Reading in the Presence of Christ: A Study of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Bibliology and Exegesis

Joel Banman

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780567698629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

Bonhoeffer's writings include a significant amount of biblical interpretation, but his potential contributions in the fields of biblical studies and theological exegesis of Scripture have not been sufficiently explored. This study reassesses some of his key exegetical writings in light of his theology of revelation and bibliology, unfolding the ways in which his reading of the Bible is determined by his theology of Scripture. Through this analysis, Joel Banman demonstrates that the uniting factor of Bonhoeffer's biblical interpretation is not methodological but bibliological: he reads Scripture as the living word of the present Christ.

1

BONHOEFFER AS A SCRIPTURAL THEOLOGIAN

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a 1936 letter to his brother-in-law, wrote, ‘Let me first admit quite simply: I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions, and that we merely need ask perpetually and with a bit of humility in order to get the answer from it. One cannot simply read the Bible like other books.’¹ With a statement like this, he was directly contradicting the proposal of Benjamin Jowett, who wrote in 1860 that Scripture should in fact be interpreted ‘like any other book’.² And indeed it was that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries scholars approached the Bible with the same kinds of methods and critiques that might be applied to any other ancient text.³ Whatever else this might have meant, it certainly meant that questions of ‘contemporary import’ were, at best, secondary to questions of what the biblical texts meant ‘back then’ in their own original context. This approach was not limited to the academy. The triumph of historical-critical methods trickled down into the pulpit, so that even now it is common to hear sermons begin by emphasizing the profound distance (as Gotthold Lessing puts it, the ‘ugly, broad ditch’) between the biblical world and our own.⁴ The preacher’s job is to bridge this gap and thereby to show how some treasures might be smuggled in from this ancient text, right over Lessing’s unsuspecting head.

The outlook of this study is that a certain kind of Christological reading of Christian Scripture does not have to contend with this gap – at least not in the same way. If Christ is the content of Scripture, the word within the words, then the ugly, broad ditch between the ancient text and the contemporary hearer is a modernist fiction. For, the Christ who is risen (and the church knows of no other ‘Christ’) is the present Christ, and therefore Scripture is by virtue of its subject matter a present word.⁵ The church’s exegetical task, then, is not about learning to bridge contexts or come up with contemporary ‘applications’. The church’s reading and proclamation of Scripture ought to discern the presence of the one who really encounters us in and as God’s word.

That, in any case, is the wager on which this book is staked. My argument is that Dietrich Bonhoeffer read and preached Scripture in just this way. Bonhoeffer’s theology of Scripture and his legacy as an exegete have been open questions from the earliest days of his reception. Over fifty years ago, Old Testament scholar Walter Harrelson concluded that ‘Bonhoeffer’s greatest contributions to Christian theology do not lie in the area of biblical exegesis. The greatness of Bonhoeffer is to be found in his work on ethics, Christology, and the relation of Christian faith to contemporary society’.⁶ Harrelson recognizes the importance of Scripture in Bonhoeffer’s own theological work, conceding that Bonhoeffer could not have made his greatest contributions apart from his ‘profound wrestling with the Bible’. Therefore, Harrelson concludes, although Bonhoeffer cannot teach us how to read the Bible, he can ‘teach us to learn to live and die with the biblical Word in our hands’.⁷ This deeply ambivalent conclusion about Bonhoeffer’s value as an interpreter of Scripture is not uncommon. Many others have admired his theology while maintaining critical reservations about his approach to scriptural interpretation.⁸

Some of this ambivalence may simply be attributed to the persistently uneasy relationship between biblical studies and dogmatic theology. However, I suspect another reason might be a methodological tendency to focus studies of Bonhoeffer’s biblical interpretation strictly on his exegetical writings. The attempt to extract a consistent, repeatable hermeneutical method from examples of his biblical interpretation often yields mixed results. I intend to come at the question from a somewhat different angle. Following John Webster’s logic that ‘bibliology is prior to hermeneutics’,⁹ my operating assumption is that Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of Scripture is driven by his theology of Scripture. Accordingly, the first half of this study is an enquiry into Bonhoeffer’s bibliology. I will define the task of bibliology in more detail below, but broadly speaking, bibliology is a theological account of what Scripture is and, correspondingly, what God does with Scripture. I make the case that Bonhoeffer’s bibliology, which is often implicit, can be seen at work throughout his exegetical writings. An analysis of the relationship between Bonhoeffer’s bibliology and his exegesis illuminates the character of both, enabling a more thorough assessment of Bonhoeffer’s legacy as a theological interpreter of Scripture. My approach in this book is to study Bonhoeffer as a scriptural theologian through the lens of his theology of Scripture.

Bonhoeffer and the Bible

Although the Bible can be found in a prominent place throughout his writings, it was never more central to his academic and personal life than during the so-called middle years of his theological development.¹⁰ His well-known ‘turn from the phraseological to the real’ in the early 1930s corresponds to an increasing emphasis on scriptural exegesis in his writings.¹¹ Three of his published books written during this period – Creation and Fall, Discipleship and Prayerbook of the Bible – are essentially exegetical works, and the fourth – Life Together – makes constant reference to Scripture, depicting the Bible and especially the Psalter as central to Christian community. Bonhoeffer’s ‘transition from theologian to Christian’, as Bethge describes it, was a quiet and unspoken change, but noticeable to those who knew him before and after.¹² His 1936 letter to Elisabeth Zinn shows that his ‘turn’ coincided with a new regard for Scripture:

I threw myself into my work in an extremely un-Christian and not at all humble fashion … But then something different came, something that has changed and transformed my life to this very day. For the first time, I came to the Bible … I had often preached, I had seen a great deal of the church, had spoken and written about it – and yet I was not yet a Christian but rather in an utterly wild and uncontrolled fashion my own master … The Bible, especially the Sermon on the Mount, freed me from all this. Since then everything has changed.¹³

This change, including his newfound appreciation for Scripture, was infectious to those around him, not least his students at Finkenwalde. In a circular letter, the Finkenwaldians wrote, ‘The Bible stands at the center of our work. It has once again become the point of departure and the center of our theological work and of all our Christian activity. Here we have learned once again how to read the Bible prayerfully.’¹⁴ Thus their community was defined not just by the centrality of Scripture but also by the prayerful character of their reading. In another letter, they report, ‘By avoiding exegesis [that is, of the historical-critical kind] in our evening devotional each day, Pastor Bonhoeffer made the biblical word even more precious to us in its objectivity.’¹⁵ Nevertheless, by early 1941, Bonhoeffer’s daily practice of reading Scripture was waning. In a 31 January 1941 letter, he reflects, ‘Sometimes there are weeks in which I read very little of the Bible. Something prevents me from doing so. Then one day I pick it up again, and suddenly everything is so much more powerful, and I can’t let go of it at all.’¹⁶ And a year and a half later, in a 25 June 1942 letter, he writes,

I am amazed that I am living, and can live, for days without the Bible … When I then open the Bible again, it is new and delightful to me as never before, and I only wish I could preach again. I know that I only need to open my own books to hear all that can be said against this.¹⁷

Although the importance of Scripture to Bonhoeffer leaps off the page in these passages, it is nonetheless significant that scriptural meditation was no longer part of his daily routine in the early 1940s.¹⁸ His imprisonment, however, would give him the time to focus once again on regular Scripture reading. He writes to Bethge on 18 November 1943 of his ‘daily Bible study’, noting, ‘I have read the Old Testament two and a half times through and have learned a great deal.’¹⁹ Some weeks later, he writes again of his increasing appreciation of the Old Testament.²⁰

Bonhoeffer’s relationship to the Bible underwent several changes during his life, but the Finkenwalde years are particularly rich. This is the time when he was training future pastors how to do their own exegesis and preaching of Scripture, supported by a regular practice of prayerful meditation. It is the time when his writings are most overtly and consistently ‘biblical’, in both form and content.²¹ Indeed, Bonhoeffer produced enough scriptural exegesis during this period to tip the balance of his writings overall; thus, it is largely on account of the voluminous Finkenwalde material that Ernst Georg Wendel can say that ‘the majority of Bonhoeffer’s work is biblical exposition’.²² This is why the second part of this book, which undertakes a series of studies of Bonhoeffer’s exegetical writings, is disproportionally weighted towards this phase of his development.

On bibliology

The heart of this study is an analysis of Bonhoeffer’s bibliology, so a few introductory words about bibliology are in order. I take it as axiomatic that in the field of Christian dogmatics there is such a thing as Holy Scripture, and moreover that this thing called Holy Scripture can be described theologically in terms of its ontology and its place in the divine economy.²³ The pursuit of such a description is the task of bibliology. As such, bibliology aims to address two distinct but interrelated questions: (1) What is Holy Scripture? (2) What does God do with Holy Scripture? In what follows, I expound Bonhoeffer’s bibliology by attending to the development of his theology of revelation, and drawing out the implications of these developments for his ontology of Scripture and his account of Scripture’s role in God’s revelatory activity.

To focus my discussion from the beginning, I add three delimitations to my undertaking of the bibliological task. Firstly, I take it that Christian bibliology is concerned with the canonical collection of texts that comprises the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Scriptures. To put it baldly, bibliology is about that book called the Bible. Christian bibliological ontology must deal with the reality of these particular texts and what, if anything, they have to do with God. Of course, whatever one might say theologically about the Bible, there is plenty that can be said non-theologically. In its present form, the Bible is the product of the work of human editors, translators, printers, distributors and countless others. Therefore, a second delimitation: Christian bibliology acknowledges a degree of human agency in the existence of the canonical texts that it seeks to describe theologically. Christian theological interest in Holy Scripture usually focuses on the role that these ostensibly human texts occupy in the course of divine revelation. My interest is the same, which leads to the third delimitation: bibliology is inseparable from and derivative of the theology of revelation. Bibliology explicates how and to what extent biblical writings function in the economy of God’s self-revealing activity in and for humankind. In sum, bibliology is an account of the Bible as God’s word.

In order to parse the relationship between revelation and Scripture in Bonhoeffer’s thought, I have attended carefully to the place and character of revelation in his theological development, from his earliest essay in systematics leading up to his Finkenwalde years. Although my study is not comprehensive in this regard, I have endeavoured to establish with the greatest possible clarity the centrality of revelation throughout his writings.²⁴ After his encounter with Karl Barth’s theology, Bonhoeffer wholeheartedly affirmed that God’s absolute transcendence negates the possibility of speaking truthfully about God apart from God’s own self-revealing speech. Bonhoeffer took up the dialectical problem of how God could remain God in revelation, which is to say, how God could remain fully transcendent even in the event of becoming immanently available. This was, for the young Bonhoeffer, the theological problem, and his dissertations represent his early attempts to address it. It was through his wrestling with the Barthian problem that he developed ways of thinking about revelation that he would carry with him for the rest of his life. I will set out this case in detail in the first half of this study; suffice it here to say that Bonhoeffer’s theology of revelation became the backbone of his bibliology.

Despite Bonhoeffer’s fixation on the Bible during the mid-1930s, there has been relatively little scholarship devoted to his theology of Holy Scripture, and only slightly more to his biblical interpretation.²⁵ In what follows, I trace the contours of a bibliology grounded in his early theology of revelation and reconfigured through his 1933 Christology. One of my central claims is that Bonhoeffer’s treatment of Holy Scripture in the 1930s represents a consistent application of his bibliology, and therefore much of what seems odd or incongruous in his Finkenwalde exegetical writings can be understood as an extension of his most basic theological insights. By atten...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 BONHOEFFER AS A SCRIPTURAL THEOLOGIAN
• Part I BIBLIOLOGY
• Part II EXEGESIS
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint