Theological Echoes and Tensions in Bonhoeffer's Discipleship

According to some scholars, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, which forms the larger first part of Discipleship, marks a break with the interpretation of it by most previous German Lutheran theologians.  For example, in the context of Martin Doblmeier’s film, Bonhoeffer, John De Gruchy states that German Lutherans have traditionally interpreted the Sermon on the Mount as an impossible ideal, whose sole purpose is to make people aware of their sinful condition, and that Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount presented a novel departure from this understanding. A similar assessment is offered by Friedrich Schlingensiepen, who states that Bonhoeffer interpreted the Sermon on the Mount in a way that was “contrary to the usual Lutheran interpretation.”  For Bonhoeffer, “the Sermon on the Mount was intended not only to lead human beings to the conviction that they are sinners who can be saved only through faith in the grace of God; even more, Jesus required consistent obedience from his followers. Anyone who claimed otherwise was preaching ‘cheap grace.’”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer's closest friend and principal biographer, Eberhard Bethge, also concluded that Bonhoeffer had held “the conventional Lutheran harmless understanding” of the Sermon on the Mount at least through 1929.  At that time, Bonhoeffer accepted the notion that a literal interpretation of the Sermon “would turn it into a law, and that law had been abolished through Christ.”

By the early 1930s, however, according to Bethge, “Bonhoeffer was entering new ground and an altered intellectual climate in his emphasis on the concreteness of faith in his interpretation of earthly discipleship, and his location of the disciple within the boundaries of historical and local decisions, fraught as they were with visible inconsistencies.” This “emphasis,” Bethge stated, was “in contrast to the Reformation era.” That conclusion seems already to have been made by Bonhoeffer himself when he remarked to his former teacher, Reinhold Niebuhr (in a 1934 letter from London), that the Sermon on the Mount “must be understood differently from the Reformational understanding.”  Gerhard Krause interpreted this remark to mean that Bonhoeffer himself “directed” Discipleship “against the students of Luther.”  In other words (to cite Bethge again), Bonhoeffer directed the book against his own earlier “conventional harmless Lutheran” understanding of the Sermon.

While Bonhoeffer’s treatment of the Sermon on the Mount in Discipleship differs in tone and content from previous interpretations by Lutheran scholars, to claim that it marks a departure from “the usual Lutheran interpretation” can also be misleading, since it seems to ignore Bonhoeffer’s continuity with exegetical decisions taken by Martin Luther himself. Even after 1932, the year Bonhoeffer claimed to have become a Christian (which also entailed his adoption of a form of Christian pacifism), he seems to have underestimated the degree to which he still shared basic exegetical and theological insights of Luther on the Sermon on the Mount. Accordingly, Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of the Sermon was not really "new for Protestant churches," as Schlingensiepen claims and as Bonhoeffer’s own remark to Niebuhr suggests.  Instead, Bonhoeffer uncovered issues and concerns in the biblical texts that German Lutheran theologians had been ignoring, repressing, forgetting, and distorting—insights that nonetheless are present in Luther’s own exegesis and that of a few other important Lutheran scholars from the century before Bonhoeffer, especially August Tholuck, whose commentary on the Sermon on the Mount was one of Bonhoeffer’s principal resources.

For further analysis of continuities and discontinuities between Bonhoeffer's Discipleship and Luther's sermons on the Sermon (and Tholuck's commentary on it), click this link.

A Hammarskjöld Pericope for Christmas Eve

In Thy wind--in Thy light--

How insignificant is everything else, how small are we--and how happy in that which alone is great.

12.24.57

Nineteenth-Century Lutheran Theologians

This past week I learned that a new book I've edited has been published: Nineteenth-Century Lutheran Theologians, Refo500 Academic Series 31 (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016).

To give you some idea of the scope of its contents, here is a list of the theologians treated in the book (and the authors who wrote about them):


Friedrich Schleiermacher (Christine Helmer; Northwestern University)

Georg Hegel (Mark Mattes; Grand View University, Des Moines)

F. C. Baur (Mark Seifried; Concordia Seminary, St. Louis)

J. T. Beck (Roy Harrisville Sr.; Luther Seminary, St. Paul [emeritus])

Adolf von Harless (Lutz Mohaupt; University of Hamburg [emeritus])


Nikolai F. S. Grundtvig (Anders Holm; University of Copenhagen)

W. Loehe (David Ratke; Lenoir-Rhyne University)

J. C. K. von Hofmann (yours truly)

Gottfried Thomasius (Hans Schwarz; University of Regensburg [emeritus])

C. F. W. Walther  (Christoph Barnbrock; Theological Hochschule Oberuersel)

S. Kierkegaard (Carl Hughes; Texas Lutheran University)

Theodosius Harnack (Christoffer Grundmann, Valparaiso University)

Albrecht Ritschl (Darrell Jodock; Gustavus Adolphus [emeritus])

C. P. Krauth (Mark Oldenburg; Gettysburg Seminary)

Martin Kaehler (Carl Braaten; Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago [emeritus])

Nathan Soederblom (Dietz Lange; University of Goettingen)


Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

This is a book about Lutheran theology in the “long nineteenth century,” that period between the political revolutions of the late eighteenth century and the end of the First World War. With respect to the history of Protestant theology, this era began with the publication of Schleiermacher’s Speeches (1799), written in the wake of Kant’s critical philosophy, and it ended with the rise of Dialectical Theology, which was inaugurated by Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans (1919) and directed against the liberal Protestant tradition begun by Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel. The end of nineteenth-century Protestant theology could also be tied to the beginnings of the modern Ecumenical Movement, which gained momentum in the aftermath of “the Great War,” largely through the efforts of Nathan Söderblom (1866–1931), who is the focus of book’s final chapter.

The book thus provides an introduction to fifteen Lutherans and one Reformed theologian who were active in this period. The one Reformed figure, Schleiermacher, has been so influential upon the development of Protestant theology, including its Lutheran stream, that his life and work are the focus of the initial chapter. Following the format of the essays in the companion volume on twentieth-century figures, each essay here covers the life, teachings, and abiding legacy of a given thinker. The goal of the authors has not been merely to identify how a specific individual was important in his own time and place, but to indicate why aspects of that person’s thinking might have a continuing significance for contemporary theological reflection. Hopefully readers of the book will gain deeper insight into our current theological milieu through an examination of these key figures who were active in the immediate wake of the Enlightenment and at a time when many Europeans were beginning to move beyond Christianity in search of other alternatives.

The project as a whole was initiated by the journal Lutheran Quarterly and carried forward through conversations with Jörg Persch of Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, “in order to determine how our recent past can help us shape our bearings in a new century.” Earlier versions of six of the essays (Schleiermacher, Hegel, Thomasius, Hofmann, Kähler, and Söderblom) were originally published
in Lutheran Quarterly. In addition to Schleiermacher—who, along with Kant and Hegel, has to be included among those who have had the greatest influence upon the development of modern intellectual history—the thinkers who are examined here are ones who saw themselves as working within the Lutheran-Protestant tradition of theology. Nevertheless, the reader will quickly notice the remarkable differences among these individuals in how they understood Christian doctrine and applied it to their world.

Twelve of the theologians presented here were Germans (one of whom became a U.S. citizen), two were Danish, one was Swedish, and one was American. Given the path-breaking significance of German theology in this century, one should not be surprised by the large number of chapters devoted to this tradition. No other English text provides as in-depth an examination of these key figures and
the implications of their theology for contemporary discussion. These are theologians who deserve to be better understood than they typically are, especially among English-speaking scholars. Each of the essays attempts to present its object in a new light and to show how that person not only gave shape to Lutheran theology at that time but also furthered the course of Christian thought itself.

For more information on the book, click on this link here.

An Interview

Earlier this year I was interviewed by the Rev. Gina Pond, who operates a podcast called "This Week in Heresy." She recently let me know that the interview is now available online.

The whole interview runs about an hour or so.

It can be found here.

Change in the Church on VUTV

Recently a few of our Valpo students did a two-part story on "Change in the Church" for our campus TV station. Our LCMS campus pastor and I were interviewed for the report. 

The first part can be seen here and occurs at the 2:14 part in the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWJYnPAQlPA

The second part can be seen here and occurs at the 4:37 point in the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZV3h3tZX1vc

(The student who conducted the interview apologized later for wrongly positioning the camera, given the brightness of the sun that was streaming through my office window that day. I told her that perhaps the end result is fitting, since many in the LCMS think I am theologically "in the dark." Another person thought the lighting made me look a bit like how Salman Rushdie did in his early interviews after the Fatwa was announced against him, his face darkened in to order to keep his appearance incognito....)