Bonhoeffer: Divine Love, Fragmented Existence, Human Identity

Long before 'authentic existence' became the buzz words of mid 20th Cenutry existentialism, Bonhoeffer was working out the relationship between personal identity, inner thought, life commitments and moral actions. More than most theologians, Bonhoeffer demonstrates the vital and vitalising link between biography and theology. In few people is there such unambiguous and documented evidence of the connectedness of thought and life, of faith and action, of life commitments and the life that flowed from them. As Dramm comments, '[Bonhoefer's] theo-logically centered life is inseparable from his life-centred theology'. (4) One of the telling epigrams used at the beginning of each chapter reads: 'Blessed are those who have lived before they died'.

The execution of Bonhoeffer in 1945, at the age of 39 brought to an end, from all human points of view prematurely, one of the most courageous and authentic Christian lives within the Sanctorum Communio (Bonhoeffer's phrase of choice for the church as Body of Christ). His dissertation under that name, Sanctorum Communio, which reads as a mature and grounded piece of theological research and explication, was written by a twenty one year old theology student!

Unlike some other studies, Dramm doesn't try to impose a pattern, whether a theological motif that centres Bonhoeffer's thought, or a narrative structure that imposes consistency on his views or actions. Instead she accepts the inevitably fragmenary and urgently occasional nature of his writings, the complexity of his thought and experience, and the disruptiveness and increasing danger of his life situation, and from this acceptance of incompleteness, explores what it is that gives Bonhoeffer's life and thought that singular ring of authenticity, like struck crystal. 'Is it not true that the lives of many persons remain forever fragmentary, even when they extend over more years than Bonhoeffer's and finally shatter in a manner less brutal?' (13) Bonhoeffer himself commented,'The unfinished fragmentary side of life is felt ...with special poignance here. But it is exactly this fragment that can in turn point to a consummation no human power can achieve'. This to his parents when it was becoming clear that his own life was now under grave threat.

And in all the unresolved fragmentariness of Bonhoeffer' s own experience, much of it caused by the disruption, dislocation and discontinuity of the political, social and historical context of his own times, there was for him the haunting question, "Who am I?" The question became the title of one of his best known poems, written in the summer of 1944. The last two lines express both the fear and faith of a man for whom courage was a gift of undeserved grace rather than a self-sufficient moral virtue.

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.

Whoever I am, Thou knowest, 0 God, I am Thine!

Dramm's earlier book on Bonhoeffer and Camus finds both similarity and contrast in two men whose lives were near contemporary. Both were driven to discover and live out the ideal of a truly authentic human existence. Bonhoeffer found it in the reality of God who comes in the human person who is the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ; Camus in human life lived in authentic freedom, sustained by a humanism based on the absurdity that human life, in its combination of the tragic and the noble, has unique and non-negotiable value.

While not imposing a structure on Bonhoeffers life and thought, this book is itself carefully structured to enable us to see Bonhoeffer - his thought and life- in all the variety and complexity of his character. I'll give an overview of Dramm's approach next post.

Comments

[Jason Goroncy]

Jim,

Thanks for this review on this most relevant of days to post on Bonhoeffer. I am struck by your description of Camus as one who lived in 'authentic freedom, sustained by a humanism based on the absurdity'. Can such freedom really exist? Is there such a thing? Is 'freedom' really the right word to use here? I assume that you're not suggesting that Bonhoeffer and Camus shared commensurate freedoms.

[Jim Gordon]

Agreed Jason. Freedom for Bonhoeffer is the freedom that is given and enabled by grace, and lived out in costly obedience to Jesus Christ. For Camus, human freedom is to choose how one will act, and for those choices to count in living against life's fundamental metaphysical and circumstantial absurdity. They are two incompatible views of freedom. But for both Bonhoeffer and Camus, human life, and their own life as each lived it, gained its meaning from the choices they made. For both, as I understand them, responsible freedom exercised in ethical choices, is what gives human life meaning, and what makes for authentic existence. But the preconditions of 'real freedm' were for Bonhoeffer religious and came from the grace of God encountered in Jesus Christ; for Camus, the only alternative was to root that impulse to freedom within human nature. For Bonhoeffer true freedom comes from without, costly gift from the transcendent God; for Camus true freedom comes from within, from choices made in response to the perceived value of human life against a meaningless universe. For Bonhoeffer the meaning of existence is God; for Camus meaning is constructed through authentic choices entered into in responsible freedom. Both thinkers would have called these authentic freedom (which is why I used the term, not because I think them equally valid)- the tragedy about Camus, I think, is that his own profound yearning for meaning in a God-less universe, was unable to transcend human finitiude and moral debility.
It is intriguing that Creation and Fall was one of Bonhoeffer's early works, and The Fall was Camus's last. The contrast between Bonhoeffer's theology, and Camus's a-theology, lies at the root of the contrast between their understanding of freedom, authentic existence, and life's ultimate meaning.

[Jason Goroncy]

Jim,

This is an awesome response that really needs to be a post of its own (and not hidden away in comments, let alone in a response to a cheeky Aussie).

Many thanks.

PS. I assumed that that's what you meant ... but thought it worthwhile to keep you on your toes. Theology at its best, of course, is always communal discourse.