Did Bonhoeffer Believe in the Resurrection? Part 2

In the last post, we explored a critique of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Richard Weikart. Now, we are going to explore the other citation used in that critique. Namely, that Bonhoeffer’s statement “We cannot and may not go behind the word of scripture to the real events,” shows that he rejected the historical character of the Bible.

Weikart’s Critique

Again, his full critique is copied in full here, and you can find the full article here.

Only two passages in The cost of Discipleship clearly reveal Bonhoeffer’s view on the unhistorical character of the Bible. One is only part of a sentence: “We cannot and may not go behind the word of scripture to the real events…. ” The other is a footnote that is couched in philosophical language, and, while comprehensible to those having studied theology or philosophy, it is probably unintelligible to the average non-philosophically inclined evangelical reader. The footnote is enlightening, because it occurs in a passage in which Bonhoeffer affirmed the truth, reliability and unity of the scriptures in the strongest possible way. To avoid misunderstanding he added a clarifying note denying the literal resurrection of Jesus in the past. He wrote:

The confusion of ontological statements with proclaiming testimony is the essence of all fanaticism. The sentence: Christ is risen and present, is the dissolution of the unity of the scripture if it is ontologically understood…. The sentence: Christ is risen and present, strictly understood only as testimony of scripture, is true only as the word of scripture.

According to Bonhoeffer, the resurrection and other events in the Bible are thus not true as empirical facts of history.[1]

This citation from Bonhoeffer comes from chapter 3 of The Cost of Discipleship edition I have. That chapter is titled Single-Minded Obedience. As in all of these articles, after having cited the critique in full, we will cite the critiqued in full.

Establishing Chapter Context

Sadly, as was the case in Part 1, Weikart has excised Bonhoeffer’s comment from its context. Once again, Bonhoeffer is not addressing the issue of historicity.

In the chapter as a whole, Bonhoeffer is arguing that all sorts of barriers come between Jesus’ call to follow Him and the reader of Scripture. He lists them early in the chapter: “Reason… conscience, responsibility… piety… even the law and ‘scriptural authority’ itself….” These, said Bonhoeffer, “were obstacles which pretended to defend them from going to the extremes of antinomianism and ‘enthusiasms.’” These were obstacles insomuch as “We [used them as pretexts to excuse] ourselves from single-minded obedience to the word of Jesus….” And that is the basics of where this paragraph fits in to Bonhoeffer’s overall chapter.

Interpreting Bonhoeffer in Context

Bonhoeffer opens this paragraph with a connective sentence to what came before, and a sentence that establishes what will follow:

By eliminating simple obedience on principle, we drift into an unevangelical interpretation of the Bible. We take it for granted as we open the Bible that we have a key to its interpretation.  

The essential problem is that “we” often read our Bibles, interpreting it based on our assumptions about what it must and mustn’t mean. Even if, for a love of God’s grace in the evangelion (Gospel), we eliminate “simple obedience” from the call of Jesus, we are actually taking a step in a decidedly un-evangelical direction. In essence, we must get our Gospel from the Word of Jesus, or not have a Gospel at all. This is what Bonhoeffer says in his next sentence.

But then the key we use would not be the living Christ, who is both Judge and Saviour, and our use of this key no longer depends on the will of the living Holy Spirit alone.

While there are other keys (those “barriers” listed above), here he is referring to one key in particular: “The key we use is a general doctrine of grace which we can apply as we will.” The “key” Bonhoeffer identifies is an abstracted doctrine of grace, made to stand as judge over God’s Word. Rather than relying on what “the living Christ” has said in His Word, and depending on the “living Holy Spirit alone” for understanding Jesus’ call on our lives, we interpose our own abstracted theological systems, thus ruling out some of what Jesus has said before ever reading it.

Now, the Christian life is made immensely more difficult. Bible reading becomes an interpretive puzzle – constantly fiddling with the text to make it fit pre-conceived notions. This is what Bonhoeffer meant in his next sentence, “The problem of discipleship then becomes a problem of exegesis as well.” Bonhoeffer adds another layer to this by emphasizing that you cannot flatten the Scriptural testimony to parallel everything in it (about the disciples, for instance) with our own lives and experience, and thus make the commands of Christ subject to experiential interpretation. This would treat every story as our story.

If our exegesis is truly evangelical, we shall realize that we cannot identify ourselves altogether with those whom Jesus called, for they themselves are part and parcel of the Word of God in the Scriptures, and therefore part of the message.

However, the Bible does speak to us. The message is to us. They are not just past events for us to identify with, or past events with no relevance to us; they are part of God’s living Word to us.

We hear in the sermon not only the answer which Jesus gave to the young man’s question, which would also be our question, but both question and answer are, as the Word of the Scriptures, con tents of the message.

Interpreting the Sentence in Question

So, then, we come to the sentence in question. It is very important that we understand, not just that sentence, but the two before it.

It would be a false exegesis if we tried to behave in our discipleship as though we were the immediate contemporaries of the men whom Jesus called. But the Christ whom the Scriptures proclaim is in every word he utters one who grants faith to those only who obey him. It is neither possible nor right for us to try to get behind the Word of the Scriptures to the events as they actually occurred.

First, Bonhoeffer establishes that our perspective is not the same as that of the disciples. That proper exegesis is interpreting what is recorded of them in the light of their own context, not ours. Furthermore, a proper exegesis of every utterance of the Christ of the Scriptures, the One whom the Bible is all about, produces obedience and faith in the end. Jesus still speaks through His Word rightly understood.

So then, any attempt to reconstruct “what really happened” by going behind or beyond Scripture is not only impossible, but misses the point of those events altogether. It is not possible because Scripture is our primary, and in many cases our only witness to those events. And it is not right because the only Christ offered to us is the One proclaimed in His Word. There is no other Christ or record of the events that occurred other than what we have recorded in Scripture.

Now, it seems that much of Weikart’s interpretation hinges on the word “actually.” Even if I grant for the sake of argument that Bonhoeffer believes that there is a more real, historically accurate account of what did occur, his entire point is to say that it is not proper or right to accept anything other than what Scripture has given us. Bonhoeffer is not rejecting what Scripture says, grasping for some other, more actual version of events. He is holding to Scripture as the only sure witness to Christ, even if it does not record events as factually as it could.

However, not granting this, in the flow of Bonhoeffer’s argumentation, he is arguing for proper, historical, contextual exegesis as opposed to presumptive, false exegesis. For this to be denied, it would have to be established that he did not really believe that, what he interprets as really happening, really happened. One would have to prove that Bonhoeffer is lying when he treats Jesus’ conversation with the young man in this chapter as an actually conversation from antiquity. Otherwise, it must be assumed that he is being truthful. And therefore, to be consistent, the phrase “the events as they actually occurred” must be seen as referring to the arguments of his opponents that he has been countering in the rest of this chapter.

Bonhoeffer ends this paragraph with three sentences, recorded here in the spirit of getting the fullness of the context:

Rather the whole Word of the Scriptures summons us to follow Jesus. We must not do violence to the Scriptures by interpreting them in terms of an abstract principle, even if that principle be a doctrine of grace. Otherwise we shall end up in legalism.

This fits into a larger thread in the chapter and the book as a whole, and which is beyond the scope of this essay.

Conclusion

Richard Weikart stripped one of Bonhoeffer’s sentences of its context. While it may be argued from other bits of Bonhoeffer’s writings that he did not believe that events recorded in the Bible actually happened, that cannot be argued here from this book. Here, Bonhoeffer defend proper exegesis against false exegesis which seeks for something outside of Scripture to act as an interpretive key over Scripture. It is simply uncharitably at it’s finest to interpret Bonhoeffer as addressing issues of historicity.

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[1] Scripture and Myth in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Fides etffistoria 25,1 (1993): 12-25, by Richard Weikart, p. 19-20