The Radiant Faith of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (& II)

Rose-Marie-Barandiaran: “God is not beyond the boundaries of this world, but at the centre of this world in life and goodness.” For the German pastor, this centre is Reality itself, in other words, “God is the absolute centre of reality.”  Does this idea resonate with you, José?

José Arregi: Absolutely. It is one of Bonhoeffer’s expressions that I find particularly thought-provoking. “God at the centre of life”, “at the centre of the world”, “the absolute centre of reality”. But God being “centre” does not mean that he is the focal point of something greater, nor the linchpin or nucleus of personal life, human history or the whole universe. Nor does it mean that God is the decisive power, or the determining factor, or the supreme value. God is not something or someone that creates, acts, speaks, intervenes or serves a purpose; he is not something or someone that is necessary to explain the origin of the world or to guarantee eternal life.

Such a “God” would be, says Bonhoeffer, a deus ex machina, like those divinities who “emerged out of a machine” on the stage of Greek theatre and intervened to resolve an awkward situation. That is what religions or religious people do, says the pastor-theologian in brilliant paragraphs: they turn to “God” to solve their problems, their limitations, ignorance, suffering, anguish, guilt, death… or drought. We postulate the “God hypothesis”, what we lack and what we need we refer to as “God”, and we take him out of our mental and emotional machinery to solve our problems. Dietrich denounces this as a “fraudulent” and “dishonest” course of action. And a short-sighted strategy, he warns, because the “God that is needed” melts away or dies as our knowledge or power increases.

It is not that he dies, but that he does not exist except as a construct of the human mind. “There is no God that exists” (“einen Gott, den es gibt, gibt es nicht”), said Bonhoeffer; there is no “God” in the way that there is energy, atoms or animals; there is no “God” that can be regarded as something or someone, as the Supreme Being of a sum of beings or the necessary Supreme Being beyond all beings. We take him out of our cerebral and social machinery as a deceptive remedy in our need.

However, God is not what we lack, he is BEING and the power to be everything, the open, emerging potential for goodness in the evolution of the universe without beginning or end. He is not “a reality”, he is the absolute Real of all reality, which is one and interrelated, and is all inseparably physical, living, sentient, intelligent, emotional, conscious…, of which the human being is neither the centre nor the culmination nor the end. Bonhoeffer’s theology was obviously still foreign to this integral ecological vision; his worldview and therefore his ethics and theology are anthropocentric, deeply centred on socio-political commitment to justice and liberation. And so he was to directly inspire the political theology of Metz and Moltmann, and through them, indirectly, liberation theology. Indeed, there is certainly no contradiction in principle between political liberation theology and ecological liberation theology. But God is, Bonhoeffer would insist, neither the ethical reason nor the guarantee of success in political or ecological liberating action: he is its centre and its true manifestation, its dynamism and its profound realisation, its cross and its glory, independent of creeds and religions.

So God is not “nothing”, in other words, he is neither something that forms part of something –energy, matter, living organisms, conscious beings…– nor the sum of all the parts: he is the creative goodness that pulsates insofar as he is, the communion of all beings starting with the as yet invisible atomic particle right up to the galaxies in constant formation; he is the deep pulse of everything; he is the originating impulse that moves life, love, and all human struggles for peace in justice, and all the birth pangs of nature or the universe or the emerging multiverse. Neither is God “nobody”, someone next to someone: he is the profound You that reveals himself to us in the you that each one of us is for ourselves, and in the you that all beings are for each other (water, tree, bird, African refugee with a child in her arms…); and he is the profound I that underpins every self, every organism, body, form and consciousness in their countless degrees and forms.

So neither do we “experience” God as we experience the taste of a fruit, the company of a friend, the passion of a commitment, the pleasure and beauty of a piece of music or the silence of a forest or a sunset. We only experience God in our human, worldly experiences. When we breathe, we breathe God; when we contemplate the countryside, we contemplate God; when we enjoy a meal, we enjoy God; when we suffer an absence, we suffer the absence of God; when we suffer for a lost cause, we suffer the loss of God; when we experience the active hope for peace and justice, we experience the active hope in God. Or we could also say: God looks, smells, tastes, enjoys, suffers and weeps, trusts and abides in us, in everything… One has to learn to look and feel reality in depth, to venerate and invoke and trust in the depths of reality. That is how I understand Bonhoeffer’s assertion that God is the absolute (not relative or partial) centre of all reality, although I would love to know how he would receive this interpretation in the prison of Tegel or at Buchenwald. And here, today.

R.M.B. : We are once again going through turbulent times, difficult times for the most vulnerable, and suffering reaches its peak in a war that is hitting us close to home. Our prayers and consecrations seem to have no effect. What does that mean?

If we return to the image “the world rests in God’s hand”, God, however, seems to want to abandon the world to its autonomy. He remains “powerless and weak, nailed to the cross”. Is that how he helps us to live as human beings? Does it mean that it is up to us to act?

J.A.: We are undoubtedly going through the most turbulent times in the 300,000 years of the human species Sapiens. It is true that never have there been so many possibilities for the Common Good of humanity –the Common Good of the community of all living beings is another matter, which does not seem to have gained anything from the emergence of humans, nor does it seem likely that their situation will improve, due to the growing human impact on the entire planet– but never have there been so many wars, exploitation and differences, never have so few possessed so much wealth at the expense of the misery of so many. The war in Ukraine is today’s most media war, but even by today’s standards it is not the deadliest.

And what about God? Hundreds and hundreds of millions of believers still ask why “God” allows these things, or still organise prayer vigils for “God” to help us. The deus ex machina is still alive in many people’s imaginations. Bonhoeffer’s warnings to religious people are still valid: their religion is a dangerous personal, social, political self-deception. It is true that the vast majority –the extent of which our author could never even suspect– no longer believe in such a divinity, simply because their worldview or their common sense or their deepest wisdom tells them that such a belief is not only absurd, but also potentially harmful.

The pastor-theologian would concur with them in what they deny. This “God” who makes himself present and acts whenever he wants to help the poor humans whom he has created does not exist. But Bonhoeffer did not merely deny the “God” that atheists deny. And he never gave up using the word God (Gott) to proclaim “another” God in whom atheists could also believe (without ceasing to be atheists, I dare say). Bonhoeffer is –together with Tillich– one of the pioneering Christian theologians in the critique of theism understood as a belief in Theos, a creative and omnipotent Supreme Being that intervenes in the world whenever he so chooses. Bonhoeffer never explicitly states that such theism must be overcome, but what else is he basically saying when he denounces the “religious” image of God, the deus ex machina, and speaks of the “impotent God” or the “God who abandons us” to our own autonomy and our own resources?

What can “God is powerless and weak” or “God suffers” mean? Some Holy Fathers (e.g. Origen, 3rd century) were already wondering about the suffering of God, and great theologians such as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Moltmann have written about this in a profound way. But what does it mean that “only a suffering God can help us” or that we can “rest in God’s hands” when God abandons us to our fate? What does “we should live as if God does not exist” mean? What is the meaning of Bonhoeffer’s most paradoxical and surprising watchword that is also his most beautiful and thought-provoking: “Living before God without God”? All this points to going beyond theism, the omnipotent “God” who speaks and works, does and undoes in the world as he wills. How is one supposed to understand all these expressions? It is not enough to say, even though the Bible never stops saying it, that God tests his faithful by allowing them to suffer or by making them suffer or by making them experience God’s total abandonment and silence. Nor are all the more subtle (and sterile) disquisitions sufficient to reconcile human freedom with the omnipotence of a God, for such disquisitions do not hold water with respect to this simple question: Why didn’t he make us free and sinless as, according to dogma, he made Jesus and even his mother Mary, born without original sin?

It is much easier to recognise that we can no longer believe in an omnipotent and extrinsic “God” Supreme Being. Neither could Bonhoeffer believe in that “God”. Yet he rested in the hands of God: deep within himself and in the hugely troubled world that had brought him to that prison, and in the wavering light of the eyes of his fellow prisoners he perceived a sure Presence, the desire, the aspiration and inspiration that moves all things, the power of goodness that is stronger than death. There is no “God”, but we can live in God, in other words, we can live in peace and lose everything or give everything in peace in spite of everything, and climb the steps of the scaffold, as Bonhoeffer climbed them, naked, free and at peace. The secret lies in knowing how to look, perceive, feel, sympathise, fraternise, and live more deeply.

But the question remains: Did Bonhoeffer go far enough in his reflection on God beyond traditional theism? Did he find the right language beyond his bold, thought-provoking paradoxical expressions? Frankly, I don’t think so, and we can’t reproach him in any way. Would he have taken his reflection further in a clearer and more coherent language, had he not been hanged at the age of 39? No doubt he would have done so, though he would not have succeeded nor we nor anyone else will ever succeed in uttering the Unutterable Mystery in unequivocal words. But the fundamental thing is to live deeply, and Bonhoeffer lived deeply, and thus experienced God, helped God –the creative goodness, the source of reality– to manifest himself, to create, to create himself. And that way he found himself, he found rest.

(To be continued)

Rose-Marie Barandiaran – José Arregi

(Published in GOLIAS Magazine 211, July-August 2023, pp. 22-26)

(Translated by Sarah J. Turtle)