Ethics for this world: what would Bonhoeffer do?

Christian Century, April 19, 2005 by Robin Lovin

Ethics: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 6. English edition edited by Clifford Green. Fortress, 593., $55.00.

WHEN DIETRICH BONHOEFFER died on April 9, 1945, few would have predicted his influence on theology, at the beginning of the 21st century. As word of his execution reached his friends and colleagues during the chaotic days at the end of the war in Europe, Reinhold Niebuhr praised Bonhoeffer's courage, but noted that he had been "too busy in the affairs of a militant church to state his own position in many books."

Niebuhr at that point knew little of what Bonhoeffer had left behind. His collected writings fill 16 large volumes in German, and a complete English translation of this critical edition is now under way. Nevertheless, Bonhoeffer's theological writing came to an unplanned and untimely end, and the book on ethics that he expected to be his most important work was left in fragments--13 manuscripts and 115 handwritten notes.

Sixty years later, a new English translation of Bonhoeffer's Ethics testifies to the continuing importance of his thought, as well as his life. Many pages of Ethics connect intuitively with the world as if they were written yesterday, but to fix Bonhoeffer's meaning clearly requires considerable work on the fragments. Clifford Green, the editor, and translators Reinhard Krauss, Charles West and Douglas Stott bring us Bonhoeffer's text and the results of two generations of scholarship devoted to it.

The study, began with Eberhard Bethge's reconstruction of Ethics, first published in 1949. The book went through six German editions before it became the small, black-covered paperback known to many American readers since its publication in 1965. I bought it that year for $1.45. I found it incomprehensible.

Bonhoeffer must be understood on his own terms, but in the case of Ethics, the text alone is clearly not enough to convey the ideas. That was the special challenge that faced Ilse Todt, Heinz Eduard Todt, Ernst Fell and Clifford Green, who edited the new German edition on which this translation is based. To begin, they abandoned guesswork about the outline and thematic structure that Bonhoeffer might have intended in favor of a meticulous reconstruction of what he actually wrote. The published German text was carefully corrected against the original manuscripts, and Bonhoeffer's work on his book was correlated to references in diaries and letters to produce a detailed account of when and where he produced the manuscripts that remain. These are presented in the order he wrote them, with notes, afterword and appendices that connect the text to the books he was reading, the places where he was working, and other things that were happening in his world. As a result, the text of Ethics becomes almost biographical. We understand Bonhoeffer's theology better because we see more clearly what he was reflecting on in his own life.

At the same time, the editors recognized that the Bonhoeffer we meet in this carefully reconstructed work is no longer our contemporary. We need help to understand the questions he faced and the sources from which he drew inspiration. The introduction by Clifford Green and the notes provided by him and the editors of the German text help locate Ethics in relation to the rest of Bonhoeffer's work and provide a vivid picture of how theology was done amidst the collapse of the old European order and the rise of Nazism. Almost ten pages of bibliography catalog what we know Bonhoeffer read, from Bismarck's memoirs to Don Quixote. The editors' notes provide a running account of how these sources influenced Ethics.

FOREMOST AMONG these sources for Bonhoeffer's generation was the work of Karl Barth, whose return to the "strange world of the Bible" inspired his younger German counterpart's early lectures. Barth's theology marked a complete break with the adjustments to modern culture and Prussian political order that Bonhoeffer had learned from his mentors in Berlin, and it provided the starting point for the Confessing Church, which absorbed Bonhoeffer's pastoral energies after Hitler's ascendancy made it impossible for him to continue university teaching.

Through the Confessing Church, German pastors and laypeople tried to keep their church faithful to the historic Reformation confessions and resist the incursions of Nazi organization and ideology. Bonhoeffer was not present at the Barmen Synod which launched the movement in 1934, but he quickly became one of its younger leaders, and he spent most of the rest of the decade as director of a Confessing Church seminary. It is to this period that we owe two of his most widely read works, Life Together and the Cost of Discipleship.

The Confessing Church maintained a courageous resistance to Hitler's decree that every German institution had to reorganize itself in conformity with National Socialist policies. Simply by its continued presence, the church defied the ideology that every person and every institution exists to serve the nation at the command of the Fuhrer. "The Body of Christ takes up space on earth," as Bonhoeffer put it in The Cost of Discipleship. "That is a consequence of the Incarnation." In his context, that was a political statement.