By Angus Harley

Bonhoeffer, we saw, said that the bible was full of myth to be interpreted by faith by the assembly. Unlike Bultmann- the master of demythologizing- Bonhoeffer was gung-ho for this mythology, understanding it as a crucial expression of the assembly’s faith. In that way, the Scriptures, in both its mythology and the early assembly’s understanding of this myth, were ‘inspired’ and were the ‘word of God’.

We’re going to take a closer look at Bonhoeffer’s system of interpreting the bible, especially as found in his commentary on Genesis 1.

Genesis 1 and the fallible word

His commentary on Genesis 1 attributes that bible chapter to the “scientific naivete” of the “ancient world”. [1] As a result, Bonhoeffer dismisses the notion that this Scriptural record was verbally inspired by God:

“The idea of verbal inspiration will not do. The writer of the first chapter of Genesis is behaving in a very human way.” [2]

This reference to a “human way” is to say that Scripture is the written record of man, and it inevitably carries with it fleshly limitations, including myths, inaccuracies, and so on. Thus, the book of Genesis, although the word of a prophet, is “said and heard as human word”.[3] So, for example, the writer of Genesis’ explanation of man being shaped like clay by a potter is dismissed by Bonhoeffer as childish and inaccurate, “[t]o be sure, as a narrative this story is just as irrelevant or meaningful as any other myth of creation.”[4]

Genesis 1 and the live Word

In radical contrast to this fallible human testimony, i.e., ‘word’, there is the ‘Word’ of God. This is the Word of creation that spoke and all came to be. It, by contrast, is not that human word of a prophet, but is God’s active, creative, live, command and speech that expresses his will.[5] This is his true Word, which brings meaning to the fallible, otherwise irrelevant, myths of man. So, immediately after Bonhoeffer refers to the irrelevance of the Genesis narrative on the Potter shaping the clay, he says this, “And yet in its capacity as the Word of God it is the source of the knowledge concerning the origin of man.”[6] Those myths (the human scriptures) are given meaning by the presence of the Word. How so? Here we need to remember how Bonhoeffer handles myths. The mythological form of Genesis 1 is teaching us a crucial lesson about God’s Word who gave life to mankind. God did made man from the ground- “Darwin and Feuerbach themselves could not speak any more strongly”[7]– but, of course, not in the simplistic form Genesis presents (science tells us so!). Still, it is God’s Word that brought forth creation, especially man. This is his live Word, not the static, ‘the pages of Scripture’, version, but the live and living form that creates life in this world. Or, to put matters as Bonhoeffer does, this human word (Scripture) accommodates the live action of ‘the’ Word, identifying with his action in live time, “in its capacity as the Word of God”. The fallen word of man ‘becomes’ the live mode by which the Word reveals himself in the present, in other words. (By the way, this is why many called Neo-orthodox theology ‘existential’ theology, for the focus is upon living theology via the live Word.)

As the reader goes through Bonhoeffer’s commentary on Genesis, he spends most of his time weaving in his pseudo-theological, philosophical, understanding of this ‘Word’ of God who makes man’s fallible ‘word’ come alive by his activity.

Dialectical method

Many will not be familiar with a dialectical form of reasoning, but it is the hallmark of what is called ‘Neo-orthodoxy’ or ‘Barthianism’. Bonhoeffer was a Neo-orthodox scholar; so was Barth and Bultmann, amongst others. All had their own peculiar form of a dialectic going on. A dialectic has three parts: a thesis; an antithesis; and a resolution.

Bonhoeffer’s dialectic permeates his comments on Genesis 1:

  • Thesis: fallen, fallible, man testifies in human scriptures in a fallible, fallen, manner.
  • Antithesis: God’s Word, from heaven, alone is live, creative, and is not of this fallen world; he is God’s speech.
  • Resolution: God’s Word/Speech creates the world, enters into it, and creates life in this world of man, and gives meaning to man’s fallible scriptures.

Contrast to Barth

In reading Bonhoeffer’s commentary, the reader will notice how Bonhoeffer is enthusiastic to compare and contrast man as from the earth, or soil, to man as given life by the divine Word. The ‘earthiness’ of man is a key factor in his hermeneutic or dialectic. Indeed, this earthiness factor is the point at which he diverges from Barth’s form of the dialectic. Let me explain.

To Bonhoeffer and Barth, both come at ‘theology’ with essentially the same dialectic, as stated above, but Bonhoeffer focuses upon God’s revelation in his Word within this fallen, fallible, sinful world, where ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’. That is, Bonhoeffer takes us to a Christology of the Word as flesh, as earthy, as the key. Fallen, frail, fallible, earthly and earthy, sinful flesh. Man is of the earth and is fallible. Yes, Jesus in the flesh was a sinner and fallible, a point we’ll come back to. But he was also God and infallible- the Speech and Word. (Can you feel another point of the dialectic coming on?!) By contrast, Barth focused on the divine side of Christology, not the earthy. So, in Bonhoeffer, freedom in the world via the Word becoming flesh and embracing earthliness, the flesh, and suffering, was the key. To Barth, freedom from the world by faith in the divine Word who creates life and delivers us from the earth was the key.

Bonhoeffer and the Nazis

Bonhoeffer’s hermeneutical method of earthiness and the flesh is key to understanding his last works, Letters and Papers from Prison, for he sees himself as a kind of Christological character suffering under the Nazi regime. These works witness to Bonhoeffer getting his mind around his own form of earthiness, namely, suffering at the hands of the Nazis. By looking by faith to the Word who became flesh and overcame it, Bonhoeffer received solace. Bonhoeffer would say this to Barth, ‘Salvation is by sailing into the storm, not away from it, Mr. Barth!’

Theology and the book of the church

With these components of Bonhoeffer’s system in place, we are better positioned to understand how he thought theology was conceived. Once again, we go to his work on Genesis:

“Theological Interpretation accepts the Bible as the book of the Church and interprets it as such. Its method is this assumption; it continually refers back from the text (which as to be ascertained with all the methods of philological and historical research) to this supposition.”[8]

The crucial first step here is the Liberal practice of critically examining Scripture and its history. Demythologizing Scripture necessarily. However, as we saw previously, Bonhoeffer embraced the myth as the voice of an ‘earthy’ assembly of fallible men. So, the ‘bible’ is a witness, albeit fallible, to the greatness of God’s Word in action throughout the centuries. Therein lies the template for Bonhoeffer’s theological method. For theology is not found ‘in’ the word of God as we understand it, but is man’s (the church’s) fallible testimony of having been touched by the Word of God, his Speech. The bible is therefore ‘the’ holy book of the church, its ‘sacred Scriptures’, because, 1) it is the medium that God has used to testify to the assembly of the Word’s actions; and, 2) it is the medium by which the Word chooses to actively engage with fallen men.

Religionless Christianity

We go back to the previous comment in an article concerning Bonhoeffer’s embrace of religionless Christianity. In this system, the Scriptures are fallible theology, and so is the theology constructed by the assembly over the centuries. The core relevance of theology, then, is not theology for its own sake, nor theology as an expression of religion. For all theology is fallible. Having said that, Bonhoeffer believes we must glory in this system, not for its own sake, but because it is through fallibility that the live Word comes to us in the world of flesh, suffering, and earthiness, and embraces us in our suffering. ‘Religion’ and ‘dogma’ are therefore pointless, red herrings, demonic distractions, even. Rather, true theology is merely the fallible human record of the live Word’s embrace of suffering humanity.

[1] Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Temptation (London: SCM Press, 1982), 27. Originally written in 1932-1933.

[2] Ibid., 28.

[3] Ibid., 16.

[4] Ibid., 44.

[5] Ibid., 21-23.

[6] Ibid., 44-45.

[7] Ibid., 45.

[8] Ibid., 10.