Confessing Evangelical

I'm nearing the end of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Discipleship (for previous posts, see here). The closing section of his penultimate chapter ("The Saints") is another critical passage, I think, for understanding Bonhoeffer's argument in the book as a whole. Overall, it demonstrates that Bonhoeffer really is saying nothing that cannot be found in the Lutheran confessions (see my post on Love and the fulfilling of the law) or, more importantly, in the New Testament.

Like Melanchthon, Bonhoeffer gives short shrift to the idea that faith and good works are mutually exclusive:

We shall be judged according to our works - this is why we are exhorted to do good works. The Bible assuredly knows nothing of those qualms about good works, by which we only try to excuse ourselves and justify our evil works. The Bible never draws the antithesis between faith and good works so sharply as to maintain that good works undermine faith. No, it is evil works rather than good works which hinder and destroy faith.

As he continues, "the law of God is still in force, and still demands fulfilment (Romans 3:31). And the only way to fulfil the law is by doing good works".

However, critically, for the Christian the doing of good works is not a matter of law, but of gospel. It is not that God commands that the believer must do good works; rather, God promises that we will do good works:

We cling in faith to Christ and his works alone. For we have the promise that those who are in Christ Jesus will be enabled to do good works.

See Ephesians 2:10, cited by Bonhoeffer in an earlier paragraph.

As a result, what Bonhoeffer is advocating is emphatically not an inward-looking obsession with how "sanctified" we are, or even a self-willed effort to become more "sanctified" by our own endeavours. On the contrary:

From this it follows that we can never be conscious of our good works. Our sanctification is veiled from our eyes until the last day, when all secrets will be disclosed.

If we want to see some results here and assess our own spiritual state, we have our reward. The moment we begin to feel satisfied that we are making some progress along the road of sanctification, it is all the more necessary to repent and confess that all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.

Bonhoeffer continues:

Yet the Christian life is not one of gloom, but of ever increasing joy in the Lord. God alone knows our good works, all we know is his good work. We can do no more than hearken to his commandments, carry on and rely on his grace, walk in his commandments, and - sin.

We ourselves will have no idea of the good works that God has done in and through us until the last day:

All the time our new righteousness, our sanctification, the light which is meant to shine, are veiled from our eyes. The left hand knows not what the right hand does. But we believe, and are well assured, "that he which began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ" (Philippians 1:6).

In that day Christ will show us the works of which we were unaware. While we knew it not, we gave him food, drink and clothing and visited him, and while we knew it not we rejected him. Great will be our astonishment in that day, and we shall then realise that it is not our works which remain, but the work which God has wrought through us in his good time without any effort of will and intention on our part (Matthew 25:31ff.).

So we are not to be cast into despair by our apparent lack of good works, our continuing sinfulness. Rather, we are "to look away from ourselves to him who has himself accomplished all things for us and to follow him".

The good works will come, not because we roll up our sleeves and make a tremendous effort of the will (unlike those half-hearted Christians, over there), but because God has promised that they will happen. And we won't even realise it has happened until we stand before him.

Labels: bonhoeffer, discipleship, sanctification

In the recent discussions about Dietrich Bonhoeffer's book, The Cost of Discipleship, one point that came up was the question of how we hear Christ's call to follow him. The point was made, correctly, that there is a difference in how we encounter Christ after his ascension into heaven.

Setting aside (please!) the question of whether there are flaws in Bonhoeffer's conception of discipleship and following Christ - though I would draw your attention to the very pertinent comments from the man himself, as posted by Pr William Voelker in an earlier comments thread - I found the following passage very powerful on this question of how we hear Christ's call today.

In chapter 27, at the start of his section on "the church of Jesus Christ and the life of discipleship", Bonhoeffer is describing the questions that crowd in when we consider the issue of how Christ calls us today. How can we take the experiences of the disciples, or the paralytic, or Lazarus, as examples for us today? Which of the various models of discipleship found in the gospels are we to adopt for ourselves? How can we know we are truly following him rather than following our own whims? Bonhoeffer writes:

There is something wrong about all these questions. Every time we ask them we are retreating from the presence of the living Christ and forgetting that Jesus Christ is not dead, but alive and speaking to us to-day through the testimony of the Scriptures.

He comes to us to-day, and is present with us in bodily form and in his word. If we would hear his call to follow, we must listen where he is to be found, that is, in the Church through the ministry of Word and Sacrament. The preaching of the Church and the administration of the sacraments is the place where Jesus Christ is present.

If you would hear the call of Jesus you need no personal revelation: all you have to do is to hear the sermon and receive the sacrament, that is, to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ crucified and risen. Here he is, the same Christ whom the disciples encountered, the same Christ whole and entire. Yes, here is already, the glorified, victorious and risen Lord.

Hence our concern when reading the gospels, or any other scriptural passage, is not to pick and choose examples, but to look to Christ and listen to what he is telling us through a given passage of Scripture:

It is therefore abundantly clear that we cannot play off the various accounts of the calling of the disciples against other parts of the gospel narrative. It is not a question of stepping into the shoes of the disciples, or of any other of the New Testament characters. The only constant factor throughout is the sameness of Christ and of his call then and now...

The Scriptures do not present us with a series of Christian types to be imitated according to choice: they preach to us in every situation the one Jesus Christ. To him alone must I listen. He is everywhere one and the same.

To the question - where today do we hear the call of Jesus to discipleship, there is no other answer than this: Hear the Word, receive the Sacrament; in it hear him himself, and you will hear his call.

If there were only one gift that the Lutheran church could give to the wider church of Christ, it would be this: its conscious awareness of our participation in the church's ministry of preaching the gospel and administering the sacraments as an encounter with the living Christ, rather than merely involving the communication of information about Christ. That has certainly been the insight for which I've been most grateful since joining the Lutheran church.

Indeed, Bonhoeffer's words in this chapter left me reeling when I read them last night. I'd made attempts to read Discipleship on various occasions in the past 13 years, but had previously ground to a halt fairly early in the book. Reading chapter 27, however, I found myself wondering what would have happened if I'd read it ten years ago. It would have blown my mind, I should think. And probably saved me a lot of difficulty and confusion. And/or caused some...

Labels: bonhoeffer, discipleship

In my previous post, I suggested that Bonhoeffer's treatment of the Lord's Prayer provides additional evidence against any charge of legalism - whether that is legalism in the sense of outright works-righteousness, or in the sense of mixing law elements into the gospel.

What I had in mind was his treatment of the petition, "Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors". Bonhoeffer writes:

Every day, Christ's followers must acknowledge and bewail their guilt. Living as they do in fellowship with him, they ought to be sinless, but in practice their life is marred daily with all manner of unbelief, sloth in prayer, lack of bodily discipline, self-indulgence of every kind, envy, hatred and ambition. No wonder that they must pray daily for God's forgiveness.

Note that this puts paid to any notion that Bonhoeffer is presenting sinless perfection, or even a certain level of legal obedience, as a condition for fellowship with Christ. We ought to be sinless, but in reality two things are true about us: we do live in fellowship with Christ, but at the same time we commit real sins that need real forgiveness. Simil iustus et peccator.

But here we hit a snag, namely the condition the prayer imposes on our forgiveness, and which Jesus reiterates in Matthew 6:14,15, immediately after the text of his prayer:

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

Here, surely, is an opportunity for Bonhoeffer the legalist to bring the hammer down upon us again. The condition is quite simple and straightforward; Jesus means what he says; there is no escape. And indeed this is what Bonhoeffer appears to start to say. However, he then takes this thought in a radically different direction from that which one might expect:

But God will only forgive them if they forgive one another with readiness and brotherly affection. Thus they bring all their guilt before God and pray as a body for forgiveness. God forgive not merely me my debts, but us ours.

Note in particular the word "thus": it is because we are required to forgive others that we make this prayer corporately. In other words, the corporate nature of the Lord's prayer, its nature as a prayer of the church, means that it is its own fulfilment of the condition in this petition. As we pray this petition together, at that point we are actually forgiving those who have sinned against us by drawing them into the same prayer. The fact that the old self may spring back to life immediately after our prayer and resume its hatred and unforgiveness is neither here nor there.

Bonhoeffer makes the same point in his exposition of verses 14 and 15:

As a summing up Jesus emphasizes once more that everything depends on forgiveness of sin of which the disciples may only partake within the fellowship of sinners.

Again, this is as far from legalism as it is possible to get. This condition is not aimed at driving us to attempt its fulfilment by our own interior efforts to attain a "forgiving" state of mind; it is pointing us towards the place in which that forgiveness of the sins of others is made concrete and actual, the place in which we acknowledge that those around us are sinners and yet continue to live in fellowship with them: the church.

Labels: bonhoeffer, discipleship, forgiveness

Rick Ritchie has been arguing (1 | 2) to the effect that Bonhoeffer's Cost of Discipleship is legalistic, that Bonhoeffer sets up a standard of perfect discipleship as a condition of salvation in a manner that amounts to works-righteousness.

This is obviously a pretty serious charge to level at a Lutheran theologian. It's one thing to say that Bonhoeffer over-emphasises law at the expense of gospel - I'm reserving judgment on that one until I've finished the book - but I do think the allegation of legalism is misplaced.

For example, in chapter 14 ("The Hidden Righteousness"), Bonhoeffer considers the apparent tension between Matthew 5, in which we are told to:

"let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven"

and Matthew 6, in which Jesus tells us:

"do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing".

How to resolve this apparent contradiction between the visible and hidden aspects of discipleship? Bonhoeffer's answer is, in my view, critical to understanding the argument of his book:

The first question to ask is: From whom are we to hide the visibility of our discipleship? Certainly not from other men, for we are told to let them see our light. No. We are to hide it from ourselves. Our task is simply to keep on following, looking only to our Leader who goes on before, taking no notice of ourselves or of what we are doing.

We must be unaware of our own righteousness, and see it only in so far as we look unto Jesus; then it will seem not extraordinary, but quite ordinary and natural. Thus we hide the visible from ourselves in obedience to the word of Jesus.

This is, of course, quite the opposite of legalistic self-righteousness, or of an inward-looking search for assurance based on the evidence of good works in one's life. As Bonhoeffer continues:

All that the follower of Jesus has to do is make sure that his obedience, following and love are entirely spontaneous and premeditated. If you do good, you must not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, you must be quite unconscious of it. Otherwise you are simply displaying your own virtue, and not that which has its source in Jesus Christ.

Such a self-forgetful existence can only be the consequence, not the cause, of our fellowship with Christ:

Once again, who can live a life which combines chapters 5 and 6? Only those who have died after the old man through Christ, and are given a new life by following him and having fellowship with him.

In other words, Bonhoeffer's exposition of Jesus' words is intended to be descriptive of what the life of the believer looks like (however imperfectly), not prescriptive of a standard to which we must attain as a precondition of salvation. As such, he is saying nothing more than is found in Article VI of the Augsburg Confession - "this faith is bound to bring forth good fruits" - or in Melanchthon's chapter on "Love and the Fulfilling of the Law" in the Apology.

But what of those of us - namely all of us - who fail to meet the exacting standards laid out in the sermon on the mount, whose faith at times seems so short of "good fruits"? Does Bonhoeffer leave us without hope, crushed by the standards of discipleship imposed as a new law upon the believer?

Quite the contrary, as his exposition of the Lord's prayer in the following chapter demonstrates. But that is for another post.

Labels: bonhoeffer, discipleship

I've just started reading The Cost of Discipleship, after Pete mentioned Bonhoeffer in the comments to my previous post. I've previously tried to read this but failed to finish, partly because it is very strong meat indeed, partly because I was baffled by a lot of the specifically Lutheran background and terminology.

The first chapter, with its attack on "cheap grace" ("grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate") certainly makes a lot more sense now I've been a Lutheran for a couple of years. Take, for example, a paragraph like this:

So long as our Church holds the correct doctrine of justification, there is no doubt whatever that she is a justified Church! So they said, thinking that we must vindicate our Lutheran heritage by making this grace available on the cheapest and easiest terms. To be "Lutheran" must mean that we leave the following of Christ to legalists, Calvinists and enthusiasts - and all this for the sake of grace. We justified the world, and condemned as heretics those who tried to follow Christ.

Ouch.

But what I really wanted to quote from that first chapter was Bonhoeffer's thoughts on Luther's phrase "sin boldly" (pecca fortiter), as mentioned in my last post (and which I have posted on before). This phrase is often misunderstood (by people who have clearly never read another word of Luther!) as demonstrating Luther's belief that Christians are free to sin with impunity, as the ultimate in cheap grace. As Bonhoeffer puts it, summarising these objections:

Is this the proclamation of cheap grace, naked and unashamed, the carte blanche for sin, the end of all discipleship? Is this a blasphemous encouragement to sin boldly and rely on grace? Is there a more diabolical abuse of grace than to sin and rely on the grace which God has given? Is not the Roman Catechism quite right in denouncing this as the sin against the Holy Ghost?

Bonhoeffer's response is that it all depends on whether we regard pecca fortiter as a founding principle for the Christian life, or as the final answer to which we find ourselves forced at the end of our attempts to obey Christ; that is, whether we see it as "the data" or as "the answer to the sum":

Taken as the premiss [for our doctrine of grace], pecca fortiter acquires the character of an ethical principle, a principle of grace to which the principle of pecca fortiter must correspond. That means the justification of sin, and it turns Luther's formula into its very opposite.

For Luther "sin boldly" could only be his very last refuge, the consolation for one whose attempts to follow Christ had taught him that he can never become sinless, who in his fear of sin despairs of the grace of God. As Luther saw it, "sin boldly" did not happen to be a fundamental acknowledgement of his disobedient life; it was the gospel of the grace of God before which we are always and in every circumstance sinners. Yet that grace seeks us and justifies us, sinners though we are.

Take courage and confess your sin, says Luther, do not try to run away from it, but believe more boldly still. You are a sinner, so be a sinner, and don't try to become what you are not. Yes, and become a sinner again and again every day, and be bold about it.

But to whom can such words be addressed, except to those who from the bottom of their hearts make a daily renunciation of sin and of every barrier which hinders them from following Christ, but who nevertheless are troubled by their daily faithlessness and sin? Who can hear these words without endangering his faith but he who hears their consolation as a renewed summons to follow Christ? Interpreted in this way, these words of Luther become a testimony to the costliness of grace, the only genuine kind of grace there is.

The contrast is between "grace interpreted as a principle, pecca fortiter as a principle, grace at a low cost", which amounts simply to "a new law, which brings neither help nor freedom"; and grace as "a living word, pecca fortiter as our comfort in tribulation and as a summons to discipleship".

Labels: bonhoeffer, luther, sinning boldly