Bonhoeffer On: Social Justice and Faith
How do we live in the tension between ultimate meaning and present realities?
Academics don’t “do” much. If you ever walk up to a strategic thinker or content creator or philosopher or problem solver who appears to be doing precisely nothing, there’s a chance they are actually doing what they do best, which is to say, not “doing” much at all, externally at least.
One of my earliest full-time, real-deal, actual adult-ing jobs was to create weekly video content from scratch for a multi-campus children’s ministry of one of the largest churches in the country. In many ways, it was an extraordinarily fun and creative job, which involved acting, screenwriting, ideation, content creation, curriculum development, and collaboration with two of the most creative and talented people I’ve ever known. Despite all this, and the fact that we consistently delivered custom, focused, original content on a weekly basis for thousands of kids, there was some friction with our boss, from time to time, when it came to what we actually “did” during work hours.
One day, the boss walks into our office, and one of us is editing video, and another is writing something down, but I happened to be doing the kind of nothing that creatives and thinkers and academics do while they are doing what they do. To all appearances, I was doing precisely nothing, except for having a snack and sitting in a rolling office chair, staring off into space. The boss looks at me and says something to the effect of “what are you doing, aren’t you supposed to be working? You aren’t doing anything!” To which I replied, “No, I’m doing something, I’m eating a peach!” You can imagine that my chosen reply didn’t go over very well with my boss, so I had some explaining to do.
I was trying to point out that my boss was operating on the wrong level, in terms of judging what was actually going on in that room. Technically, I was “doing” something; I was eating a peach. On a deeper level, I was actually doing the hardest part of my job; I was ideating, creating, thinking about how to solve problems, planning, “noodling.” Later in the creative process, had my boss observed me, he would have seen me writing, finding actors, acting, participating in the shooting, directing, and editing process, and presenting our content to hundreds, if not thousands, of children. And, to be fair, if all I did was sit in that chair all day and think, I wouldn’t really be doing the job I promised to do.
Similarly, if all academics ever did was think and talk to other academics, they would be less than useful to most other people. Thankfully, many academics also teach, actively participate in public discussions, lead and advise governmental and private organizations, write popular-level things that normal people actually read, connect with people who can put their research into practice in the real world, and a host of other things. The interior work is often most impactful when it is translated to more exterior realities. The relationship between these two kinds of “doing” is complex, often mutually reinforcing and refining, and can be seen in pretty much every area of human life, practice, culture, and society.
Likewise, for religious people, there is almost always a complex relationship between thought and practice, doctrine and praxis, ideas and actions, thinking or speaking or learning on the one hand, and actually “doing” on the other. For Christians, we have preaching and service, theology and ethics, relating to God and relating to other people, the mystery of the next life and the reality of the present one. Some might call this dialectic “faith” and “ (good) works,” or for more contemporary culturally-awakened conversation, “faith” and “social justice.” In other words, how much should a person of faith focus on telling other people about their faith or focusing on their own internal growth in their faith, and how much should they focus on making the world a better place, here and now? Should a pastor or a church focus more on the story of Jesus and the transformation they believe Jesus brings to people’s lives and souls and families, or should they focus more on feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, fighting unjust laws and systems, digging wells, sending doctors to remote villages, ending social oppression, erasing food desserts; in short, solving the very real problems that continue to plague our communities and our societies?
Bonhoeffer found both major approaches to answering this question to be lacking. He recognized that, for Christians, there is an “ultimate” reality, which is associated with God, with Jesus, with the “end of the world” or the final destiny of humanity, with the grace of God breaking into the world and pulling it into a better future, and there is also a “penultimate” reality, which is pretty much everything that leads up to that final, ultimate destiny or reality. We obviously live in the penultimate, in most respects. But what are the two proposed solutions that Bonhoeffer found so inadequate to the task of living well in the tension and in the light of these two realities? He called them “radicalism” and “compromise.” What follows is taken from chapter 2 of my book, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics of Formation, which focuses on the core argument and structure of Bonhoeffer’s magnum opus, Ethics:
Ultimate and Penultimate Things
The justification of the sinner is something ultimate. “Ultimate and Penultimate Things” addresses justification (the final word of God’s grace) and its relationship to everything leading up to it; namely, the things that most kinds of ethics tend to be concerned with. Justification is ultimate in two senses. It is qualitatively ultimate as God’s final word; there is no greater reality. This word is also the temporally ultimate word; everything that has come before, namely the penultimate, precedes it.
Bonhoeffer argues that not only is this final word of justification by grace alone, but it is also through faith alone; faith in the work of Jesus Christ. Because this work has been accomplished by a timeless God “the past and future of the whole life flow together in God’s presence. The whole of the past is embraced by the word ‘forgiveness;’ the whole of the future is preserved in the faithfulness of God…This life knows itself stretched and sustained from one eternal foundation to another, from its election before the time of the world toward eternal salvation to come.”
Faith is never alone, Bonhoeffer argues; it is accompanied by hope and love. We look forward in hope and act toward God and others out of love. This all stems from Christ. “The content of the Christian message is… that we should be like Christ himself.” But in seeking to live out the ultimate word of God in the way described above, we realize that something (penultimate) always precedes it. “The only thing that can be justified is something that has already come under indictment in time.” This is a nod toward the “guilt” of the previous essay and to Bonhoeffer’s motif of the incarnate, crucified (judged), and resurrected (new) humanity in Jesus Christ. The Christological triad of formation remains a powerful, if understated, theme in this essay.
According to Bonhoeffer, the penultimate exists, yet it is completely superseded by the ultimate. However, one must come from the penultimate to the ultimate; the ultimate cannot come at the beginning. The problem is one of determining to what extent one can and should live in light of the ultimate while still experiencing penultimate realities. Bonhoeffer next lays out two “extreme” solutions to the tension I have been describing throughout the better part of this book. One he calls “radical,” and the other, “compromise.”
The radical solution orients itself solely to the ultimate and sees itself as a mutually exclusive option broken away from the penultimate. Christ and the penultimate world are at enmity with one another. The Christian has no responsibility for the world: “The world must burn in any case.” This is strikingly reminiscent of H. Richard Niebuhr’s “Christ Against Culture” type of Christian interaction with the world and some aspects of Hauerwasian/communitarian strain of character ethics.
The other “extreme” solution is compromise, and Bonhoeffer does not blush at calling this compromise of ultimate and penultimate extreme. This option may seem more level-headed, rational, or practical than the radical solution, but it still makes the ultimate and the penultimate mutually exclusive. The ultimate is not dangerous in any way; it “stays completely beyond daily life and in the end serves only as the eternal justification of all that exists, as a metaphysical cleansing of the indictment that burdens all existence.” This solution is reminiscent of H. Richard Niebuhr’s “Christ of Culture” type of Christian engagement of the world; it is not an option for Bonhoeffer’s ethics of formation.
The problem with both of these “extreme” solutions is that they either destroy the penultimate on one hand, or do away with any reality of the ultimate on the other. These options seem to be mutually exclusive indeed. Bonhoeffer states the problem succinctly: “Thus creation and redemption, time and eternity, fall into an insoluble conflict; the very unity of God is itself dissolved, and faith in God is shattered.”
Bonhoeffer argues that it is not a Christian solution that is needed; it is Christ himself. No principle, law, or rule can resolve the exclusivity of radicalism or compromise. “In Jesus Christ God’s reality and human reality take the place of radicalism and compromise.” When Jesus Christ takes form among his people, the realities of the world and of God are mutually manifested.
Because radicalism breeds hatred, an evil world can make Christians into evil people by their radical hatred of the world. Because compromise hates the ultimate, it becomes trite and useless. Bonhoeffer sums up this problem thusly: “Radicalism hates time. Compromise hates eternity.” For Bonhoeffer, only Jesus Christ can embody the ultimate and the penultimate, and in doing so, form a new humanity:
In Jesus Christ we believe in the God who became human, was crucified, and is risen. In becoming human we recognize God’s love toward creation, in the crucifixion God’s judgment on all flesh, and in the resurrection God’s purpose for a new world.
The incarnation of Jesus affirms the penultimate, the crucifixion realizes the judgment of the ultimate upon the penultimate, and his resurrection allows a new life which “breaks ever more powerfully into earthly life and creates space for itself within it.” I read this as shorthand for the process of Christian formation, given the definition I am using. For Bonhoeffer, this perspective of the ultimate from within the penultimate helps us to “recognize what being human is.” Being human means being justified by the ultimate, but living fully in the penultimate, which is empowered by the ultimate.
Bonhoeffer also notes, “the penultimate must be preserved for the sake of the ultimate.” When we hurt or destroy the penultimate, we hinder the work of the ultimate. If the final word of grace is to be heard, the people who would hear it must be cared for. This is a part of the role of ethics in the world; to make the way smooth for the final word of grace. “If the hungry do not come to faith, the guilt falls on those who denied them bread.” What Christians do in the world makes a difference, even if it does not ultimately appear to immediately “save” anyone in a religious sense.
We must also keep in mind that, for Bonhoeffer, there is no method to get from penultimate to ultimate; Christ must extend his way to us from ultimate to penultimate. There is no pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, so to speak. Bonhoeffer reminds us that “the loss of this ultimate will sooner or later lead to the collapse of the penultimate, if we do not succeed in claiming those penultimate things once again for the ultimate.” This claim sets Bonhoeffer’s ethics of formation apart from similar virtue or character ethics that seek to develop methods in order that individuals or communities might become more like Jesus. There is a strong resemblance here to Bonhoeffer’s argument against formation as programs or trying to imitate Jesus found in the essay “Ethics as Formation”.
Towards the end of this essay, Bonhoeffer argues that Christians should claim the “human” and the “good” of the penultimate “for Jesus Christ, especially where, as an unconscious remnant, they represent a previous bond to the ultimate.” Bonhoeffer argues that even if people do not claim Christ, yet they are human and good, they should be claimed for Christ and encouraged toward confessing Christ. He then says, “the next two chapters should be understood in this perspective.” In other words, the next two chapters were to be understood as a plan for claiming the “human” and the “good” in the penultimate for Christ (the ultimate).
For Bonhoeffer, to do Christian ethics, to be a Christian in the real world, means to live in the midst of tensions, including this tension of ultimate and penultimate things. There is no resolution to be found in Christian (or any other) practical solutions, teaching, activism, theology, laws, principles, rules, service, faith, or conceptions of justice. Christians can’t choose between seeking a materially better world and physically healthier humanity and a human world full of meaning, purpose, and connection to God and others. The only way for Christians to live well is to identify with and be formed by the person and presence and body of Jesus Christ. There is no easy way out; there is no simple solution.
For Bonhoeffer, we must become the kinds of people and communities who can live in both aspects of reality without sacrificing the other, and the only way to do that, he argues, is through being transformed by Jesus, day by day, in community with others, imperfect and yet pulled into the better, possible-yet-difficult future we believe God has for us. Sometimes, we’ll be the busiest people there are, scurrying around, solving problems, actually “doing” things, helping people, changing the world with our hands and our resources and our sweat. Other times, we’ll be connecting with the deepest and most lasting reality there is while “doing” a whole lot of nothing. Sometimes, the world needs you to fight for justice, feed the hungry, house the homeless, and clothe the poor. Sometimes, the world needs you to eat a peach.