I was imprisoned by subjectivity and you visited me: Bonhoeffer and Foucault on the way to a postmodern Christian self

Currents in Theology and Mission, Oct, 2002 by Tom Beaudoin

One of the most important issues at stake in the church's mission is what the church encourages or allows young adults to think about themselves--what the church teaches about how we should interpret our lives and order our relationships with others. Not only is it observable that on such issues ministry to young adults often stands or falls, it is also the case that the meaning of one's own life and relationship with others is at the very heart of the way of Jesus. Because of the margin of freedom that many young adults claim with respect to personal and spiritual development and church affiliation, and given the power that the church can and does exercise over the lives of young adults, a great deal hinges for both on what the church communicates about what is important about our lives and how we order our relationships with others. What exactly the church should be preaching and practicing about self-identity is a complicated question, both in principle and in the actual situation of many of our churches t oday. Each of us practicing theology or ministry does so with an at least implicit understanding of what constitutes a Christian self. Fortuitously, subjectivity has come in for serious questioning in much postmodern philosophy and theology. The time is opportune for an intentional reappraisal of how we construe Christian subjectivity.

In service of such a reappraisal, the purpose of this lecture is to resource Dietrich Bonhoeffer, by way of Michel Foucault, for the task of reinterpreting the Christian self in our present. The rethinking of subjectivity going on in postmodern theories and theologies affords an opportunity to revisit a classic Protestant work, through a postmodern lens, for the sake of gathering up intellectual resources for ministry in the present. It is not a matter of forcing Bonhoeffer's work to take responsibility for our questions or our answers but rather of culling what is useful for Christian subjectivity today from the resources of our Christian tradition.

I come to Bonhoeffer's work, in the words of Michel de Certeau, to "poach" it, (1) to read it strictly for my purposes, putting it to use for a theology of the present. Such a project was not foreign to Bonhoeffer, who remarked in an early lecture that out of "love for this contemporary world of ours[,] [e]very word is to be spoken out of the present for the present." (2) This poaching delimits my task in giving to our understanding of a theology of the cultures of younger generations further tools in service of what Foucault called the "undefined work of freedom." (3) Thus, when an idea struck me as useful in Bonhoeffer's work, I adopted Maria von Wedemeyer's tactic: "I purloined it and bore it off." (4) My style of interpreting Bonhoeffer is also a matter of honoring a chief characteristic of Bonhoeffer's own theological style, of which Eberhard Bethge has written, "Bonhoeffer did not let himself be deterred from applying his subjective contemporary experience to an eclectic examination of texts." (5)

I admit a certain hesitation in writing about Bonhoeffer, because I am, first, a Roman Catholic and second, decidedly not a "Bonhoeffer scholar." Can anything new be said of this man, or can anything said of old be deployed for a new freedom? My task here is to ask, with respect to an ethic of the self, not what Bonhoeffer himself necessarily saw but what his work allows us to see today. This is not an attempt at comprehensiveness with respect to Bonhoeffer's ouvre. Although it is important to associate my question within ever-widening circles of his other works, of interpretations of the Christianity of his day, and of interpretations of the self in the traditions to which he was heir, none of these tasks can be accomplished here. At the risk of parochialism, I shall restrict myself as much as possible to the prison letters, fixing their coordinates for this question as an initial movement in a larger project for a post-modern Christian interpretation of the self.

One challenge of this topic is that its evidence is scattered like so much chad over the gaps, repetitions, miscommunications, and interruptions intrinsic to letter-writing. Some sort of tentative whole must be made, risking Adorno's warning that "the whole is the untrue." Threads joining fragments together will have to be sewn into the text, and artificial limbs affixed. While this is true of an interpretation of any text, it is readily evidenced in a project such as this. I begin with Foucault to furnish a running start into Bonhoeffer: sketching the self in Foucault, looking at the self in Bonhoeffer's letters, and drawing implications for theology and ministry today. In this way I hope to develop one small piece of the groundwork of a problematic that will serve the church's mission to young adults.

The self in Foucault

One of the most fruitful construals of the self in postmodern philosophy has come from the French philosopher Foucault (1926-1984). I do not survey his work here but merely introduce the logic of one strand of his thought about the self. This work attempts to demonstrate and provoke critical thought about the meaning of subjectivity. Foucault privileges a rigorously historical approach that seeks to remove subjectivity from the realm of the natural, the transcendental, and the ahistorical and strives to demarcate the historicity of subjectivity itself. In principle, this is not an inscrutable method of inquiry: honesty in the face of historical consciousness would demand that we observe that people in different times and places have understood themselves, and what it is about themselves that they share with other human beings, quite differently; they have valued very different qualities about themselves; they have appealed to a wide range of authorities to interpret themselves; they have imagined in very diff erent ways what it means to say "I," indeed have innovated very different terms to refer to the entity who is the author of his or her actions. Even today, what it means to be or to have a "self" manifests significant variations according to one's geographic place, economic situation, race, sex or gender, and educational background. It is of course one thing to understand this in principle and quite another to know what to make of it in the implications for one's own life.