My mind seemed electrified reading Bonhoeffer, especially when I came to realize just how integrated, how cohesive, his thinking truly was. Casey Doss (Tables and Altars), a friend and fellow seminarian, and I commented in discussion one day that one simply could not separate Bonhoeffer’s Ethic from his Christology. And so before we can delve further into Bonhoeffer’s choices in the 1940s, and ultimately refute the claim that he scuttled away his Christian conviction rooted in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in order to accommodate an assassination plot, we have to consider more deeply who Jesus is within his theology.
For Bonhoeffer, Christ is not merely one more person to be known, He is true knowledge and our knowing. Jesus transcends study as subject-object within the discipline of human logic. Again, “Only God himself can speak his Word”. Jesus is the Word, the ‘Logos of God’. This is why Bonhoeffer will call Christology “Logo-ology”, the “science par excellence”.1
Our disciplines of Science and Art bring to us the questions of causation and meaning, which Bonhoeffer summarizes as belonging to the goal of classification. One can organize objects and ideas into their relationships of cause/effect or by their significance to other objects and ideas. These are the question of “How?” “How can this object be classified?”2
But God cannot be classified. Christ the Son, who is the Lord, as the Logos of God is the counter-Logos, he argues. In other words, Jesus in his appearance, in his preaching and teaching, is the kingdom of God at hand, who is both the death of the old (our attempts of classifications) and is himself the New Creation. The Scriptures tell us this when they call him Judge. Therefore he is the judgement of our knowledge as he is the only way we can know. He says of himself, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn 14.6). Though we want to assimilate him into what we already know about power and righteousness, or wisdom and love, or justice and hope, or gender and sex, or family and friendship, or obedience and freedom, etc., we simply cannot!
Jesus challenges every category as the one who makes all things what they are and will be. Jesus is not an idea or object within the bounds of our existence — he is the boundary and the existence! “It is only from God that man know who he is.”3
And so, the question of “How” it is possible for Christ to be who he is remains wholly and woefully inadequate. We can only ask the question, “Who? Who are you, Jesus Christ, Word of God, Logos of God?” Bonhoeffer contends.
This is the beginning.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center, (NY: Harper & Row, 1960), 28.
Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center, 29.
ibid, 31.