The radiant Faith of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (& IV)
Rose-Marie Barandiaran: Our job as human beings, according to Bonhoeffer, “is not a religious problem: it is to live the joys and sufferings following the steps of Jesus. To interiorize, to question our moral conscience, to flee from individualism and the self-satisfaction offered by pious works and the search for salvation”. “Faith is our work of men”. How should we interpret this statement?
José Arregi: I would summarize it saying: for Bonhoeffer, the ultimate, true being or destiny of the world and of humanity is to live the life and assume the destiny of Jesus, of “Christ”. But we could also say it the other way around, although the theologian pastor did not explicitly propose the reverse formulation: the being and destiny of Jesus, or of the “Christ” consisted in realizing and fulfilling the being and destiny of the world, the being and destiny of the human being in the world. To be “world” consists in being in relation, to form a unique harmonic body in an interconnected becoming. And to being “human” consists in being son and daughter, brother and sister, in being neighbour, in receiving and giving oneself, and, thus, in finding health and salvation, the blessing or the joy of living. Cosmology, anthropology, Christology, theology… do not refer to juxtaposed realities nor to superimposed layers; they refer to a single Reality with Soul. And, in itself, this Reality has nothing to do with any religion, with creeds, “sacred” cults, spaces or persons, spirits, gods, heavens or hells of the hereafter… all of them human cultural creations, for better or for worse.
By the way, for Bonhoeffer, the difference between the historical Jesus and “Christ of the faith” is irrelevant. For many present-day Christians and theologians, myself among them, “Christ” is, regardless of the letter of the Christological dogmas, the traditional Christian name for the liberated human fullness, furthermore, it is the name of the liberated creation in the universal brotherly-sisterly relation of all living beings; as for the particular man Jesus of Nazareth, he is the seed and forerunner, the witness or martyr and precursor prophet, neither unique nor perfect, of the Christic fullness, horizon of our life.
So, to be “Christ” for Bonhoeffer (and for myself) means “to be for the others”, or should we say, to be inseparably from, by, with and for the others, all beings. And it implies to give oneself until death. And that is ultimately what it means to be a human person, or a bonobo, a robin, a worm, an agapanthus, water, boson, star, galaxy or black hole… To be from, with and for and to give oneself until death: that is what Jesus did, even if he was not perfect. He gave himself and was crucified. But to die for giving oneself is to live, to resurrect to a life that does not die, to the Life that beats in everything that is, from the particle to the galaxies (or even universes) with no end. Like Jesus did. Like all living beings, like all beings that form a single cosmic body: the world.
The “work” or the “mission” of a Christian is to live the joys and sufferings of human life in the world with Jesus, like Jesus did. But also vice versa: the “work” or the “mission” of the particular Jesus or of the “universal Christ” is to rejoice in human joys and to bear human tasks or sufferings, to live carrying the weight of the world and animated by “matter” which is essentially pure energy, which we do not know what it is and where it comes from, but from which new forms of being and life constantly emerge. That is what God’s “worldliness” or “intrawordliness” means.
Our Christian task is one and double, as Bonhoeffer says: “to pray and make justice”, and both are “worldly” tasks. They are not two tasks or parallel and consecutive tasks. To pray is not to address prayers to a divinity to help us, nor is it to take refuge within oneself. To pray is to breathe and to be deeply, to express and display our being in depth, to encounter in depth with oneself and with everything, with and in the Heart of everything, with and in the justice and peace of everything. To do justice is not a mere action, it is to act and live incarnating our deep and true being, the profound inspiration of our inner source in solidarity, in a risky and free, and joyful manner. That is what “a-religious Christianity” means.
Our “human work is Faith”, but faith has nothing to do with beliefs, whether religious or otherwise. It is trust in that inspiration that springs from the depth of the world that allows us to live deeply –within a religious or non-religious framework, but beyond all framework- our tasks and festivities, successes and failures, joys and sorrows, certainties and perplexities, “in God’s arms” with “God” or without “God”.
R.M.B.: Jesus will be “the last one” and “his words will not pass away”. We still have to live the “penultimate”, and we can see how difficult that is today, and how likely it is to continue being so.
“Never forget that we are earthly, and that death and resurrection are already present in us”, as Bonhoeffer testified until his last breath.
J.A.: “The last one” and “the penultimate”… These are categories that place objects or events, or ourselves, within space-time coordinates of the world: the penultimate house of the street, the last day of the month… If these coordinates cannot even be applied to the infra-atomic reality, to the atomic particles, how much less to whatever constitutes our deep being, which is one with the profound being of all beings! The last is lived and played out in the penultimate, in the space and time of our history, in our earthly form, but it is not limited by space and time. Our deep being is eternal.
Eternal in what we call time and space, in our visible world. Eternity does not mean lasting with no end, nor what begins after time. Eternal life is life in happy goodness, life as the grace of receiving and giving oneself. Life that neither begins nor ends. The “Divine life” in all, the truly human life or the cosmic breath or the spirit of life. We Christians call it Christic life, and we celebrate it incarnated in the figure of Jesus, at the same time particular man and universal Christic symbol.
Resurrection consists in giving our life in our finitude open to the infinite, in the midst of our miseries and greatness, joys and sorrows. We resurrect in our lives, like Jesus resurrected in his free and given life, in his healing compassion, in his open communion, in his freedom in solidarity. Life is constant transformation, in every heartbeat and breath. When heartbeats and respiration cease, the incessant transformation of life in its earthly form is completed and it opens to the great transformation: breath becomes one with Breath, life with Life. We call it death, but it is a passover, the final passage of this form into the formless Fullness in all forms, in a process that extends from what we call matter-energy to that which we call life in all forms of life. A process which is both earthly and cosmic, and in its depth it transcends the narrow measures of space and time. Every day is the beginning of creation and the end of the world governed by unfair power. Sentient, living, loving matter, we walk in the great cosmic communion towards the fullness of Life beyond the limits of our wounded love, of our limited life.
A witness to the last moments of Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that his last words, in the courtyard of the Flossenbürg concentration camp, while, at age 39, he walked naked to the gallows, were: “this is the end; for me, it is the beginning of life”.
R.M.B.: The last word for the theologian…
J.A.: Nobody, not even Dietrich Bonhoeffer, has the last word, even though a moment will arrive for all of us when we cease being able to control our breathing and our voice will cease, voice which will continue resounding in all voices. The last breath that the martyr prophet prematurely surrendered inspires new words that prolong the prophecy of his martyrdom.
How little Dietrich’s voice lasted! I wish his life would have been longer and he would have been able to develop his theological discourse during the decades of 1940s to 1990s when Europe en masse embarked on a path to overcome a spirituality and Christianism anchored in unintelligible and useless religious categories! A path that the rest of the continents will also walk sooner or later. In May 1944 he wrote: “Old words will have to wither and become silent”. He was made silent, but the echo of his words and of his silence continues resounding. And we, and those who will follow us –should there be someone to follow us- will have to prolong his martyrial testimony, his prayer and his work in favour of justice beyond the word, but also his word, his theological reflection. It is up to us to risk our own, always penultimate, word.
We are many decades late after the last words of Bonhoffer who, in turn, wanted to make up for centuries of delay of the Church that claims to be a follower of Jesus, and who pointed beyond religion and the traditional theistic image of the ultimate and fontal Mystery. Karl Barth, the most significant and influential theologian of the Protestant Churches in the 40s and 60s, was disconcerted by the theology of the late Bonhoeffer, because of his appealing to an “a-religious Christianity”, and spoke against him and against a few others who dared take his place (Harvey Cox, Vahanian, Robinson, Van Buren, Altizer, Hamilton, Tillich…). The Churches, Protestant and Anglican as well as Catholic and Orthodox, were open to certain institutional reforms, but continued to cling to the traditional significance of fundamental dogmas.
This path has already failed or it will fail. Fidelity to Earth, to the Gospel of Jesus and to the testimony of Bonhoeffer requires a deeper transformation than any one that has yet occurred in the history of Christianity, except for the one that converted the movement of Jesus into a patriarchal, clerical and imperial religion. The Gospel, humanity, Earth and the echo of the words of the theologian pastor require reinventing an “a-religious Christianity” in an a-religious world: to reinvent God beyond theism; to rediscover Jesus as Christ beyond the letter of the dogmas; to relearn to read the entire Bible and its inspiration beyond the letter; to reimagine a Church beyond all its religious, patriarchal and clerical pillars.
Perhaps it is already too late to start this radical theological and institutional revision and for the Churches, “praying and doing justice”, to be really a leaven for a new world. No longer do they have the necessary social mass for it. But, in the short and medium term, I do not see another alternative for the remaining Christian communities: either try it or accept becoming a cultural ghetto and a museum relic. In any case, the Breath of Life will continue to animate the heart of Earth, of humanity, of the entire Universe.
(The end)
Rose-Marie Barandiaran – José Arregi
Toulouse – Aizarna, 2022
(Published in GOLIAS Magazine 211, July-August 2023, pp. 29-34)
Translated by Mertxe de Renobales Scheifler