Because of the authority of his example, we look to Bonhoeffer for wisdom and guidance as to the right conduct of life, though he is perhaps more earnest in nothing than in insisting that there is no freestanding code through which goodness can be achieved. In his unfinished late work called Ethics, he says, “The will of God is not a system of rules which is established from the outset; it is something new and different in each situation in life, and for this reason a person must ever anew examine what the will of God may be. The heart, the understanding, observation, and experience must all collaborate in this task. It is no longer a matter of a person’s knowledge of good and evil, but solely the living will of God; our knowledge of God’s will is not something over which we ourselves dispose, but it depends solely upon the grace of God, and this grace is and requires to be new every morning.”
This is an application of the classic Reformation teaching that no one can do the will of God on the strength of his or her own efforts. It is a statement of the faith that God is present and active in the whole of the world — if he were not he would not have a will to be newly expressed in every situation of life. It seems one should be able to extract a secular ethic from the thinking of a man so generous in his views and so positive in his treatment of the secular world as Bonhoeffer, yet to do so is to defeat his clear intention. “Situation ethics” as a form of relativism is obviously not the point, because it is what remains of this idea if the active will of God is factored out of it. Later in the same essay he says, “The world, like all created things, is created through Christ and with Christ as its end, and consists in Christ alone.”
A scholar coming across such language in an ancient text would quite certainly identify it as a fragment of a hymn. Language of this kind pervades Bonhoeffer’s work, which I think may be described as a meditation on it, and a celebration of it. Great theology is always a kind of giant and intricate poetry, like epic or saga. It is written for those who know the tale already, the urgent messages and the dying words, and who attend to its retelling with a special alertness, because the story has a claim on them and they on it. Theology is also close to the spoken voice. It evokes sermon, sacrament, and liturgy, and, of course, Scripture itself, with all its echoes of song and legend and prayer. It earns its authority by winning assent and recognition, in the manner of poetry but with the difference that the assent seems to be to ultimate truth, however oblique or fragmentary the suggestion of it. Theology is written for the small community of those who would think of reading it. So it need not define freighted words like “faith” or “grace” but may instead reveal what they contain. To the degree that it does them any justice, its community of readers will say yes, enjoying the insight as their own and affirming it in that way.
Theology may proceed in the manner of a philosophical treatise or a piece of textual criticism, but it always begins by assuming major terms. And all of them, being imbedded in Scripture and tradition, behave altogether differently from discursive language. To compound the problem, Christian thinkers since Jesus have valued paradox as if it were resolution. So theology is never finally anything but theology, words about God, proceeding from the assumptions that God exists and that we know about him in a way that allows us to speak about him. Bonhoeffer calls these truths of the church “a word of recognition among friends.” He invokes this language of recognition and identification in attempting to make the church real and aware of itself, with all that implied when he wrote. For him, word is act. And, for him, it was.
In a very striking degree, Bonhoeffer’s theology returns to formulations which are virtually credal in their use of imagery taken from the narrative of the sacrifice of Christ. The effect is beautiful, musical. But the language functions not as ornament but as ontology. For him, it makes the most essential account that can be made of Being itself. For example, in a late letter famous for the statement that Christianity must be “demythologized” and biblical concepts reinterpreted in a “worldly” sense, he explains, “What is above this world is, in the gospel, intended to exist for this world; I mean that, not in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystic, pietistic, ethical theology, but in the biblical sense of the creation and of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Clearly he does not consider such language mythological, and the case could be made that he does not consider it religious either. This fact expresses his belief in the preeminent reality of the cosmic narrative implied in the words Christ, incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Myth and religion are at the margin. Christ is at the center.
Bonhoeffer invokes such language as the culminating expression of any passionate argument, especially the great Nevertheless, that the world is to be loved and served and that God is present in it. The day after the failure of the attempt to assassinate Hitler, in which he and his brother and two of his brothers-in-law were deeply involved, Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to Bethge about “the profound this-worldliness of Christianity.” He said, “By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world — watching with Christ in Gethsemane … How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray, when we share in God’s suffering through a life of this kind?” These would seem to be words of consolation, from himself as pastor to himself as prisoner. But they are also an argument from the authority of one narrative moment. The painful world must be embraced altogether, because Christ went to Gethsemane.
In 1937, Bonhoeffer published The Cost of Discipleship. He attacked the “cheap grace” of prevailing Lutheran teaching, which seemed merely to make people comfortable with their sins. “Costly grace” (interestingly he does not call it “true” grace, though the implications of the distinction would almost justify the use of that word) carried with it the acknowledged obligation of discipleship, that is, obedience: “It is only through actual obedience that a person can become liberated to believe.” He says that although, as Luther taught, faith is prior to obedience, in effect the two are simultaneous, “for faith is only real when there is obedience, never without it, and faith only becomes faith in the act of obedience.” This argument does not cite Paul’s Epistle to the Romans or otherwise ground itself in authority, though it means to overturn historical consensus about a crucial Reformation doctrine. The writing comes out of the time at Finkenwalde, from his teaching and his preaching to young men who were making a brave attempt at obedience. Their faith was “worldly,” that is, active and costly, not theoretical or doctrinal. He is appealing over the head of conventional theology, to shared experience. This is another form of the “word of recognition among friends,” an appeal to the experience of act as witness and as revelation. Bonhoeffer’s theology is in its circumstance as much as on the page, and this must surely have been his intention. No other method would have been consistent with his theology.