the old church must take its leave; quiet prayer and action will serve in the interim until something new is raised in the church’s place.17 However, there must be a difference between naming specific failures and confessing them as sins, and speaking broadly of the church as having failed.18 Again, God’s speech has not yet effected a total transformation of the church. The church remains both sinful and saintly. To indicate that a failure of the church is responsible for the failure of the church is a very weighty claim. In the former case, sin can be confessed, repented of and the church restored; in the latter case, the church must give way to a new structure better able to mediate the reality and relations the church previously ordered. Bonhoeffer himself maintained an enduring place for the church in the postwar world. Therefore, for Bonhoeffer, it cannot be the case that this particular sin of self-interest, grievous as it may be, led to the ultimate failure of the church. De Lange’s reading does not properly account for the church’s simulus status. He has set up an ideal of “church” against which the historical instantiation is found wanting. That ideal second-guesses what God actually called together, and second-guessing God is to transgress the creaturely limit. Instead, the simulus insists that the church can exist as sinful and also be restored in its sin by its participation in Jesus Christ. The efficacy of the sacraments, as structures of the church, is secured from above. The church’s institutional competency, like any individual Christian’s competency, remains hidden, held to in faith, and unrecognizable to all those lacking eyes to see. The third circumstance in which competency is compromised is when historical and cultural situations shift so dramatically that the speaker no longer addresses the proper time and place. The world’s coming of age could be considered this kind of dramatic shift. Surely the church’s speech must adapt to address the world it now navigates. Apologetic attempts to turn back the epoch clock are insufficient and unworthy for reasons documented in the last chapter. In this challenge to the church’s competency, de Lange is closest to the mark. Even so, characterizing the needed transformation of language as “translation” is problematic.19 Bonhoeffer does not task the church with translation; he tasks the church to wait for the birth of something new. The need for something new to be born should be even more obvious when Bonhoeffer writes in response to baptism, the sacrament in which the old is put to death and the new being is raised in Christ. De Lange’s failure to distinguish between divine and human speech results in a less helpful reading. It is true that the church by and large no longer knows how to speak to this new world. Bonhoeffer’s criticism of the so-called apologetic responses to the world’s coming of age makes precisely this point.20 Yet, this does not mean that the church engages in an apologetic exercise of translation. The church waits on God. When God speaks and the world moves, the church, with its eyes to see, recognizes this movement,

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witnesses to it, and participates in the world’s transformation.21 As the church witnesses to and participates in this transformation, God’s work gives birth to a renewed grammar of grace. This is why Bonhoeffer appears quite comfortable using the “old” words. There is no need to translate them, as if the language stripped of “church-ese” would become sufficient on its own. Rather, language needs renewed by the advent of God in a new world to which the church can once again bear witness.22 The language itself is competent—“redeemed” and “reconciled” are adequate words to describe the reality effected by God’s speech—but waits on God to reveal that competency. Two recurring problems trouble de Lange’s reading of the baptismal reflections. The first is what he says: His reading too often fails to bear in mind the distinction between divine and human speech, to acknowledge the dual agents at work in baptism. The second, related, problem is this: For all his reflections on speech-acts, he barely notices that the letter he is reading is occasioned by baptism, an event wherein God speaks words of welcome to effect the Christian’s inclusion into the church. The sacraments should be prime candidates for theological reflections on speech-acts, and yet de Lange does not dwell on what it might mean for the recovery of competency contained in Bonhoeffer’s description of religionlessness to be discussed in relation to baptism. This omission is as glaring as it is regrettable. The weaknesses of de Lange’s readings, however, reveal the need to do what he does not: contextualize Bonhoeffer’s theology of religionlessness within his Lutheran sacramentology. Re-reading the Baptismal Reflections In light of the last section’s analysis of de Lange’s reading of the baptismal reflections, there remains a need to offer a reading that both better elucidates how religionlessness educes competency in the church’s witness to God and do so in a way that makes intelligible why Bonhoeffer would think it proper to offer these specific reflections, undertake this specific religionless project, around the event of baptism. It is helpful to situate Bonhoeffer’s letter in its historical circumstances. Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge was born on February 3, 1944. Bonhoeffer learned what the child would be named, at least in part after him, in a letter from Renate on January 10. On February 4, Bonhoeffer’s own birthday, Maria von Wedemeyer delivered news of the baby’s birth and confirmed that he was, indeed, to be called Dietrich.23 Bonhoeffer was writing a letter to Bethge at the time, and continued it with words expressing all the joy and anxiety a new child rightly brings: “I hope I can promise you to be a good godfather and ‘great’-uncle (!) to him, and I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t

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say I’m really tremendously pleased and proud that you have named your firstborn after me.”24 Taking up the letter the next day, he was already aware that young Dietrich progressed the family a generation onward, an event that receives further attention in the baptismal “Thoughts.”25 Even before the child was born, Renate expressed hope that Dietrich would be present to baptize his namesake.26 When circumstances conspired against this, Bonhoeffer wrote a letter, addressed to Renate and Eberhard, containing Bonhoeffer’s own reflections for the occasion.27 Eberhard baptized young Dietrich on May 21, 1944, while home from Italy on leave, and Bonhoeffer’s “Thoughts” was read aloud.28 Notably, it was during this period of time that Bonhoeffer first wrote to Bethge about the idea of a “religionless Christianity.”29 During this time, Bonhoeffer’s trial was scheduled and rescheduled. Berlin endured severe air raids, including one that killed a prisoner with whom Bonhoeffer had become close. This is to say that the times were tumultuous—punctuated with the ecstasies of new life and the sorrows of life lost, the thrill of intellectual progress and the pain of physical separation prolonged—but Bonhoeffer found the times fruitful and instructive for just this reason. One of the richest offerings from this time is Bonhoeffer’s consideration of the world after the war and the religionless Christianity appropriate to such a world offered for young Dietrich’s baptism. While these considerations lack some of the polemical sharpness visible in many of the letters between Bonhoeffer and Bethge, they gain a clarity and coherence sometimes hard to perceive in the ad hoc, occasional correspondence. Here, the many themes discussed in the last chapter are brought to bear on one another in a manner that is both prophetically critical and pastorally constructive. In the text, Bonhoeffer offers a series of five reflections. The first of these is that, with the advent of this child, the family progresses a generation, and the family’s memory will extend (God willing) over 250 years through this child.30 The second passage discusses the virtues young Dietrich can expect to receive by way of the families who will shape his life.31 The third discusses the possibilities and dangers of suburbanization and the new shape of relations between the country and the city.32 The fourth discusses the ways in which life will be experienced differently by those of his generation and those of the baby’s generation.33 The fifth and final offers the most extensive and direct discourse on religionlessness of the set, suggesting how the church into which baby Bethge is baptized will have to inhabit this new world.34 Only the last of these seems, on the surface, to have a direct bearing on the theme of religionlessness; only the last one seems to have even a tangential reference to the sacraments generally or baptism in particular. The following, however, shows that delving below this cursory reading

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reveals how the entire series coheres around the dual themes of sacraments and religionlessness life. Inclusion in a Community: The First and Second Reflections The first and second reflections belong together and speak to a central concern in the theology and practice of baptism: inclusion in a community.35 Traditionally, baptismal sermons about the inclusion of a child in a community are not immediately concerned with the family. Generally, in a baptismal service, the church is the community made responsible for teaching and raising the child. Yet, within Bonhoeffer’s paradigm of religious structures, the family is no less responsible for ordering relations than is the church. Family, too, is a religious structure where God intends the Christian to be turned outward with the love of God and others. Himself formed first by family life, Bonhoeffer would be keenly aware of the value this community has in mediating the love and grace of God.36 Bonhoeffer does not believe that the actual forms of family life with which he and Bethge were raised will long survive the war: “The old village parsonage and the old middle-class house belong to a world that will have vanished by the time you grow up.”37 Yet, the “spirit” or values of these forms are more enduring and will appear in a new form. So grateful for the training and heritage his family has provided him, and praying the “spirit” of this family will do the same for young Dietrich, Bonhoeffer expects that “[t]he devotional life of your home will not be noisy or wordy, but it will teach you to pray, to fear and love God above all, and to do the will of Jesus Christ gladly.”38 Bonhoeffer tells baby Bethge that his family has been formed and will help form and teach him to know what it is to love God and serve the world in a faithful way. Family talk should not obscure the place of the church in this segment of Bonhoeffer’s letter. Touching on the family here does not displace the church, as it were, but expands the horizon for God’s formative activity.39 Key phrases such as “firm foundation for living with others” and “responsibility” hint at how Bonhoeffer has transposed the work of the church alongside another religious structure.40 In Bonhoeffer’s theology, the Christian learned to live with others through participation in the church. The church is the location in which, through baptism, the Christian’s responsibilities toward God and neighbor were first received to be exercised in freedom. Reading this reflection in light of Bonhoeffer’s sacramentology makes clear that the family should not suddenly become the locus for these themes at the church’s expense. The church’s faithful exercise of its responsibilities enables the family to exercise its responsibilities well, also. All of this suggests the first step toward religionless habitation of the world: inclusion into a community of loving hearts that teaches the Christian

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to conceive of the world rightly through receiving. This must be developed further. Bonhoeffer’s first reflection works around two poles: moving forward and looking back. As the first born in a new generation, the family itself is moving forward with the birth of Dietrich Bethge.41 Grandparents have suddenly become great-grandparents and uncles become great-uncles. Yet, the baby is blessed insofar as he receives the “incomparable advantage” of personally receiving the past this family can share.42 This child, born in 1944, will hear stories from his great-grandfather of people he knew who were born in the 1700s. God willing, Bonhoeffer continues, young Dietrich will live to tell these stories to those born after the year 2000. When he is grown, this baby will be the bearer of some 250 years of oral tradition having received this legacy and the corresponding responsibility to bear that legacy from his family.43 Young Dietrich has received a community to care for him; he has also received a community for which he must care. The baptismal resonances of that claim are self-evident: By way of baptism, the Christian is inducted into a community of faith and given the faith that will sustain her care for others. This familial legacy comes down to the infant in many forms. The second reflection in Bonhoeffer’s letter suggests three traditions converging on this child that will prepare and form him for the remainder of his life.44 The first of these is the “village parsonage” tradition inherited from Eberhard Bethge. Bonhoeffer’s praises for this form of life are many: Simplicity and health, a communal and varied intellectual life, unpretentious enjoyment of the good things of life, in natural and un-self-conscious sharing with ordinary people and their work; a capacity for looking after oneself in practical matters and a modesty founded on inner contentment; these are the enduring earthly values that found their home in the village parsonage and that you find in your father.45

From this village inheritance, Bonhoeffer expects his namesake to receive a solid grounding from which to “live together with others,” recognize genuine accomplishment, and maintain inner happiness.46 The second inheritance is that of the cosmopolitan, upper-middle-class form of life, carried down through the Bonhoeffer family, namely Renate. This form of life has many virtues of its own: “a proud awareness of being called to high responsibility in public service, intellectual achievement and leadership, and a deep-rooted obligation to be guardians of a great historical heritage and intellectual tradition.”47 The third inheritance comes from Bonhoeffer, himself, as the child’s namesake. From Bonhoeffer, young Dietrich comes to understand what the fate of the good in the contemporary world looks like.48 Bonhoeffer has been imprisoned and forced to share the life of his community only from

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a distance. Even so, the tradition Bonhoeffer received has enabled him to be grateful for life in the midst of trial and turmoil, even to maintain a degree of optimism about the future.49 This optimism is not to say that the future Bonhoeffer sees coming will be a bright one. The fate of the good, after all, is imprisonment. Rather, Bonhoeffer’s optimism lies in the hope that the traditions embodied in baby Dietrich will give him the fortitude to survive what is coming: “Amid the general impoverishment of spiritual life, you will find your parents’ home a treasury of spiritual values and a source of inspiration.”50 The vocabulary of this section is evocative. On the negative side, there are words like dangers, stormy, impoverishment, sorrows, cares, and confusion. Interspersed throughout are other words like refuge, calm, clarity, inspiration, and joy. It would seem that in this future there will be as much to be grateful for as there are occasions for which the Christian’s love and service are required to bind the wounds of the world. As such, the future requires Christian thisworldliness as born from the Lord’s Supper, described in the last chapter. The legacies converging in young Bethge all refuse to abdicate their responsibilities for the well-being of others in the here and now. Dietrich Bethge has received a tradition that has formed him in how to read and respond to the world. He will be taught by this tradition to respond with love and charity and wholeness despite the cares and calamities the world will bring to bear against him. All of this resonates with the churchy way of knowing described in chapter 2. The churchy way of knowing teaches the Christian to read and respond in a this-worldly manner to the hostilities of the world coming of age. The churchy form of knowing is to acknowledge and to respond obediently to the call of Christ into the world as the Christian bears and is borne by a community of love and service. This way of knowing, and by extension of being, is possible because God enters into history to call this community to Godself, effecting grace to mediate loving relations. This community was called together in the sacraments, birthed from encountering God in water and bread, and therefore belies the world’s godless, self-referential understanding of autonomy and security. The worlds’ selfunderstanding, born from a religious disposition, sets its members against one another. The faithful community exposes the godlessness of the world by its confession of sin and by acts of loving kindness, by binding the wounds inflicted in the world’s pursuit of self-security. The world is not grateful that its shame should be revealed, and so the community is pushed to the cross where it suffers alongside a suffering God. Even though Bonhoeffer talks about family, in the same breath he is speaking about a different community: The church that receives the child in baptism, forms the child by inclusion in its form of life, imparts its tradition of love and service, and provides the bulwark of fortitude that will help this child endure “the coming years of

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upheaval.”51 The church receiving a new member in baptism may not be the direct referent of Bonhoeffer’s first two reflections in this letter, but this baptized community does suggest both the structural type by which the familial inheritance is described and the ends to which Bethge’s familial inheritance work in service. Suburbanization and Life Together: The Third Reflection The third reflection from Bonhoeffer’s letter is perhaps the most baffling of the series. That it follows from the conclusion of the second reflection is apparent enough, but what is less clear is if the phenomenon of which Bonhoeffer speaks describes either the past or contemporary reality well. Bonhoeffer turns his attention to a new development: the movement of city people out of cities and into the country, fundamentally transforming the rural way of life. This concern follows from the previous insofar as Bonhoeffer formerly spoke of the passing away of a certain form of life and now speaks about what has risen in its place. This new suburban form has very little to commend it, at least from Bonhoeffer’s perspective: “The quiet and seclusion of country life has already been invaded by radio, cars, telephones, and the bureaucratic organization of almost all aspects of life.”52 About the only thing Bonhoeffer suspects is good about this form of life is that at least “they will gain from having a plot of land under their feet from which to draw strength for a new, simpler, more natural and contented life of daily work and evening leisure.”53 It is possible that Bonhoeffer’s praise for the former “quiet and seclusion” of country living might be a youthful idealization of that form of life. What Bonhoeffer found praiseworthy about the village parsonage form of life suggests that “quiet and seclusion” have little to do with actual country living. It is also questionable whether “the age of big cities on our continent seems to be over.”54 When 74.6 percent of the European population continue to live in cities, with fully half the population living in cities of 50,000 or more persons, Bonhoeffer does not seem prophetic.55 That does not mean that the theology undergirding Bonhoeffer’s reflection is not worth further examination. The comment, almost in passing, that “Cain was the original founder of cities,” is fraught with meaning from the perspective of the Bonhoeffer corpus. Cain is the subject of Bonhoeffer’s final chapter of Creation and Fall.56 There, Bonhoeffer concludes that Cain is the aggravated form of the homo sicut deus contra deus. Sinful Adam takes hold of life, trying to secure life by creating life. Cain is the murderer, trying to secure life by destroying life. Cain does what only God can do, and Cain does this in anger against and defiance of God. Bonhoeffer judges cities to bear the godlessness of Cain. Cities are “terrifying places” where people once sought every vain thing life could offer,

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but now “have brought death and dying upon themselves with every imaginable horror.”57 Even as cities die, as people leave cities and those people who remain are disillusioned of the cities’ glamour and unbounded promise, cities are murderers. They reach out beyond themselves to the countryside and strangle that form of life until it is dead, replacing it with the technology and bureaucracy that give urban residents the illusion of having secured their lives themselves.58 The godlessness of cities is not a godlessness without hope. Creation and Fall provides the necessary framework—by way of the sacraments—to sustain Christian hope even as cities engulf suburbs and destroy the “quiet and seclusion” of country life. Crucifixion, Christ forced to the cross by Cain’s murdering hand, represents “the last desperate assault on the gate of paradise”59 by humanity. On the cross, as was articulated in the Christology lectures as well, the mocking human question “Who are you?” is turned on the asker.60 The mocker is undone. Death is put to death. Christ lives, and creation lives through him. Bonhoeffer’s prose becomes poetic when reflecting on this moment: The trunk of the cross becomes the wood of life, and now in the midst of the world, on the accursed ground itself, life is raised up anew. In the center of the world, from the wood of the cross, the fountain of life springs up. All who thirst for life are called to drink from this water, and whoever has eaten from the wood of this life shall never again hunger and thirst. What a strange paradise is this hill of Golgotha, this cross, this blood, this broken body. What a strange tree of life, this trunk on which the very God had to suffer and die. Yet, it is the very kingdom of life and of the resurrection, which by grace God grants us again. It is the gate of imperishable hope now opened, the gate of waiting and of patience.61

Even in the godless and desolate landscape of urban and suburban sprawl, there is hope to be found in having “a plot of land under their feet.”62 From this plot, this Golgotha, the Christian finds the strength to live a life of work and leisure in contentment. Bonhoeffer has good reason to quote I Timothy at this point in the baptism reflections: Godliness marked by contentment is the alternative mode of habitation to the godless habitation of sub/urban technophiles and bureaucrats who would reach out and kill an entire form of life to preserve their own.63 The lifeless, godless, barren land of Babylon is transfigured into the life-affirming, life-giving kingdom of imperishable hope by those Christians who encounter the suffering Christ to eat and drink.64 Creation and Fall’s imagery of drinking and eating, of blood and a broken body, is Eucharistic.65 By invoking Cain in the baptism reflection, Bonhoeffer draws his criticism of cities into reference with both the world’s godlessness, a key theme to religionlessness, and the sacraments. Beneath Bonhoeffer’s

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criticism of cities lies a deeper theological belief: Those who encounter Christ at the Lord’s Table will gain the strength they need to inhabit even a godless world well, with love for others rather than a compulsive need to consume at another’s expense. Cities are but one manifestation of the world’s godless and violent attempts to secure itself against finitude. As those who take the Lord’s Supper, Christians receive the faith necessary to suffer the world’s evils and love the world even so. “We Cannot Even Plan for the Next Day”: The Fourth Reflection The first two reflections in this series of five center on what it means to be placed within a community of loving hearts. Their content is influenced profoundly by Bonhoeffer’s sacramentology. Bonhoeffer’s third reflection laments the loss of the countryside and hopes some ground can be found from which to resist the terror of urban and suburban encroachment. By placing this reflection on cities alongside Creation and Fall’s discussion of Cain, the founder of cities, it becomes evident that the ground from which the Christian resists godlessness is the ground of Golgotha upon which she encounters the suffering Christ at the Lord’s Table. This fourth reflection, in many ways, would be best described as a confession. Bonhoeffer admits that for his generation and the generations before him each person expected to “plan, develop, and shape his own life.”66 This narrative of progress, expressed at an individual level, has been shattered by the war. What was made has been unmade, and what were perceived as unified lives have been shattered into fragmentary existences. In “After Ten Years,” Bonhoeffer describes this fracturing as a situation in which the conspirators were forced to stop “worrying about tomorrow.”67 There were, however, two ways in which this cessation of worry expressed itself. On the one hand, there is the more common, godless way which “means that [most people] have succumbed to living only for the moment at hand, irresponsibly, frivolously, or resignedly.”68 Bonhoeffer also categorizes escapism to a better future here among other frivolous abdications of responsibility. On the other hand, there is a faithful response that looks like “taking each day as if it were the last and yet living it faithfully and responsibly as if there were yet to be a great future.”69 Bonhoeffer continues: “To think and to act with an eye on the coming generation and to be ready to move on without fear and worry—that is the course that has, in practice, been forced upon us. To hold it courageously is not easy but necessary.”70 In Bonhoeffer’s fourth reflection, he articulates how this epoch shattering war has forcibly unmasked the old, godless pretentions that a person could build her life without the simultaneous affirmation of “Lord willing.” This unmasking led to a resigned nihilism among the populace. This unmasking

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also led to responsible action by a faithful remnant. Even in the latter case, Bonhoeffer laments that “we learned too late that it is not the thought but readiness to take responsibility that is the mainspring of action.”71 Still, those in Bonhoeffer’s situation are learning that “it will be the task of our generation, not to ‘seek great things,’ but to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos, and to realize that this is the only thing we can carry as ‘booty’ out of the burning house.”72 Bonhoeffer confesses that the godlessness of his age, a godlessness in which he was fully complicit, has been unmasked and he is only now learning what it is to inhabit the world in faith.73 The great consolation of confession is that it makes room for free, creaturely habitation of the world. This is the mode of being Bonhoeffer had to learn to adopt; it is a mode of being he hopes the next generation will inhabit more naturally, shaped as they will be by being born into war and coming of age during the reconstruction of the world. Responsible action must be free, that is, carried out from within the creature’s own resources.74 Bonhoeffer takes this from Luther, for whom “[t]he salvation faithfully and passively received by the inner self becomes cooperatively, and freely, agential through the outer or temporal self as one engages the world through vocationally conceived relationships.”75 This is why he expresses a desire that his generation, for the sake of the new generation, can “preserve that soul, which will empower [members of the next generation] to plan and build up and give shape to a new and better life.”76 For Bonhoeffer, responsible action must also be creaturely, which is to say that it must recognize its contingent character and be prepared to submit to the Creator’s judgment. This is the impulse behind Bonhoeffer’s claim that the new generation will subordinate thought to action: This generation will “only think about what you have to answer for in action.”77 This subordination of thought to action resists the kind of abstraction from the concreteness of historical reality that could lead to other-worldliness. This subordination means that the habits of thought and discernment in this next generation will concern themselves primarily with the struggles of concrete reality. Faithful Christians in this new generation will find that they must love the world with their own love, given to them and sustained by Christ. Christians will do so, not selfishly expecting to build their own lives, but with an eye toward the world’s promised future, toward the reconciliation of all things. The Christian will live ever aware that she is accountable for the way she builds and shapes the world and that what she builds can be torn down in an instant, if God wills it. That the Christian understands a responsibility to and for the world is not to say that her efforts at shaping the world will be entirely welcomed. Responsibility has little room for naïve idealism. Early on, Bonhoeffer’s generation believed they could shape the world “with reason and justice”78 only to

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find that the world in its godlessness was open to neither.79 The world’s hostility to both reason and justice were evinced by both the senseless world war and the brutal holocaust that were ongoing even as Bonhoeffer wrote. There are hostile powers and principalities in the world against which the faithful contend, and idealized hopes in basic reason and a common sense of justice are not sufficient to win the struggle.80 Keenly aware of this, Bonhoeffer hopes: “Your [younger] generation will deal with these powers more soberly and successfully.”81 The younger generation will know their allies and will have the courage to name their enemies as such.82 As in all wars, the faithful suffer hardships and privations at the hands of and for the sake of the godless world. The faithful learn to bear this pain, rather than flee it, by following the example of the suffering Christ.83 This language of bearing, suffering, and enduring life are all deeply rooted in Luther’s theology of baptism. For Luther, the Christian life means daily suffering the death and resurrection first effected in baptism.84 As a Christian remembers her baptism, she remembers the reason her death was necessary (sin) and also the responsibility to love that is entailed by her resurrection into the body of Christ. By his confession, Bonhoeffer uses this fourth reflection to lay out what it will mean for the faithful in the next generation to confront a godless world in a responsible fashion as those who are baptized. To quote a letter from two months later, “Before God, and with God, we live without God.”85 Christians live before God in creaturely accountability. They live with God in suffering to be pushed to the cross for the sake of the world. They live without God in their freedom to live and build toward the future from their own God-given strength. By confessing the idols of personal success and naïve idealism that his own generation had so eagerly and unwittingly embraced, it becomes possible for Bonhoeffer to build a future, even if only with words, that looks more faithful to the historical situation of the church in the world: a situation wherein responsible Christians struggle against the world for the sake of the world’s reconciliation. While the form of the fourth reflection is confession, the content is thoroughly baptismal: Renounce evil in all its forms and be turned to follow Christ. “You Are being Baptized Today as a Christian”: The Fifth Reflection The discussion until this point has made one thing abundantly clear: In this series of reflections, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and confession each find their expressions in a religionless habitation of a godless world come of age. Without these three practices, the faithful form of life Bonhoeffer describes would prove impossible to envisage much less embody. This is no less true of the final section in Bonhoeffer’s letter.

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In the fifth reflection, Bonhoeffer senses that a new kind of aristocracy will be necessary to order the postwar world and govern the passions which gave rise to the war, or to which the war gave rise. He senses that Christians will be uniquely disposed to fill that gap because they have been formed by life in the church. Society seems to, in Bonhoeffer’s reading, express a longing for the values of justice, achievement, and courage.86 Germany, Bonhoeffer believes, will be prepared to submit itself to the leadership of persons who embody these same values: “We can give up our privileges without a struggle, recognizing the justice of history.”87 Both by recognizing the worth of such persons and by following their lead, “we shall prove ourselves worthy to survive by identifying ourselves generously and selflessly with the whole community and the suffering of our fellow human beings.”88 Bonhoeffer’s vision in the opening section of this reflection is particularly grand. In a godless world, is it really conceivable that an entire society would seek such noble values? Or would a godless world really be prepared to sacrifice privileges to turn its eyes toward the sufferings of the entire community? The society Bonhoeffer is hoping develops seems to be populated by proper creatures: conscious of divine lordship, open to others, offering themselves in service to the world. Some element of Christendom may remain embedded in Bonhoeffer’s thoughts.89 Even so, Bonhoeffer’s own bourgeois aristocracy will give way to a new one. The institutional church, belonging to the bourgeois as it did, and compromised as it is for having spent so many years preserving its own future, will no longer hold the cultural power it wielded. Yet, the baptismal life of the church’s members—suffering, service, resisting evil, and the like—will be indispensable in restoring Germany and the world. For the fullness of that restoration, both church and world wait on God. In the meantime, the church’s language has been lost. This is startlingly and regrettably clear as the church speaks its traditional words over young Dietrich in baptism.90 Precisely because the church was so thoroughly engaged in securing its own future, the language of redemption, reconciliation, love, and cross have been twisted so that they can no longer be heard as they were meant to be heard. The church’s blinding self-interest is reflected by the way the Confessing Church, as Bethge describes it, was unable to see how its confession of faith and desire that the Nazi’s “let the church be the church” was itself an act of political resistance.91 For that matter, when the church struggle began the Jewish question was most forcefully related to Jews who had been baptized as Christians. Only a relative few voices were able and willing to cry out for the protection of Jewish persons more broadly.92 All this time, of course, the church has been baptizing. Its members have been pausing to reflect on what baptism means. Yet, Bonhoeffer suspects it is unlikely they remembered their baptism well.93

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It is true enough that “we sense something totally new and revolutionary”94 in this vocabulary, but it has been warped so that rather than turning persons outward it lands lethargically on the ear. So Bonhoeffer suggests two ways by which the church can remember its baptismal calling more clearly: “prayer and doing justice among human beings.”95 Through prayer and action, Bonhoeffer believes that the church humbly waits on God and learns to cast its vision beyond itself once more.96 Bonhoeffer prays that a time eventually will come when the church receives God into its midst once more, where the church is once again truly Christ existing as community, and then the church’s language will once again be “liberating and redeeming like Jesus’s language, so that people will be alarmed and yet overcome by its power.”97 This recovery of language will be an eschatological reality if nothing else. Yet, when that moment does come, the church will proclaim that “God makes peace with humankind and that God’s kingdom is drawing near.”98 Perhaps, and more importantly, that speech will even be believed. The competency of the church’s speech, which de Lange so desired, is finally effected because of God’s action to reveal the truth of the church’s speech. The Christian cause of prayer and action will be quiet and unassuming. Christians will proceed in the world in their own strength with the freedom given them by the God to whom they are accountable. By contextualizing Bonhoeffer’s theology of religionlessness in his sacramentology it becomes clear that, for Bonhoeffer, Christians embody a worldly form of life born out of the transformation they suffer as they encounter Christ at font, Table, and in the neighbor to whom they confess. Even so, a Christian’s public witness does not consist of witnessing to and pointing at the sacraments. Invoking the arcane discipline means that these practices are reserved for the edification of the church; the church does not appeal to them because the world would not understand them. The unassuming lives of prayer and action to which these practices give rise are the sole and sufficient witness of the church to the world; Bonhoeffer’s last reflection insists that the world needs these lives from the church. Bonhoeffer does not say in this last reflection how welcome the world will be toward this cause, though previous reflections suggest the world likely will be less than accommodating. The world has never appreciated its need and insufficiency being laid bare. Even so, as God speaks through the church again, there will be power in those words to do something, namely, to effect the reconciliation of all things. Summarizing the Baptismal Reflections Bonhoeffer chose the occasion of a baptism as the first time he gave his thoughts on religionlessness a broader hearing than Eberhard Bethge. That occasion is significant. In a letter two months after the baptism, Bethge

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asked if Bonhoeffer minded his theological letters being distributed to other Finkenwalde contacts, to which Bonhoeffer responded he himself was not yet ready to disseminate this line of thought to others.99 For a baptism, however, Bonhoeffer could not help but speak to this particular theme, no matter who might be there to hear it. By now it is clear why this is so. Chapter 2 shows that Bonhoeffer’s way of reading the world and his way of responding to the world are born out of receiving Christ in the sacraments. Chapter 3 shows how Bonhoeffer, following Luther, believes that the sacraments function to instill, sustain, locate, and vitalize Christian faith. The Christian’s faith determines the content of her witness: Encountering Christ at font and Table, and hearing Christ pronounce forgiveness and reconciliation through the words of a neighbor, evoke a specific way of being. Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and confession motivate a form of life faithful to what it means to be creatures of God in the world. Chapter 4 argues that faithful habitation of the world means that Christians engage the religious structures that order life together. Christians engage these structures with a disposition born out of the faith received in the sacraments; Christians engage the world as creatures of God rather than trying to be God over the world. The faithful form of life Bonhoeffer describes, as has been argued across chapters 5 and 6, corresponds to his description of religionlessness. This chapter has looked at one of the few locations where Bonhoeffer connects the sacraments and religionlessness explicitly by offering an interpretation and contextualization of the reflections Bonhoeffer sent his godson on the occasion of Dietrich Bethge’s baptism. In the first and second reflections, baptism suggests the importance of being admitted to and formed by a community of loving hearts. The third reflection, on city and rural life, through its reference to Cain, takes recourse to the Eucharist. Bonhoeffer hopes that the world can be inhabited in such a way that consumption and destruction, embodied in the horrifying specter of cities, gives way to lovingly suffering the presence and claim of the neighbor. In the fourth reflection, Bonhoeffer’s own confession highlights the need for confession to take place in light of the egregious failures of the last ten years. By confessing, Bonhoeffer expects that evil is renounced and the future has been opened, turned, toward Christ. The next generation can deal with the evils of the world in a more faithful manner. Therefore, in the fifth reflection, Bonhoeffer can talk about the baptized life of prayer and action that will, in time, give way to the speech of God that reconciles all creatures to God and one another. The sacraments provide a crucial context to religionlessness. Christians go to the sacraments time and time again to receive the faith and love that sustains their faithful habitation of a godless world. This love endures all things, all the resistance a godless world can muster, and the Christian gives

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herself over to gladly suffer the claims of her neighbor. All of this is reflected in a letter Bonhoeffer sends to Eberhard Bethge just days after the baptism: A baptismal day like this doesn’t allow for softer moods. When in the middle of a threatening air raid God sends out the call, the gospel call to God’s kingdom through baptism, it’s remarkably clear what this kingdom is and seeks. A kingdom stronger than war and danger, a kingdom of power and might, a kingdom that is eternal terror and judgment for some and eternal joy and righteousness for others. It is not a kingdom of the heart but reigns over the earth and the whole world, not a passing but an eternal kingdom that builds its own highway and calls on people to prepare its way; a kingdom for which it is worth risking our lives.100

Baptism does not permit a soft mood. Baptism requires a faith that is hard enough to resist the world’s godlessness by witnessing to God’s reign and kingdom. “A kingdom for which it is worth risking our lives,” Bonhoeffer concludes. Just as Christ’s life was given over for the church and the world, as he is given over now in the sacraments for the sake of the church and the world, so too does the church give its life over to the world. This act is a risk— the world is godless—but a faithful Christian is not characterized by concern for her own well-being or future. The Christian, in her baptism, is in fact already dead and resurrected. Therefore, the Christian’s future is entrusted to God. Bonhoeffer’s fourth reflection showed that the Christian’s concern is her witness to Christ and his kingdom through her righteous action on behalf of those whose lives are destroyed by godlessness, even if the only action she can perform is confession. The church moves into the world with a witness to the restoration and reconciliation of all things worked out by the God who, even in the midst of war, calls together a community of love in baptism. Bonhoeffer’s fifth reflection recognized that the world may never appreciate the power in this kind of witness; the world may never recognize the church is doing something both necessary and profound. Or perhaps it will be that precisely because the world does recognize the potency of the church’s witness, the church will find itself ridiculed and marginalized—forced with Christ to the cross. The world may call what the church does foolishness while the world’s own sin is counted wise. This is of no concern. It is not for the church to transform the world; it is for the church, in quiet lives of prayer and action, to witness to the Christ who has and continues to transform the world.101 EVANGELICALS AND RELIGIONLESS WORSHIP TODAY The church moves from the sacraments into the world in lives of simple obedience to the call it heard when encountering God at font, Table, and

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confession. That does not mean that the church’s obedience is instinctually, unreflectively exercised. Precisely because the sacraments form one to read and respond to the world, one is responsible to read and respond to the world. This means discernment and reformation. Evangelical worship may be one place where this faithful, religionless vision may be more thoroughly applied to strip away the idols and clear the way for the church’s continued openness to the God it receives in the sacraments. Therefore, all that remains to do is discover what a recovery of Bonhoeffer’s robust theology of the sacraments helps the church to understand about its contemporary life and work. If lives of prayer and seeking justice are what Christians can hope to muster (noting that Bonhoeffer never puts one without or above the other), then how can Bonhoeffer’s vision help evangelicals to reform their prayer and inspire their pursuit of justice? More precisely, what can the church do to conform its witness and practice more closely to Christ’s call received in the sacraments? Bonhoeffer’s link between worship and justice should be fairly evident by this point: Worship centered on the sacraments gives rise to a community existing for the sake of others. Yet, precisely because of this link, it is necessary to see how worship might more fully conform to and confirm the truths the church received from Christ in the sacraments. To undertake this task, it is necessary to do three things. First, some evidence must be offered that interests in both liturgy/sacramentology and social justice are very real phenomena for contemporary evangelicalism, at least in its American context. Relevant studies and case studies will be offered to this end. Second, specific suggestions are made for practices American evangelicals can engage and beliefs they can foster that will help them to embrace an aspect of Bonhoeffer’s theology from which they’ve too often turned aside. The good news for many parts of the evangelical tradition is that much of what is said here may be already be practiced. The rest, actually, should not be hard to implement. In that respect, these suggestions are really only beginning points and simple points to begin at that. The challenge will be to be more intentional about using these practices to achieve the desired effects and to embrace those practices that have not yet been embraced widely within the tradition. While some suggestions may look like what a particular congregation is already doing, other congregations are not. Evangelicals can all learn from one another, then, how to truly make their worship, and thereby their living, religionless. Reading the Present Reality: Evangelical Movement toward Sacramental Reception and Practices of Justice That significant swaths of American evangelicals are concerned with matters of social justice is hardly a contentious claim any longer. From its inception,

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evangelicals have taken umbrage with the social ills that surround them, and they continue to bear a kind of social consciousness all their own. John Wesley sought prison reform and the abolition of slavery. More recent examples like Jim Wallis have taken strong stances on economics, war, and the environment.102 What may take more convincing is the claim that the movement of evangelicals to more liturgical worship practices rises to any significant level. It is important to be clear about what this second movement means. First, this does not mean that, because of the forms of their worship, evangelicalism is in numerical decline and more mainline denominations are on the rise. If anything, the statistics suggest the opposite of that to be true. According to Pew Research Center (PRC) statistics published in May 2015, about 25 percent of Americans still identify as evangelical Protestants, as they have for the last seven years during which time the population percentage identifying as religiously unaffiliated grew substantially.103 Far from dying away, evangelicals continue to be one of the largest and most influential religious groups in America today. Second, this does not indicate that those leaving traditional evangelical groups for more liturgical denominations represent a particularly large number of persons. According to the same survey, fully two-thirds of those children and youth raised as evangelicals remain so affiliated. Of the third who do leave, only 14 percent switched to either a mainline Protestant or Roman Catholic affiliation, 1 percent lower than the amount who now identify as having no religious affiliation at all. Those who leave evangelicalism are still more likely to leave the church altogether than to switch to the kind of denominations where the sacraments are more commonly a part of worship. The concern of this section is to explain the experience of the 14 percent of evangelicals who did make the transition from evangelicalism to these more liturgical, sacramental settings. One could also point toward those evangelical churches who are incorporating more liturgical elements in their worship without leaving their historic evangelical denominations at all. Unfortunately, no statistical data exists that might indicate the breadth of churches reconsidering and reincorporating such practices at this time, but anecdotal evidence suggests their existence. Growing numbers of evangelical churches, for example, seem to be lighting advent candles or using the lectionary, both of which are associated more closely with “high church” liturgical practices. What follows can hopefully encourage evangelicals to continue pressing in this direction and in greater number. Third, evangelical does not necessarily refer to an historically evangelical denomination any longer. Even those evangelicals who are turning toward mainline denominations often take some part of their evangelical heritage. The religious landscape of America is bewilderingly diverse. The PRC

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found that nearly across the board, more people are identifying themselves as evangelical regardless of the tradition in which they worship. Over the last seven years, mainline Protestant and Orthodox traditions each saw a 2 percent increase in those among them who identify as evangelical; Roman Catholics saw a 6 percent increase.104 Spiritualist traditions such as Quakers or Mennonites saw an astounding 9 percent growth in self-identified evangelicals. All of this suggests that those who are leaving do not necessarily see evangelicalism as backward, bankrupt, or spiritually deficient; rather, it seems they are looking for something that adds to their evangelical commitments. Fourth, observing this movement does not ignore the significant amount of people moving in the opposite direction. Mainline denominations and Roman Catholic churches find that a noteworthy amount of their own members are migrating toward more historically evangelical denominations. The PRC found that roughly 40 percent of American evangelicals were not raised evangelical. Of that 40 percent, only 2 percent grew up non-Christian. Those qualifications should clarify what it means to explain the experience of those who are moving toward more liturgical forms of worship, whether by leaving or remaining in historical evangelical bodies. Not every situation can be taken into account here. For example, perhaps some married into the new tradition. Others may have moved and found the commute to the nearest Baptist church was too far a distance to sustain. However, there are enough stories in circulation that point to the two themes of sacraments and justice that it is reasonable to assert that some movement within evangelicalism is taking place because of these concerns. A survey of some of the accounts offered by those who have made the transition will demonstrate that this phenomenon does exist; people really are concerned about how their worship and their life are drawn together. With this locus of concern identified, concrete suggestions are offered for how evangelical Christian worship might be conducted so as to promote a love of neighbor born out of receiving Christ in the sacraments. Hearing from Those Who Made the Journey Three books (and many more besides) document the stories of those who have transitioned from traditional evangelicalism into more liturgical, sacramental homes. The first of these was published first in 1985 and revised and updated in 2012: Robert Webber’s Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail.105 The second and third books are authored by evangelical turned Anglican, Rachel Held Evans. The experiences reflected in her memoirs, Evolving in Monkeytown and Searching for Sunday, resonate compellingly with a large audience.106 Many of the people to whom she is keen to give a voice are the people this section seeks to describe as well.

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Webber’s book describes his own journey from being a fundamentalist Baptist to an Episcopalian. He perceives his movement to have taken place in three stages: beginning in familial faith, developing a searching faith, and arriving at an owned faith. He cites multiple reasons for which he began to search for a different expression of faith—evangelicalism’s brutal rationalism, its reduction of worship to soul winning, and so on—but the subject of his third chapter is his transformative experience encountering God in the sacraments, discovering that, “God works through life, through people, and through physical, tangible, and material reality to communicate his healing presence in our lives.” He continues: “I began to see that the sacraments . . . were the means by which my relationship with God in faith was established, repaired, and maintained.” These sacramental experiences, “continually [keep] me in the church.” Through these experiences, he found a way to ground himself in the history of the whole church and to be welcome to those of other denominations, including those he previously believed to be apostate traditions. The sacraments, as tangible conveyers of God’s healing and saving action, welcomed Webber into the church and he responded by embracing those God brought alongside him. Rachel Held Evans frames her story similarly. She uses the, no doubt purposely, contentious metaphor of evolution to describe a journey from fundamentalism, to “wondering if the God of my childhood was the kind of God I wanted to worship,” to a “surprising rebirth” of faith.107 What is perhaps most striking about Evans’ introduction is how she describes this journey: “Sometimes God uses changes in the environment to pry idols from our grip and teach us something new.”108 She suggests that for her, a shift in historical circumstances (perhaps not a shift so sweeping as the world’s coming of age) brought about a shattering of idols that might “take God himself to finally pry some of them out of our hands”109 to encourage faithful living in the present. Previous ideas of God are dispensed with as God moves in history to transform the world, moving “into those shadowy places we’re not sure we want him to be.”110 The narrative and vocabulary she uses have strong resonances with Bonhoeffer’s anti-idolatrous articulations of religionlessness. Evans, like Webber, was strongly influenced by evangelical rationalism and apologetics. Her world was fairly insular, insofar as she never really met any of the people she was instructed how to refute. However the rationalism and penchant for critical engagement that her evangelical upbringing instilled eventually turned on itself. Her conversation with others led her to begin thinking in terms of this-worldliness: “Maybe salvation isn’t just about eternity. . . . Maybe God wants to save us from something in the present, something in the here and now . . . maybe our sins, maybe our circumstances, maybe even our religion.”111 As she read the Gospels, she noticed that

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following Jesus was not about assent to a set of beliefs but about a redirection of love.112 Later she noted, “there is liberation in obedience.”113 Like Webber, her search for a faithful form of life and worship led her to the Episcopal church. Particularly, she says it was the sacraments as she received them in that context that instilled faith in her: When my faith had become little more than an abstraction, a set of propositions to be affirmed or denied, the tangible, tactile nature of the sacraments invited me to touch, smell, taste, hear, and see God in the stuff of everyday life again. They got God out of my head and into my hands. They reminded me that Christianity isn’t meant to simply be believed; it’s meant to be lived, shared, eaten, spoken, and enacted in the presence of other people.114

For both Webber and Evans, encountering Christ in the sacraments proved a transformational experience, one that pulled them out of their head and into the world, into a community of people where love was received and required. Their stories could be repeated many times over. Many of the other narratives related in Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail also mention the importance of the sacraments and how they served to embody and evoke Christianity in ways worship without the weekly practice of the sacraments had not.115 Worship seemed fuller and richer and more whole when knees were in contact with kneelers, thumbs thumped into chests in the sign of the cross, one palm grasped another in sharing the peace, and fingers pressed a piece of bread into an open palm. This more embodied worship, they found, led to a Christian form of life that was far more holistic, this-worldly, and demanding than anything they had known before. Bonhoeffer might say that in encountering God this way, they received and answered the call of a more costly grace. But why must the evangelical church learn to articulate the movements toward social justice and sacramental engagement as one? What happens if the trends toward liturgical worship or justice are left to their own devices? Another way of asking this might be, what is the danger in not recognizing with Bonhoeffer that the church comes to know and inhabit the world faithfully only through receiving Christ in the sacraments? Webber, because of his focus on worship, and Evans, with her focus on justice, both reveal the dangers of making one or the other of these themes one’s exclusive focus without necessarily falling prey to these dangers themselves. Bonhoeffer’s ability to more full throatedly and consistently hold both concerns together makes his voice imperative in these times. Webber helps one to see how exclusive focus on worship might obscure the this-worldly teleology of worship. Describing baptism and the Supper, he writes, “Baptism is the sign of our entrance into the church, and the

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Eucharist is the visible reminder that the only way to God is through the broken body and blood of his son Jesus Christ. By receiving the bread and wine, we are continually fed and nourished, for they bring Christ’s action to us again and again.” This is true, but to what end is Christ brought to us time and again? Webber’s answer, at least in this location, seems dominated by the vertical plane. The sacraments feed and nourish faith so that one remembers she has been reconciled to God. For example, “The Eucharist makes me aware that I am acceptable to God because of Jesus Christ.” Is that all? The only time he seems to step beyond the vertical is to acknowledge that “I receive this sign in faith and it effects a healing with God, my neighbor, nature, and me.” Even this does not suggest that the neighbor with whom one is healed or restored is also making a claim on one that is, in Christ, received as a gift and responded to in love. The Table in Webber’s account is not immediately an occasion for free and responsible action. It might seem that the only transformation effected by this encounter with Christ is that one’s own future is secured. It is not immediately clear how this knowledge of a secure future liberates one to live in the present; no matter how grateful one may be to God for securing one’s own ends, without this additional step the heart remains a cor curvum in se. God’s grace has been subsumed only as it benefits oneself. Grace with no cost is cheap grace. Without actually ascribing this attendant danger to Webber, it must be clear that any church that conceptualizes its reception of the sacraments only in these vertical terms is hardly capable of inhabiting the world faithfully. Fortunately, Webber’s account of confession shows that Webber does not make that mistake.116 Receiving the sacraments does not automatically give rise to a faithful form of life; the sacraments must be received, as the Augsburg Confession qualifies it, “rightly.” Receiving the sacraments only to ensure that one is reconciled to God, to secure one’s own being against finitude, is not to be reconciled to God. It is not that the emphasis on Christ’s promeity with which Webber operates is itself wrong. It is a powerful and significant thing to know that Christ has acted on one’s behalf and that through Christ one has been and is being reconciled to God. However, gospel promeity invites promeity. The grace does not stop with those who receive it in the sacrament, but in its superabundance grace overflows the church through the church as the church returns to the world transformed by its encounter with Christ and witnessing to the reconciliation of all things in Christ. Prayer and action, Bonhoeffer insists. Reading Evans invites the alternative question: What is the result of action, of pursuit for justice, when such action is uninformed by the church’s worship and its encounter with Christ in the sacraments? As before, this does not imply that Evans has herself separated justice and worship. In fact,

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Evans refusal to separate justice and Christ reality seems abundantly clear in passages like this one: Even when Jesus hung on the cross . . . he said, “Father forgive them . . . .” Now that is a higher way. That is the kind of goodness and grace my childish view of equality can never fully grasp. . . . When we forsake our way of doing things in favour of his, we experience the kind of joy and peace that inspires mountains to shout and trees to applaud.117

Still, the prominent place of justice within her narratives provides an opportunity to ask a question that needs an answer. Evans writes: “Justice has always been a big deal to me.”118 So it is for many people. Yet, if justice does not have its home in Christ, faithless alternatives readily present themselves. There is a temptation to let homeostatic pragmatism serve as the ethical norm: The church (should or should not) be concerned about (insert cause here) because (insert dysfunction this cause introduces). For example, the church should be concerned about the state of heterosexual marriage, and unconcerned with the plight of suicide rates among homosexual youth, because it perceives that heterosexual marriage lies at the bedrock of society whereas fewer homosexual youth does not upend the status quo. Pragmatism blinds the church to certain ills, not for the sake of Christ, but because looking too closely might disrupt the social equilibrium. Or, conversely, when pragmatism is lacking, idealism serves as a fitting substitute. Blind to no ill at all, a church may chase every injustice until it is worn so thin it hasn’t the strength to challenge the idols that license these injustices in the first place, satisfied with weak commitments to solidarity or proximity. Neither is satisfactory. A concern for social justice unlinked from the sacraments, from the worship of the church, does not need to ask the questions of Christ reality: Who is Christ for us today, and how do I come along Christ in his suffering? Without its worship, the church’s action in the world lacks the focus required to discern who its neighbor is and how it can be Christ existing as community for that neighbor today. Lacking such means of discernment, the church runs the risk of exercising its own will arbitrarily in a manner not conformed to Christ’s will and call. The cost must be in accordance with the grace. Encouraging the Future: What Worship Looks Like Lived from the Sacraments Justice and the sacraments, action and prayer, love for neighbor and the encounter with God—three ways of identifying the same pair—cannot be separated from one another. If worship exists at the expense of ethics, the

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church worships an idol. Where ethics exist amid a worship vacuum, there may be a great flurry of movement but there is little following of Christ. There is little discipleship. In worship one comes to read the world the right way, to recognize Christ, and therefore one comes to inhabit the world in a faithful manner. Likewise, living in the world faithfully drives one back to the church’s worship to receive Christ in and as her neighbor, and to have instilled, sustained, and located the faith necessary to go forth in love. Bonhoeffer’s churchy way of knowing explains why receiving the sacraments in worship and faithful Christian living belong together. In the sacraments, Christ acts in and for the world. The one who receives the sacraments encounters the presence of Christ. Christ undoes the one who receives him in the sacraments, turning her outward. So directed, she is given to her neighbor and her neighbor is given to her. They are encouraged toward acts of mutual love, following and abiding with Christ in the world, pouring themselves out for the sake of the world. They suffer not only the transformation acted in them by Christ, but the vain struggles of a godless world resisting its reconciliation but moving toward reconciliation nevertheless. They bind the wounds of those caught up in the struggle. They bear the sin and guilt of those they encounter, lifting them both to God and praying, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.” They add, “Mia Culpa. I am guilty. I alone am guilty.” All this because being a creature of God cannot be separated from a creaturely form of life grounded in receiving God in the sacraments. Receiving the sacraments is a primary means by which the church resists its own religious dispositions and follows God faithfully once more. Bonhoeffer also makes an important caveat: The sacraments are not only God’s work on the church, but also very human works. They can and have been twisted. Even if God’s presence serves to renew and restore these practices, one cannot ignore the possibility—or more truthfully, the inevitability—that they will be co-opted by those who receive them to further their own agendas: to secure their presents and futures without the God who makes the present and future possible. Reconciled and sainted sinners are sinners nevertheless, no less prone to fret over and resist their finitude than any other person. Therefore the twin movements among evangelicals toward justice and sacramental practice should not be conceived or engaged independently of each other. Without the other, neither movement can be sustained faithfully. Recognizing this permits a final question, perhaps the most important one thus far: How can the church’s worship around the sacraments more fully conform to and participate in faithful, religionless habitation of the world? What does that kind of worship look like? Given the possibility that the church’s worship proves less than faithful at certain points, can worship be reconceived so as to participate once again in the restoration of the world?

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Both Webber and Evans found their home in the Anglican Communion. Others have migrated to Lutheran, Catholic, or Orthodox churches. Still others have incorporated aspects of those traditions’ worship into more historically evangelical settings. The most immediately pressing question is not where people are going, however. Far more important is what they are finding and how they are being formed when they find a form of worship in which to participate. No doubt some persons are formed differently depending on the tradition in which they are engaged. Still, these sacramental encounters educe a form of life conducive to quiet witness in prayer and action. And the promise is that these encounters encourage a more faithful form of evangelicalism than tee-shirts used as billboards for the Bible (when you must be in faith to recognize the authority of those words), or music that hardly dares to dwell on the real struggles of this world (despite a great deal of love for the next one).119 How can evangelical worship reorient itself to the sacraments to encourage Christians to live a life of faithful prayer and action? God is, of course, the effective agent of transformation in the church’s worship. That God is at work, however, does not mitigate the church’s responsibility to use its own strength and its own resources, its own God-given freedom, to live as faithfully as it can to the work God is doing. Therefore what the evangelical church requires must apply to its worship is a “sacramental understanding” to “live deeply the prophetic reality of the sacraments.”120 Consequently, the final matter is this: What does the cultus look like in a religionless church? Bonhoeffer described five alternative forms of religionlessness life, detailed in the last chapter. Preaching, singing, praying, moving, and so on, can all be thought through for their ability to conform the church more closely to the content of its encounter with Christ in the sacraments: You participate in the life of the living God who suffers to be destroyed to redeem the world. The first thing that must happen, as has been mentioned before, is that the sacraments need to be received and recalled more regularly in many evangelical bodies. Calvin writes: “As bread nourishes, sustains, and preserves the life of our body, so also Jesus Christ’s body is the food, nourishment, and preservation of our spiritual life.”121 Bread sustains life every day. It is as common to life as water and air. Surely the everydayness of the elements themselves is betrayed by the infrequency with which the Supper is taken. If one is to be formed by and to the sacraments, the sacraments have to be present and (in faith) Christ in them. Some may object that this constant return to the Table leads to apathy. Yet, familiarity breeds conformation rather than contempt. God surprises and challenges those who receive the Supper habitually by continually exceeding their expectations for what happens in the meal and by directing them to new neighbors or old neighbors in new ways. Worship that conforms to the sacraments must include receiving the sacraments and it must do so frequently.

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Having insisted on this point, the following five sections each explain how other staples of Christian worship can contribute to religionless living and religionless worship when reconceived through the effects of the sacraments. Religionless’ five themes—this-worldliness, the suffering Christ, prayer and action, corporate discernment, and confessing one’s creaturely posture before the Lord—can all take form in Christian worship and point the church back to Christ’s call in the sacraments. This-worldly Worship: Worship against Daydreams First, the benefits of Christians actually having the sacraments as part of their worship can be discussed. This is not merely a repetition of the need for frequency, but rather a statement on the way concrete benefits receiving the sacraments regularly can bring. Religionlessness means, in part, to be concerned with this world. The Lord’s Supper, baptism, and confession—all form the church to be this-worldly in Bonhoeffer’s sense. They encourage everydayness, gratitude, and awareness of suffering. Perhaps it is easiest to see how the Lord’s Supper provides time and space for one to express gratitude. After all, the alternative designation of Eucharist means thanksgiving. The Supper has long been considered an occasion for gratitude. In the event, God by God’s own goodness and mercy gives over grace to which one is not entitled by merit. Thankfulness is the only proper response to such a gift. The Supper becomes a concrete moment in which the blessings one receives can be acknowledged and appreciated. It may also be evident how the Supper is an occasion whereby the church becomes aware of suffering. When a broken wafer is lifted up as a priest proclaims, “Behold the lamb of God,” or as a minister rips asunder a loaf of bread and recites, “This is my body, broken for you,” the church remembers why it was necessary for Christ to come at all. Christ’s own body was broken so that the sin that broke the bodies and spirits of so many persons might give way to redemption and reconciliation. Thousands of years later, the Supper is still an occasion for the church to groan along with all of creation as it awaits final release from the slavery of corruption and the simultaneous restoration of its creaturely freedom perfectly manifest, of which the church is only the first-fruits (Rom. 8:18–25). The original Supper was doubly occasioned by suffering: the suffering of the world to which Christ was responding and the suffering of Christ which he was anticipating. In the original Supper, Christ deigned to suffer the hands of the world upon him to redeem and reconcile the world. In the meal today, the church deigns to suffer with Christ; the church, too, is turned to suffer the sufferings of the world. What is perhaps least evident is that the church’s worship is “everyday.” Monastic communities who pray the hours and worship together on a daily

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basis may be exempted from this charge; similarly, those Episcopalians who still read Morning and Evening Prayer daily. Yet, for the most part Christian worship in evangelical settings is associated with one day—Sunday. There was a time where Sunday was made a very special day, indeed. One bathed and shaved the evening before, and dressed in one’s nicest suit or dress to go to meeting. Stores were all closed and, in some locations and traditions, one did not even go outside to play in the afternoon. That time is certainly past. Stores are now open and sports leagues no longer avoid scheduling games for Sunday. As important as Sabbath is, the restoration of Sunday to the everyday is probably a good development. There is certainly no going back now. Still, those who do attend church rather than a football game find themselves entering a world that seems far from everyday. This world is filled with sights and sounds far from common: priests in collars or cassocks, a cross hung prominently on one wall, and memorial markers for people lost to the congregation’s living memory. Worship, no matter how one does it, is always a bit strange. It seems out of step with time. The church’s worship does not necessarily look like everyday life, but many everyday phenomena are caught up in the church’s worship nonetheless. There is eating and drinking, washing, speech, silence, and song, and it all takes place with everyday elements such as bread, water, and the human voice. In this way, the church’s worship encourages Christians to find God in everyday things and encounters. For all its strangeness, when the sacraments are a part of Christian worship that worship locates God concretely in this world, among these people, precisely where God chooses to be located. It does not direct its practitioners to the beyond, but to the God in their midst and the persons around them. Worship of the Suffering God: Worship against Idolatry Presumably, when the church comes together to worship, it comes together to worship God. God may, of course, overcome any idol erected—and the church that comes to kneel below an empty cross can certainly come to know something of the God who suffers—but there are a great many ill-conceived Christ’s worshipped in churches today. How might the service work to strip away idols so that one is prepared to come before the living God? An Episcopalian friend once said why he appreciated reciting the Creed immediately following the sermon. It seemed he was saying, “Nevertheless, I believe,” to whatever the preacher had just tried to say. Reciting the creed is a certain kind of apophatic moment. It is a moment where the church says that God is beyond us but even so know how God has been revealed to and for us. This is how the finite bears the infinite: in faith, as creatures acknowledging the sheer majesty and inutterability of their creator. Engaging in this

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kind of apophatic moment can serve to strip away the idolatrous ideas of God one brings to church with them so that the suffering God can come to the fore. Practicing these moments and stripping away these idolatrous notions prepares one for the moment when the encounter of revelation does happen. It is possible to create other such moments in worship where affirmation and negation cancel one another out. Reciting the Nicene Creed following the sermon is only one example, and one that even non-Creedal evangelical traditions might well consider. That they are bound by no creed does not mean that they cannot affirm a creed that does in fact accord with what they believe. Another example might be placing the offertory directly after a time of prayerful petition. Christians come asking God for gifts, and respond to those petitions by giving gifts themselves. Alternatively, simply beginning a service with some act petitioning for purity establishes a shared assumption that Christians enter worship needing purified. Something needs washed away, and one is making oneself open to that possibility. Eventually, this process of affirmation and negation can give way, though, to the acknowledgment of where God is revealing Godself here and now in the sacraments. The service can be one of apophatically pushing the church away from its false ideas of Christ and toward the Christ whose body is broken and blood is shed to redeem the world. Congregants do not need told that what they are doing is canceling out or contradicting what they just did or affirmed. They merely do it until the service leads them to a point where they finally realize that this is all the more that can be truly said: Christ is given over to the world to suffer with and for it at the world’s own hands. More importantly, Christ is given over to them. He is quite literally placed into their hands, and his presence transforms them into a community of loving hearts that participates in Christ’s giving and suffering. These apophatic kinds of moves, however they are incorporated, can help prepare a congregation to receive the God who is and loosen their grasp on the idolatrous ideas of God that would have them substitute Christ’s weakness with strength or Christ’s service with authoritarianism. By means of these apophatic movements, the congregation can be prepared to receive and worship the God who encounters them when they take the Supper. They can have eyes to see that God even suffers to be present as bread and wine if this is what will sustain Christian hearts in love. Worship as Prayer and Action: Worship against Interiority The sacramental practices themselves evoke this-worldliness. Apophatic moments clear the way for the church to encounter and stand with the suffering Christ. Prayer and action become one when worship is purposefully embodied, thus modeling in worship the entire mode of Christian living.

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When one enters the church from the parking lot, she is handed a worship bulletin by a smiling, kindly gentleman. She squeezes past a single-mother and her child with a coloring book to take her normal seat. When she sings, she stands alongside a host of others with her hymn book weighing heavily in her hands. When she sits to pray, other bodies mirror her activity. When the time comes for the Supper, another congregant passes her bread and wine that she receives with her hands and ingests by her mouth. Before she leaves the church again, someone has shaken her hand either in welcome or to pass Christ’s peace. While worship is a time for prayer, in worship one discovers that prayer is a kind of action. Prayer takes place with one’s whole body. As such, prayer cannot help but be externalized. The church has many ways by which the bodily nature of prayer is evidenced. For those who kneel, cold stones chill their knees or their joints sink comfortably into kneelers. Some make the sign of the cross as they invoke they name the Triune God as the one to whom their prayer is directed. More commonly among evangelicals, heads bow and hands clasp. Brows furrow in worry, sighs of resignation break pregnant silences, and joyful smiles spread widely across faces. Moreover, praying action is engaged in as a group, with all the dangers and promises this entails. What is commonly referred to as a moment of quiet contemplation alone with God is not quiet or lonely at all. Precisely because prayer is an embodied action it becomes visible to all. Jesus spoke about the perils of public prayer: It becomes a spectacle where the one who prays does so to be seen (Mat. 6:5). Bonhoeffer was equally aware of the threat.122 Prayer can certainly become the occasion for competition whether one is more eloquent than another or the subject of one prayer is more “worthy” than another. Yet, even unspoken prayers offered in closets remain public prayer to the degree that they are not interior but embodied, visible to the world, not contained within the one who prays. Prayer cannot help but overflow the boundary of the body of she who prays. Prayer therefore becomes part of the preparation necessary if the church is to rightly administer the sacraments, that is, receive them faithfully in faith. Prayer reinforces that Christians exist alongside and for others. For all his warnings against public prayer, Jesus also said he was present where two or three were gathered (Mat. 18:20). Prayer characterized by confession and intersession recognizes that it is the action of Christ that redeems and sustains the world, not one’s own work of prayer. One serves another as she prays for another. More, she is invited to become the answer to the prayer she prays. He who prays for the naked confesses he has two shirts, and she who prays for the poor confesses she has money to spare, and both are driven to service of those in need. Perhaps this is not always the case—the poor can pray for the plight of the poor as well as anyone if not better, and they cannot confess

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to having funds lying about spare—but nevertheless the one who prays is reminded that in some way she can bind the wounds of those who bear the burden for which she is so concerned. In addition, to receive the Supper together after having prayed alongside one another is to be more keenly aware of the needs and struggles of those called to share the Table alongside oneself. To receive the grace of Christ present in bread and wine, to share these with your neighbor, is to be reminded of the many gifts one has received and the many ways in which one can put these in the service of others. One is not driven inward by prayer; one is directed outward because prayer is embodied. Prayer is action. Because this is the case, prayer in the context of worship prepares Christians for taking the Supper together by rendering concrete the needs and struggles of those whose prayerful petitions are embodied around those who refuse to pray with their eyes shut. If Christians want to learn to do justice in the world, they must learn to pray well. Worship as Corporate Discernment: Worship against Conscience Religionless, faithful life is also characterized by corporate discernment, and so worship should participate in the discernment process. While the sacraments themselves evoke a way of knowing and describing the world through Christ, the church is invited to test the spirits as it engages in patterns of call and response. In Public Worship and Public Work, Christian Scharen describes a Roman Catholic congregation divided over a priest’s social ministry to the homeless and those sick with AIDS. Many long-time members simply left the church. Others were content to recognize his priestly authority—and so he was meticulous in his practice of the liturgy—but were less open to recognizing his pastoral authority. Over time, however, the priest’s practice of the liturgy yielded a congregation whose life was as open to the homeless and sick as was their altar Table. Scharen writes: To the extent this happened at the Shrine, it happened because of the focused work of Father Adamski over a fairly long period of time, all the while holding to his view that he could not “tell” people how their lives could be transfigured through participation in the breaking of the bread but could only show them by inviting them, by drawing them into the practices that themselves became the school of transfigured life. . . . The “should” of practical sense, inculcated through ritual practice, gives participants a disposition that without thinking recognizes the situation and responds to it with a “yes, this is who we are; this is what we should be all about here.”123

The great boon of Scharen’s work is to draw out the struggle taking place within a congregation as it engages the sacraments and is transformed

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by them. There is no linear move from the ritual to its meaning for the congregation to the congregation’s embodiment of this meaning. Each of these stages is characterized by a struggle amid the community about who it is and what it is about. This process of communal struggle can be identified as communal discernment. The congregation as a whole comes to the Supper time and time again as it tries to determine together what it means for them to take the Supper in their time and place. The Supper becomes an occasion for them to wrestle with the hard questions like, “Who is Jesus Christ for us today? Where is he taking shape in the world? How are we to follow him into those places?” The church’s worship does not provide all the answers but insists that the world be read theologically nonetheless. One example of a congregation engaging in the process of corporate discernment through its worship would be the classic give and take, the call and response, between preacher and congregation in African American churches. The Spirit is said to motivate the preacher’s words, sure enough, but if the Spirit does not move the people to engage with and respond to the sermon, the sermon is deemed unsuccessful.124 No matter how well crafted a sermon may be in advance it is incomplete until the people weigh in together. The preacher does not even have to ask for the response—it often takes place where he or she pauses to breathe. The response can take many forms. It can encourage the preacher: “Amen,” “uh huh,” or a hum. It can acknowledge the preacher by repeating a line he or she has just spoken. It can also direct the preacher if the congregation feels he or she is no longer on track or could make things clearer, with the people responding, “Well?” or “Help ‘em Lord.”125 The preaching event is participatory for everyone present. Preacher and congregation work together to cultivate a theopolitical imagination that lets them attend to a description of the world that does not diagnose only the world’s ills but also recognizes God at work to deconstruct social injustices and other barriers to flourishing.126 Call and response is not unique to the African American tradition—though the spontaneity with which it takes place in that setting is likely unparalleled elsewhere among American evangelicals. However, there are other ways that evangelicals can work together in worship to develop a shared theopolitical imagination. Calls to worship often take the call-response structure. Even though the response is often prepared in advance, the thoughtful congregation is given an invitation to respond. That invitation may be rejected if nobody is comfortable enough with what they are being asked to affirm. Some traditions offer intercessions where the one who prays intones, “Lord, in your mercy,” and the congregation responds: “Hear our prayer.” Our prayer. In this response, the congregants opt in to the prayer and claim it as their own, affirming what has been prayed as their own reading of the world by doing so. There are many forms this call and response might take, each of which engages the same task

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of corporately imagining who the congregation is and how they are to be in the place where Christ has encountered them and thrown them back into the world. Worship for the World: Worship against a Self-reliant World It only seems fitting, here at the end, to go back to the beginning: Baptism, remembered in the very architecture of the church’s building, rebuffs all pretentions of lordship and autonomy, and makes one a creature. Christian baptism is perhaps not a weekly part of worship, though many a minister wishes it could be. But Christian worship does usually take place in a designated location week in and week out. The architectural features of that location are part of the worship. Churches should use that architecture to help congregants remember their baptisms. Early church habits of baptizing in running water have largely given way, at least in the United States, to fonts or baptisteries located prominently within the church building. These are the places where one became a Christian, and their conspicuous presence calls one to be a Christian again. Luther often told despairing persons to remember their baptism. By that, he intended them to remember the promises baptism conveyed and sealed. Because of baptism, they were in Christ. Because of baptism, they were sealed by the Holy Spirit. Because of baptism, they were members of the church. Because they died in baptism they had been raised to a new life. They were now creatures of God—not little lords—no matter how frequently they sinned and transgressed that boundary. Baptism conveyed obligations, as well. Christians were now free from the bondage of sin and so were bonded in love and service to God and the world. Their lives were no longer their own but had been bought with a price (I Cor. 6:19–20). With its promises and responsibilities, baptism serves as a reminder to the church that it is under God’s authority but by, with, and under that authority it has been ennobled and freed in service. This is a very different kind of freedom than Western post-enlightenment societies have generally preferred. It is a consequence of the liberal project that human beings are conceived of as autonomous exercisers of arbitrary will, accountable to no one, whose resources are one’s own to be used by and for oneself. Baptism is an uncompromising and unequivocal “No!” to these self-centered and selfsecuring conceptions of freedom. Baptism draws one into the community of the church where one receives the promises of God that the future is secure by the work God is doing. Baptism draws one into the community where one is received in faith as a gift of God and where one receives the community in faith as God’s gift. Baptism draws one in to the community that celebrates the Lord’s Supper and so is turned to one another and the world in loving responsibility. Baptism

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and the Lord’s Supper, font and Table, frame not only the architectural setting of Christian worship but also the very shape of Christian life. As the church invites one to enter the waters and to eat the body and drink the blood, it gives rise to the kind of person who knows how to resist the temptation of worldly bondage: She can remember her baptism and so stand free and firm in Christ. Worship that wants to be religionless should take care that the worship space is oriented toward the places where faith is received. CONCLUSION This chapter began exploring the sacramental themes latent in the baptismal reflections around religionlessness. That form of life, however, is inconceivable apart from receiving the sacraments, as only those who receive the sacraments know. By means of the sacraments one knows herself to be placed into a community and carried by them through life, formed in ways she could neither anticipate nor even understand when the formative process began. The end of such formation is a life of godliness marked by contentment; this in contrast to Cain’s greedy, death-dealing, self-securing form of life embodied in the problem of urban sprawl. Christ’s work on the cross as revealed in the Eucharist is enough to transform even dead and godless Babylon into the peaceable kingdom. Bonhoeffer offers a confession for his entire generation—they belonged to those who tried to build and secure life on their own and learned too late the perils their ambitions contained—but does so in the hope that his confession can create space for free, creaturely habitation of the world by those who are being born as the war comes to its bloody finish. Their life, what the world requires of them even if it does not want it of them, will be a life of quiet prayer and seeking justice. This dual alignment of prayer and justice with faithful, religionless habitation of the world prompts an attempt to reconcile two growing movements among American evangelicals today. Evangelicals appear increasingly interested in more liturgical worship oriented around the sacraments. Too, there is a growing recognition that issues like race, immigration, and economics call for the church to be socially conscious and engaged in the pursuit of justice and mercy for the least of these. The other-worldly theology that permitted Marx to call Christianity an opiate of the masses does not reflect a gospel that is good news to the poor even now. While these two developments are readily enough observed, they are not always observed as belonging to each other. Yet, sustaining these movements requires observing how each needs the other. Robert Webber and Rachel Held Evans show how evangelicals are already describing worship in terms of justice and justice in terms of worship, though not always with the same full-throated endorsement of both causes

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that Bonhoeffer offers. While neither Webber nor Evans actually speaks of sacraments or justice to the exclusion of the other—and in this they are incredibly instructive—their emphasis on opposite sides of the same coin do invite others to hypothesize what these two movements look like if they remain apart. Worship without justice breeds insular institutionalism. Justice without worship collapses into pragmatism, or simply collapses under the weight of its own undirected fervor. How, then, does the Christian cultus, the church’s worship, serve to promote faithful, religionless lives of love and service? Most basically, the sacraments must be frequently incorporated into the worship service to form those who receive them. In their own way, each of the three sacraments affirms thisworldliness unequivocally. Liturgical language that cancels itself out helps one to set aside preconceived notions about the God one will encounter until she is at last instructed to behold the suffering Lamb of God in broken bread. The bodily act of prayer makes one more keenly aware of the needs of those who are called to the Table alongside her—those whose prayers God intends to answer through her. The call and response is an opportunity for the church to corporately discern the will of God for them as they interpret this place and time. Finally, the church’s architecture encourages the Christian to remember her baptism and draws her back to creatureliness, resisting the call to godless, worldly autonomy. The thrust of the whole is this: To be Christian is to be encountered by the God who is given as one receives the sacraments. Baptism, confession, and the Lord’s Table are necessary acts for those who seek to follow Christ. One follows the call of Christ to font, neighbor, or Table, and there Christ forms one into his likeness so that the redemption and reconciliation of all things begun on Calvary might continue to take form in the church today. Therefore, what it means for the sacraments to be administered rightly comes into sharper focus. The sacraments are administered rightly when the worship of the church participates in shearing away the idols and pretentions that human beings are otherwise inclined to bring to the Lord’s Table and foist upon God. When worship prepares one to be surprised and taken captive by God, one can also be surprised and laid claim to by her neighbor, and then be reconciled in loving service to them both. The Christian can be without religion.

NOTES 1. Christiane Tietz, “The Role of Jesus Christ for Christian Theology,” in Christ, Church, and World: New Studies in Bonhoeffer’s Theology and Ethics, ed. Michael Mawson and Philip Ziegler (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 13–14.

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2. De Lange, Waiting for the Word, 21. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisā (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). 3. De Lange, 200: 21. 4. DBWE 2, 150. 5. Ibid., 22. 6. Ibid., 23. 7. Ibid., 25. 8. Ibid. Bonhoeffer rejected this way of thinking already in DBWE 2, 154. 9. De Lange, Waiting for the Word, 26. 10. Ibid., 26–33. 11. LW 37, 100–101. 12. LW 36, 359. Likewise, it is God, not the minister, who baptizes. Ibid., 62–63. 13. DBWE 8, 389. 14. De Lange, Waiting for the Word, 30. 15. DBWE 8, 389. 16. De Lange, Waiting for the Word, 35. 17. Ibid., 35–36. 18. DBWE 6, 135. 19. De Lange, Waiting for the Word, 32. 20. DBWE 8, 427. 21. Ibid., 390. 22. Ibid., 389–90. 23. Ibid., 289. 24. Ibid., 290. 25. Ibid. 290, 383. 26. Ibid., 274. 27. Ibid., 383–90. 28. Having been read at the baptism, the manuscript was subsequently concealed and, in hiding, was damaged. Fortunately, a typed copy was prepared the week following the baptism. This typed manuscript became the basis for all further publications. Ibid., 383, fn. 1. For discussion of how the other prison letters survived, see Bethge, Friendship and Resistance, 38–57. 29. DBWE 8, 364. 30. Ibid., 383–84. 31. Ibid., 384–85. Virtue is a contested term when applied to Bonhoeffer’s theology, as Bonhoeffer would be critical of virtue ethics for its proclivity to split apart the person from the world around her. However, Moberly argues that virtue does not do this necessarily and so opens up the possibility of using virtue to describe the way in which one is engaged in the world. Jennifer Moberly, The Virtue of Bonhoeffer’s Ethics: A Study of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics in Relation to Virtue Ethics (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013), 90–91. Virtue is used here in the latter sense. 32. Ibid., 385–86. 33. Ibid., 387–88. 34. Ibid., 388–90.

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35. Ibid., 383–85. 36. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 13–21. 37. DBWE 8, 385. 38. DBWE 8, 385. 39. Ronald C. Arnett, Dialogical Confession: Bonhoeffer’s Rhetoric of Responsibility (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 218. 40. DBWE 8, 384. 41. DBWE 8, 383. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. DBWE 8, 384–85. 45. Ibid., 384. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 385. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 386. 54. Ibid., 386. 55. The previous statistics are from United Nations Environmental Project, “Urban Areas: Europe,” GEO-3: Global Environment Outlook, 2002. Accessed March 2, 2015, http:​/​/www​​.unep​​.org/​​geo​/g​​eo3​/e​​nglis​​h​​/420​​.htm.​ 56. DBWE 3, 145–46. 57. DBWE 8, 386. 58. Ibid. For more on Bonhoeffer’s criticism of technology, see Daniel J. Treier, “Modernity’s Machine: Technology Coming of Age in Bonhoeffer’s Apocalyptic Proverbs,” in Bonhoeffer, Christ, and Culture, ed. Keith L. Johnson and Timothy Larson (Nottingham: Intervarsity Press, 2013), 94. 59. DBWE 3, 145. 60. Ibid., 145–46. DBWE 12, 305. 61. DBWE 3, 146. See also DBWE 12, 305. 62. DBWE 8, 386. 63. Ibid. 64. Bonhoeffer also quotes Jer. 51:6: “Flee from the midst of Babylon . . . she could not be healed.” Ibid. 65. DBWE 3, 146. 66. DBWE 8, 387. 67. Matthew 6:34. DBWE 8, 50. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. The sentiment of this accords well with the, most likely apocryphal, saying of Luther: “Even if I knew the world was going to end tomorrow, I would still plant my apple tree today.” 70. Ibid.

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71. Ibid. See also Ibid., 303. 72. Ibid., 387. 73. Barth would rightly contend that only because Bonhoeffer is acknowledging his complicity could this passage truly be a confession. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 57. 74. DBWE 2, 153. 75. Mary Gaebler, The Courage of Faith: Martin Luther and the Theonomous Self (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), 156–57. 76. DBWE 8, 387. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., 388. 79. Ibid. 80. See “On Stupidity,” Ibid., 43–44. 81. Ibid., 388. 82. DBWE 6, 339–51. 83. DBWE 8, 388. 84. LW 36, 69. 85. DBWE 8, 479. 86. Ibid., 388. 87. Ibid., 389. 88. Ibid. 89. The theoretical justification by which it might be possible that an aristocracy of Christians who inhabit the world with a faithful disposition could engender a society that follows suit would probably be found in Bonhoeffer’s concept of collective geist, first developed in Sanctorum Communio. To the degree that a collective geist is formed by a group of persons but also takes on a force independent of those persons and bears back down on them with its own claims about how to understand and inhabit the world, if the geist of society were shaped by faithful persons it may be possible that society shapes faithful habitants. That such a society could ever actually be instantiated is a highly dubious possibility, especially given that any persons responsible for shaping the geist—however faithful they may be—remain both saints and sinners. 90. Ibid. 91. Bethge, Friendship and Resistance, 18–20. 92. Klaus Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, vol. 1 of 2, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1977), 254–79. 93. DBWE 8, 389. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid., 390. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 99. DBWE 8, 457. 100. DBWE 8, 395. 101. DBWE 6, 352–62.

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102. A history of the progressive evangelical movement can be found in Brantley Gasaway, Progressive Evangelicals and the Pursuit of Social Justice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). For a treatment of evangelicalism more broadly, see also Brian Steensland and Philip Goff, The New Evangelical Social Engagement (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2014. 103. Pew Research Center, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape: Christians Decline Sharply as Share of Population; Unaffiliated and Other Faiths Continue to Grow,” Pew Research Center. Accessed May 12, 2015, http:​/​/www​​.pewf​​orum.​​org​/2​​ 015​/0​​5​/12/​​ameri​​cas​-c​​hangi​​ng​-re​​ligi​o​​us​-la​​ndsca​​pe. 104. It is worth noting that among the mainline protestant denominations Lutherans— outside Missouri Synod—were the most likely to not identify as evangelical. 105. Robert Webber, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Why Evangelicals Are Attracted to the Liturgical Church (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2013), Kindle. 106. Rachel Held Evans, Evolving in Monkeytown: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010); and Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2015), Kindle. 107. Evans, Evolving in Monkeytown, 22–23. 108. Ibid., 22. 109. Ibid., 18. 110. Ibid., 23. 111. Ibid., 86. 112. Ibid., 104–6. 113. Ibid., 175. 114. Evans, Searching for Sunday, 16. 115. These can be found in part 2 of Webber, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail. 116. Webber, n.p. 117. Evans, Evolving in Monkeytown, 137. 118. Ibid., 128. 119. Axel R. Schafer, Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011) might offer a less polemical, though equally dissatisfied description of evangelical culture. 120. Tercio Bretanha Junker, Prophetic Liturgy: Toward a Transforming Christian Praxis (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014), 31. 121. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: 1541 French Edition, trans. Elsie Ann McKee (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2009), 547. 122. DBWE 5, 93. 123. Christian Scharen, Public Worship and Public Work: Character and Commitment in Local Congregational Life (Collegeville, MN: Pueblo Book, 2004), 64. 124. Cleophus Larue, I Believe I’ll Testify: The Art of African American Preaching (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 84.

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125. Evans E. Crawford, The Hum: Call and Response in African American Preaching (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995). See also Dale P. Andrews, “African American Preaching and Sermonic Traditions,” in African American Religious Cultures, ed. Anthony Pinn (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO Books, 2009), 480–82. 126. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 46–52.

Conclusion

Bonhoeffer’s correspondence with Eberhard Bethge opens a question which subsequent scholarship has left unexplored. As Bonhoeffer began to describe how religionless Christianity navigates a world coming of age, he was keenly aware that this had implications for the church and its worship. Bonhoeffer’s outline for a book shows that he intended to devote a section to the cultus, but the outline itself provides no material by which to reconstruct what Bonhoeffer would have written.1 The context of Bonhoeffer’s theology, however, precludes certain interpretive possibilities. From the start of his theological career, Bonhoeffer was concerned with the shape and action of the church. From prison, he wishes he could once again engage in acts of worship such as the Lord’s Supper right alongside Bethge.2 From the beginning to the end of his career, Bonhoeffer was engaged with and interested in the church. In light of this interest, it is clear that religionlessness should not be thought of as a form of secularism or atheism. Yet, in Ethics and from prison, Bonhoeffer also spoke of a failed church, of a church that has failed to resist the godlessness of a shifting historical landscape.3 Things could not simply be business as usual. The church could not merely press forward, expecting everything to turn out well. Change was required. For Bonhoeffer, the content of this change would be the church’s embrace of a religionless form of life. Neither secularism nor dogged institutional perseverance can provide an adequate description of a religionless cultus, and so it is necessary to dig through Bonhoeffer’s work on three themes—religion, religionlessness, and the sacraments—to develop this description. Sacramentology, as a locus within ecclesiology, provides a necessary resource for connecting Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology, his interest in the church, with religionlessness, with its inherent criticism of the church. 211

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When read in his Lutheran context, Bonhoeffer clearly affirms that a religionless cult looks like worship wherein the Christian encounters God in the sacraments and is directed through that encounter to her neighbor in a faithful and loving way. Demonstrating this claim required extended attention to two central themes: the sacraments and religion. The sacraments were the first point of reference. Martin Luther’s theological legacy, at the root of Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran tradition, had a profound and lasting influence on Bonhoeffer and his own sacramentology. Luther’s theology required attention to three themes: the form of the sacraments, the function of sacraments, and Christ’s presence in the sacraments. Form asks what a sacrament is, explaining how discrete practices can be spoken of univocally, and function asks what the individual sacraments do. The personal presence of Christ is a necessary condition for the sacraments’ effectiveness. For Luther, a sacrament is a sign and a promise received in faith. Faith is the posture in which persons trust God to hold their futures secure and in trust are able to love others instead of using others as means to an end. Faith, however, comes from without and is the work of God. The function of the sacraments is to make Christ manifest so as to instill, strengthen, locate, and vitalize faith. The Christian is encountered and overwhelmed by the love of God and God’s promises to forgive and redeem the world. She can see that only this Christ whom she encounters has the capacity to secure all her needs. Freed from trying to save herself, the Christian’s heart is opened up in love to God and her neighbor. The neighbor is no longer a resource, a thing to be used in the vain pursuit of self-security, but is a creature of God with all the dignity that relation implies. Thus, the encounter with Christ in the sacraments places the Christian into a community of faith that is responsible to love her and for which she is responsible to love. The community of faith is a community of love, too, and these two descriptions are inseparable from one another. Robert Jenson’s sacramentology both models the enduring significance of these themes from Luther within Lutheran theology and also represents the creative ways in which Luther’s work can be redeployed by Lutheran theologians like Bonhoeffer. Luther’s theology sets up the Lutheran context necessary for understanding the sacramental hermeneutic with which Bonhoeffer operates. Having set up this context with which to understand Bonhoeffer, the second chapter turned to Bonhoeffer to see how he took up and interpreted this Lutheran heritage. Act and Being shows how Bonhoeffer sees the revelatory encounter with Christ in word and sacrament as entirely transformative. This transformation is so thoroughgoing that revelation requires a whole new way of knowing—churchy and creaturely. Using the broad groupings of act and being theologies, Bonhoeffer explains how either of these on its own is insufficient to explain what occurs when the Christian comes face to face with the living God in revelation, particularly within the community that performs

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baptism. Act theologies cannot account for the continual presence of God in history to ensure the continuity of the promises made in baptism; being theologies cannot account for the event-character of revelation, that punctuated moment in time where the Christian is consciously aware of being moved from being-in-Adam to being-in-Christ. To be in-Christ is to be in and know from encountering Christ as he deems to be circumscribed within and for the church. The event of revelation is caught up in the continuity of the human rituals and practices of a historical community. Within this community and its practices, God makes the Christian able to see the world rightly as a place where God is active. All false lordly pretensions are laid to rest and creatures are raised anew to love and serve one another as gifts of God. It is evident Bonhoeffer believes that to be Christian is to have a churchy way of knowing and, by extension, being: By being encountered by Christ in word and sacrament, the Christian comes to know the truth about all things and participate in the redemption of all things. Christ is present and active even now in history to redeem and reconcile all things. He calls the church to participate with him in this activity, giving them the eyes to see where he is at work. The implication of this ecclesial form of knowing is that the sacraments should not be easily set aside when it comes time to discuss religionlessness. On the contrary, religionlessness should be seen as a working out of the truth the church comes to know in Christ through the sacraments. The sacraments instill and sustain a kind of faith that manifests as religionlessness. Bonhoeffer’s own account of religionlessness does not stand against the church; his account redirects the church toward God and neighbor in just the way sacraments do. Even where Bonhoeffer’s theology does not continue to make explicit reference to the sacraments, as is largely the case in the prison correspondence, the churchy way of knowing that Bonhoeffer deduces from his Lutheran context insists that everything be known through the reality of Christ who is present in word and sacrament to redeem the world. Having established the more general point that the truth about the world is known through the sacraments in chapter 2, chapter 3 examines Bonhoeffer’s theology of the three practices Lutheran theology can generally recognize as sacraments: baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and confession. These three practices serve to create a distinctive ethos or corporate geist that informs the continuous life of the community well beyond the event itself. In agreement with Luther, Bonhoeffer operates with the belief that the church is a spiritual community and the activity of God in the sacraments create and maintain that community: Baptism instills faith by putting to death all lordly pretentions and raising new creatures into the community of saints; the Lord’s Supper sustains, locates, and vitalizes faith as it turns hearts outward to those God has deemed one’s neighbors; and confession sustains and vitalizes faith as it restores the community between persons that sin continually seeks to rupture.

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To be in-Christ is to know life as ontologically and ethically determined by the call of Christ in and to the sacraments. Yet, this church community is not only spiritual, but also human. This necessitated attention to the other central theme: religion. Chapter 4 identifies two ways in which the language of religion is utilized throughout Bonhoeffer’s career. First, Bonhoeffer observes how certain structures govern and order human life together and calls these structures religious. He never suggests these structures—or at least the relations they seek to govern—can be done away with entirely. On the contrary, religious structures are an indispensable fact of human life. Quickly, however, a second account of religion emerges that describes religion as a human attempt to control or elude God and neighbor. This dispositional expression of religion is an outworking of the human heart turned inward, and in its corruption it corrupts the structures it engages. The sacraments are religious structures that serve to order relations between God and persons in the church. As religious structures, sacraments are also corruptible, meaning that religionlessness could possibly result in dispensing with the sacraments as wholly corrupted realities. Divine agency resists that possibility and secures the continued efficacy of the sacraments from above; God promises to be present and reconstitute what has been co-opted. Dispositional religion stands in contrast to faith instilled and sustained by Christ in the sacraments. Placed into faith, human beings hear the call of God and follow. Dispositional religion raises idols; faith razes idols. Chapter 5 begins the task of describing what it meant to Bonhoeffer for the church to exist in a religionless manner in the world he saw taking shape around him at the close of World War II. Bonhoeffer’s move toward religionlessness was necessitated by the catastrophic failures of the church, evidenced by socially and politically disenfranchising effects of the church’s own accounts of religion. Reading Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, however, revealed that the church was still an important part of the postwar world Bonhoeffer envisioned. This was precisely because the church is the place where Christ is encountered. In a Lutheran context, Christ is encountered in the church in the sacraments. The chapter offers sustained attention to five themes from the prison correspondence to demonstrate how these themes participate in the work of the sacraments to instill, strengthen, locate, and vitalize faith so as to affect a faithful form of life. These themes were the world coming of age, displacing the conscience, this-worldliness, the suffering of God, and Bonhoeffer’s prescription for Christian lives of prayer and action. In its coming of age, the world has taken on a degree of autonomy and self-reliance that transgresses a proper creaturely freedom. The conscience became a dominant means by which this godless autonomy was self-legitimized. A godless world is unwelcoming to God in its midst and forces God to the cross. Suffering the whims and whips of the world, Christ redeems the world. With gratitude

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and love for what God gives them now, Christians witness to the truth of redemption and reconciliation in Christ and participate alongside Christ, suffering to be given over to the world that rejects and despises them but is transformed nevertheless. Read within Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran context, it is clear how the sacraments of baptism, Eucharist, and confession serve to explain Bonhoeffer’s description of religionless life, even when Bonhoeffer is not explicit about this background. Because the sacraments serve to motivate the very form of life Bonhoeffer is interested in motivating by his appeal to religionlessness, a religionless church is not devoid of sacraments. Instead, a religionless church is, through its reception of the sacraments, stripped of its self-justifications; it is a church in which institutional safety and selfperpetuation has been set aside so that love might be risked; it is a church in which Christians participate with Christ in the world by, with, and under the authority of the suffering God. Chapter 6 examines the text in which Bonhoeffer brought the sacraments and religionlessness most closely together before suggesting how American evangelical traditions can structure their own worship to purposefully help inculcate religionlessness within their congregations. In the reflections written for Dietrich Bethge’s baptism, Bonhoeffer offers a religionless account of the world and suggests how this world might be inhabited by the new generation. The chapter demonstrates how these reflections were birthed from the event that occasioned their writing: the sacraments, and particularly baptism. Pointing to this baptismal context secured the connection between a religionless form of life and the church’s worship in word and sacrament. In the sacraments, for Bonhoeffer, the church community is opened up to love God and neighbor, to give its life following Christ in service to the world. Engaging Christ in the sacraments forms the church to inhabit the world well. Christians thus formed will be able to live contently in their creaturely freedom. They will be engaged in the task of corporate discernment rather than trusting to their own conscience. They will be conscious of and grateful for the everyday blessings of this world, while also being aware of and resistant to the ills that bring harm to others. They will be prepared to follow Christ to the cross and suffer at the hands of and for the sake of the world they see being set to rights in Christ. Through their prayer and action, they will witness to the redeeming and reconciling work of Christ. In their obedience to Christ, Christians become participants in Christ’s work. For those evangelicals who find Bonhoeffer’s vision of Christian discipleship compelling, it is imperative to accept that religionlessness is part of discipleship. Furthermore, worship itself needs more thoroughly formulated to encourage religionless. Fortunately, there are means of conducting this reform and growing numbers of evangelicals are already engaging the task. While several ideas were offered for what this reformation may look like,

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worshipping congregations must decide for themselves how best to go about the process. There will be no set rules, only a shared vision. That vision is of Christians who pray for and serve one another in likeness of the Christ who suffered for them. These Christians are drawn thoroughly into the stuff of this world until all of creation reflects their own worship: totally shaped and conformed to the Christ who is present and active by, with, in, and under font and table. Bonhoeffer’s prison theology does not move away from the strong ecclesiology of his dissertations. Instead, the theology from his years of conspiracy and imprisonment continues to emphasize the church and its cultus as the place where God is encountered, the call to discipleship received, and the world renewed. As a result of this theological continuity, closer attention to his theology of the sacraments is warranted in studies of Bonhoeffer’s theology going forward. But more importantly, the church as a whole must pay closer attention to the call of Christ echoing forth from the sacraments to those with the ears to hear. Hearing and encountering Christ in that location is necessary if the church has any hope of untethering itself from its idols and faithfully witnessing once more to the God who is, and who gives Godself to the church. NOTES 1. DBWE 8, 502. 2. Ibid., 181. 3. DBWE 6, 103–33.

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Index

Anabaptist theology, 2, 27 arcane discipline, 136, 152, 184 assurance, 5–6, 14, 51, 73, 141, 148 Augsburg Confession, 9, 47, 103, 192 Baptism, 44–45, 49, 51–55, 58, 69–74, 85–87, 143–46, 150, 175–78, 183–84, 186, 191–92; infant, 5, 36, 43, 52, 55, 73–74, 143, 202–3; in Luther’s theology, 13–15, 18–19; newness of life, 52–53 Barth, Karl, 1, 35, 38–42, 46, 50, 59–62, 101, 107, 121, 207 Bethge, Eberhard, xiii–xiv, 135, 149, 153, 173–76, 183–86, 211 Black Church (also, Harlem experience), 128, 130, 201 Christ, Jesus: condescension of, 7, 41; hiddenness of, 8, 86–87, 156, 167; pro me/pro nobis, 20, 104, 141; real presence of, xiv, xix–xx, 2–4, 8–9, 20–25, 31, 35, 38, 40, 42, 47, 50, 56–59, 67, 70–72, 75, 81, 83–84, 97, 103, 105, 114, 116, 119, 127, 131, 134, 155, 167, 169, 190, 194, 198, 212–13; resurrection of, 19, 21, 23–24, 46–47, 52, 74–75, 82, 85, 116, 134; suffering of, 135, 141,

148–51, 155–56, 177, 179–80, 182, 196–98, 215 clericalism, 7–8, 76 community: of confessors, 8; discernment, 141–44, 150, 154, 196, 200–202; of loving hearts, 18–19, 54, 68, 70, 74, 88, 105, 116, 146, 175, 180, 185, 198 confession (also penance), 49, 79–87, 133–35, 140–41, 147, 154–55, 172, 180–82, 194, 199–200; in Luther’s theology, 5, 7–10, 15; in Lutheran debates, 7–10, 68, 79–80; absolution of sin, 6–9, 19, 49, 81, 83–84, 141, 143, 150, 157 confessing Church, 34, 68, 183 confession of faith, 77–78, 183 conscience, xxii, 4–5, 15, 17, 53–54, 105–9, 128, 135, 141–45, 148, 154– 57, 164, 200–202, 214–15 cor curvum in se (also, self-love), xxi, 14, 35–36, 40, 51, 56, 59, 70, 81, 83, 100–109, 115, 122, 170–71, 192 creatureliness, 15, 31, 37–39, 44–60, 65, 67–71, 74, 78, 81–90, 100, 102, 104–9, 120, 135–44, 151, 156–57, 167, 172, 181–85, 194–97, 202–4, 212–15

229

230

Index

death of God Movement, xiii, 110 eschatology, 23, 33, 40, 52, 54–55, 76, 83, 91, 147, 184 Eucharist (also Lord’s Supper, Christ’s Table), 40–42, 49, 58, 74–79, 85–87, 103, 115–16, 143–45, 148, 155, 179–80, 191–92, 195–96, 198, 200–201; frequency of, 58, 195, 204; in Luther’s theology, 15–18, 19; transubstantiation, 3, 13 evangelicals (also, evangelicalism), xx– xxiii, 57–58, 86–87, 119, 135–37, 143, 147, 150, 154–57, 187–204, 215–16 faith, 35, 95, 104, 130, 152, 154, 155; acts of, 10, 16, 44, 49, 54–56, 76, 81, 118–19, 133, 167, 185–86; actus reflexus/actus directus, 32, 73; bad, xiv, 12, 53, 117, 171; cofession of, 77–78, 183; costly, 12, 14–15, 69; disposition of, 103–9, 117, 119, 131, 212, 214; gift of, 12–13, 108, 157, 176, 180; in God’s promises, 6–7, 12, 14–16, 51; hiddenness of, 118, 147–48, 157, 195; location of, 16– 18, 53, 85, 148; received in, 5, 8–9, 31, 72, 78, 84, 146, 155, 185, 202; source of, xvi–xvii, 14, 23, 38–39, 49, 71, 74, 106, 137, 145, 151, 169, 190–92, 203, 213 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 23, 37, 140 Formula of Concord, 34 freedom, 23, 39–42, 50, 105, 123, 132, 139, 141, 146–48, 175, 182, 184, 195–96, 202, 214–15 German Christians, 131 German Evangelical Church, 131 Gogarten, Friedrich, 1 Heidegger, Martin, 35, 44–45, 59, 90, 126, 130–31

Held Evans, Rachel, 168, 189–95, 203–4 Herrmann, Wilhelm, 63, 129 Holl, Karl, 1, 19, 124 Husserl, Edmund, 43–44, 62 idolatry, xiv, xix, xxi, 23–24, 51, 101, 113, 117–20, 131, 136–37, 156–57, 182, 187, 190, 193–94, 197–98, 204, 214, 216 indulgences, 4, 7, 11 Jenson, Robert, 3, 21–24, 33, 41, 212 Luther, Martin, xv, xix, 1–25, 31, 33– 34, 37, 72, 74–75, 80, 82, 85, 115, 132, 165, 202, 212 Luther renaissance, 1 Melanchthon, Phillip, 8–9; Loci Communes, 9 prayer, xix, xxii, 7, 17, 22, 74, 103, 112, 128, 142–45, 151–55, 172, 184–87, 193, 195–204, 214–15 religion: critique of, xiv, xxi, 95, 114, 118–19, 127–28, 169; disposition of, xxi, 95–97, 103–20, 127–28, 131, 156, 177, 194; in modern theology, 129–31; structures of, xxi, 95–104, 106, 108–19, 127, 131–32, 142, 147, 167, 175, 185, 214 responsibility, 18, 73, 78, 83–88, 99, 102, 118, 128, 143–50, 154–55, 175–76, 180–82, 195, 202 Ritschl, Albrecht (also, Ritschlean), 1, 46, 63, 129, 158 Scheler, Max, 43–44, 62 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 129, 158, 165 scholasticism, 10, 13, 27, 33 Seeberg, Reinhold, 1, 32

Index

sicut deus, 53, 71, 100, 105, 139–40, 156, 170, 178 simul justus et peccator, 48, 69, 118, 122, 172 Tillich, Paul, 130, 159–60 volk theology, 131 Von Harnack, Adolf, 1, 63, 129, 160 Webber, Robert, 168, 189–92, 195, 203–4

231

world come of age, 137–40, 149, 182 worldliness (also, everydayness), 9, 11, 25, 49, 140, 145–46, 191, 195–97, 215; other-worldliness, xxii, 147, 156–57, 181; thisworldliness, xix, xxii, 135, 145–47, 155, 177, 190, 196, 198, 204, 214 Zwinglian theology, 2, 20, 41, 57, 72

About the Author

Chris Dodson (PhD, University of Aberdeen) teaches theology, history, and literature at Decatur Christian School. He speaks and writes on the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther and is interested in the contemporary liturgical and political implications of their work. He has been a member of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Society, the American Academy of Religion, and the Society for the Study of Theology. He is a member of and licensed preacher for the Episcopal Church, USA.

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