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International journal for the Study of the Christian Church

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Redeeming the penultimate: discipleship and Church in the thought of Sren Kierkegaard and Dietrich Bonhoeffer
David R. Law Published online: 16 Mar 2011.

To cite this article: David R. Law (2011) Redeeming the penultimate: discipleship and Church in the thought of Sren Kierkegaard and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, International journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 11:1, 14-26, DOI: 10.1080/1474225X.2011.547317 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1474225X.2011.547317

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International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2011, 1426

Redeeming the penultimate: discipleship and Church in the thought of Sren Kierkegaard and Dietrich Bonhoeer
David R. Law

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There are striking parallels between the theologies of discipleship advanced by the Danish thinker Sren Kierkegaard and the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeer. Bonhoeers notion of costly grace closely resembles Kierkegaards critique of the misuse of the Pauline-Lutheran doctrine of justication by grace through faith alone. After the publication of Cost of Discipleship, however, Bonhoeers view of discipleship moves in a dierent direction from that of Kierkegaard. Whereas Kierkegaard takes discipleship to mean that the Christian must be in irrevocable conict with the world, Bonhoeer sees discipleship as living in the world and cultivating a worldly holiness. This article tracks the reasons why their initially similar theologies of discipleship result in Kierkegaard and Bonhoeer developing dierent understandings of Christian discipleship and church. The discussion is organised around the distinction Bonhoeer makes in his Ethics between the ultimate and the penultimate. Kierkegaard emphasises the ultimate to such an extent that the penultimate is virtually eliminated and the Christian disciple is called upon to live in a state of constant eschatological opposition to the world. For Bonhoeer on the other hand the penultimate is not to be condemned but to be transformed in the light of the ultimate. The article argues that the diering notions of discipleship advanced by Kierkegaard and Bonhoeer arise from the dierent political contexts in which they were living and writing. Whereas Kierkegaards historical situation prompted him to arm the ultimate by confronting his contemporaries with New Testament Christianitys gime radical opposition to the world, Bonhoeers resistance to the Nazi re prompted him to reect on how the ultimate can be integrated into the penultimate and how the Christian disciple can engage with the world without being of the world. Keywords: Kierkegaard; Bonhoeer; penultimate; totalitarianism; secularism discipleship; justication; ultimate;

Not everyone who says to me Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven (Matt. 7.21). To Christians who take their faith seriously these are terrifying words. Am I one of those who merely talk about discipleship, but never actually take up my cross to follow Christ? And if I am serious about discipleship, how do I do something about it? What is the will of Christs Father in heaven and how do we recognise it? How do we separate his will from all the other things that press in on us in our daily lives? These are not easy questions to answer, but in attempting to do so we can turn to two guides who have struggled deeply with these problems, namely Sren Kierkegaard (181355) and Dietrich Bonhoeer (190645).
ISSN 1474-225X print/ISSN 1747-0234 online 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/1474225X.2011.547317 http://www.informaworld.com

International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church Kierkegaard and discipleship

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Kierkegaard lived during a period of great change in Danish society. During his lifetime Denmark made the transition from an agrarian society to an industrialised, democratic, bureaucratic, capitalist state.1 The secularism that these developments brought in their wake led to the gradual replacement of the Christian world-view with an individualistic notion of the self that increasingly pushed God into the background of peoples lives or out of their lives altogether. Far from opposing the encroachments of secularism the state church was in Kierkegaards opinion contributing to the demoralisation of the life of the spirit by sanctifying the secular values of midnineteenth-century Denmark. The church was guilty of suppressing the countercultural character of the Christian Gospel and toning down its radical call to discipleship. One of the strategies employed to support the sanctication of the secular values of contemporary society was misuse of the Pauline-Lutheran doctrine of justication by grace through faith alone. In his writings Kierkegaard frequently criticises the way this doctrine has been exploited as a means of avoiding discipleship. Kierkegaard sees Luthers rediscovery of the Pauline doctrine of justication by grace through faith alone as important for making clear that grace cannot be earned by human beings but is freely given to them by God. In the face of the Roman Catholic theology of meritoriousness and the belief that a relationship to God could be based on human works, Luther performed an important service in reasserting the fundamental Christian truth that it is God who takes the initiative and restores our broken relationship with him. Kierkegaard points out, however, that Luthers critique of Roman Catholic meritoriousness and his recovery of Pauls doctrine of justication by faith did not aim to abolish good works. For Luther, good works continued to be an essential aspect of being a Christian, for they constitute the Christians response to the gift of divine grace. Good works are furthermore the means by which the Christian witnesses to the truth of Christianity. As Kierkegaard puts it in For Self-Examination (1851), Luther wished to take meritoriousness away from works and apply them somewhat dierently namely, in the direction of witnessing for the truth.2 Good works do not create the God-relationship but are the Christians response to the God-relationship which God himself graciously bestows upon human beings through no merit of their own. Danish Lutheranism, however, Kierkegaard complains, has seized hold of Luthers rediscovery of grace as an unearned, freely given gift in order to avoid the earnestness of following Christ.3 Contemporary Christians lay claim to the gift of divine grace, but ignore the demand to perform good works that should be their proper response to this gift. The result, Kierkegaard continues, is that whereas medieval Catholicism sought grace through works, contemporary Lutheranism seeks grace without works.4 The Pauline-Lutheran doctrine of justication by grace through faith alone requires, however, not the abandonment of works, but the doing of good works without expectation of reward. As Kierkegaard puts it, Christianitys
1

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For discussions of these developments see Andersen, Survey of the History of the Church in Denmark; Hovde, The Scandinavian Countries; Koch and Kornerup, Den danske Kirkes Historie, vols. 6 and 7; Elrod, Kierkegaard and Christendom, esp. ch. 1; Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, part 1; Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Crisis of Faith. 2 Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, 17. 3 Ibid., 16. 4 Ibid., 1617.

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requirement is this: your life should express works as strenuously as possible; then one thing more is required that you humble yourself and confess: But my being saved is nevertheless grace.5 For Kierkegaard the works that Christians must do to express their gratitude at the gift of grace they have received are rst and foremost to die to oneself and to bear witness to the Gospel. This means taking up ones cross and, like Christ, suering persecution at the hands of a hostile world. This, Kierkegaard holds, is the New Testament conception of discipleship. Bonhoeer and discipleship Dietrich Bonhoeer lived a century later than Kierkegaard and under very dierent historical circumstances. Whereas Kierkegaard was dealing with the problems thrown up by Denmarks transition to modernity, Bonhoeer was concerned with the problem of how to be a Christian in a totalitarian age. Despite their dierences, however, both thinkers were concerned with the same fundamental problem, namely the question of discipleship. Nobody reading Bonhoeers Cost of Discipleship can fail to be struck by its similarities to many passages in Kierkegaards thought.6 Like Kierkegaard, Bonhoeer criticises contemporary Christians for abusing the doctrine of justication by grace through faith alone, complaining that they take divine grace for granted and ignore the responsibilities that ought to accompany their reception of this gift. Contemporary Christians treat grace as a universal principle, bestowed indiscriminately upon everyone, assent to which is all that is demanded of the believer to receive forgiveness of sins. Since God has justied the world irrespective of our actions, there is no need for Christians to do anything in return. On the contrary, it is an act of presumption to strive to do good works, for it is rebellion against the free and boundless grace of God.7 The consequence of this distorted understanding of justication by grace through faith alone is the elimination of the transforming power of the Gospel. Because we are saved regardless of our actions, we can carry on living in the world on the worlds terms and according to the worlds standards.8 Bonhoeer complains that this misappropriation of divine grace undermines the distinction between Christianity and the world, the result of which is that the antithesis between the Christian life and the life of bourgeois respectability is at an end. The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no dierent from the world, in fact, in being prohibited from being dierent from the world for the sake of grace.9 There is no longer any distinction between the Christian and the secular individual. Indeed, grace is reduced to the sanctication of an utterly secular, spiritless mode of existence. It is this complacent acceptance of Gods grace that Bonhoeer has in his sights in his condemnation of cheap grace. Cheap grace appropriates the benets of grace, but refuses to give anything in return. Bonhoeer complains: Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and
5 6

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Ibid., 17. Bonhoeer, The Cost of Discipleship. 7 Ibid., 34. 8 Ibid., 34. 9 Ibid., 10.

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incarnate.10 Costly grace, on the other hand, is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.11 Such grace, Bonhoeer writes, is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.12 Such grace is costly also because God himself paid the price of delivering up his only Son to secure our redemption: What has cost God much cannot be cheap for us.13 Kierkegaards reception in the early twentieth century The major question we must ask is: what follows? How does this call to discipleship made so forcefully by Kierkegaard and Bonhoeer play itself out in concrete terms in everyday life? This is a particularly important question in view of how Kierkegaards thought was appropriated in the rst half of the twentieth century.14 The appropriation of Kierkegaard by such allegedly irrationalist existential philosophers as Heidegger and the use of Kierkegaard to support Nazi ideology by such gures as the philosopher Alfred Baeumler and the theologian Emanuel cs,16 and Theodor Hirsch led scholars such as Arnold Ku nzli,15 Georg Luka 17 Adorno, to regard Kierkegaard as a forerunner of fascism. Kierkegaards bourgeois irrationalism and decisionism, they claimed, laid the foundations of National Socialism. This view would seem to be supported by the use made of Kierkegaard by Hirsch, who interprets Kierkegaards critique of bourgeois Christianity and his emphasis on the absoluteness of the God-relationship as a characteristic of Germanic Christianity, the manly courage to act.18 Kierkegaards notion of Christianity as deant faith (der trotzige Glauben) is for Hirsch archetypally Germanic, while Kierkegaard himself embodies the Germanic virtues of action, heroism, and activism. Where this appropriation of Kierkegaardian notions of action and decision could lead is evident in Hirschs notion of Fuhrung, leadership, which he denes as not a fact, but a daring act which gives birth to itself in struggle and decision.19 For other thinkers in the 1920s and 1930s Kierkegaard seems to have been literally a transitional gure in the sense that he enabled them to make the transition from one belief system to another. A good example is provided by Karl Thieme. Originally a Protestant, he wrote in 1929 that he had passed through despair with Kierkegaard, to Karl Marx and had now committed himself to the struggle on

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10 11

Ibid., 4. Ibid. 12 Ibid., 5; original emphasis. 13 Ibid. 14 For discussions of Kierkegaards reception in the early twentieth century see Schjrring, Theologische Gewissensethik und politische Wirklichkeit; Greve, Kierkegaard im Dritten Reich. For a discussion of Hirschs treatment of Kierkegaard in his Kierkegaard-Studien, see my Christian Discipleship in Kierkegaard, Hirsch, and Bonhoeer. 15 Ku nzli, Die Angst als abendlandische Krankheit. 16 cs, The Destruction of Reason. Luka 17 Adorno, Kierkegaard noch einmal. 18 Hirsch, So ren Kierkegaard, 120. 19 Ibid., 16.

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behalf of the international proletariat.20 A few years later, however, he altered his position again and wrote that eternal salvation is to be found only in the truth of Catholicism and not . . . with Sren Kierkegaard.21 The phenomenon of Kierkegaards thought being taken up to bolster a variety of ideologies ranging from National Socialism and Marxism to Roman Catholicism prompted Adorno to observe that Kierkegaards dialectic of inwardness and notion of renunciation of the self leaves it to chance into whose hands his thought is entrusted.22 Although Kierkegaard can indeed give us the resources to oppose the established order, it does not of itself prevent us from then going on to subjugate ourselves to new forms of domination. Hirsch provides a good example of this. He applied the cultural-critical elements of Kierkegaards thought to the Weimar gime, which he saw as the fullment of the heroic Republic, but not to the Nazi re decisiveness and activism he held Kierkegaard to be advocating. Although Adorno is in my opinion misreading Kierkegaard,23 the radically dierent ways in which Kierkegaards thought was taken up by twentieth-century thinkers arguably indicate one of the problematic elements of Kierkegaards thought: Kierkegaard is able to give us the resources to liberate ourselves from inadequate world-views, but gives us insucient guidance on how to be Christians in the concrete situations in which we nd ourselves in this troubled world of ours. Kierkegaards radical eschatological view of Christianity arguably creates a vacuum that can suck in pernicious doctrines. Bonhoeer was brought to a greater consciousness of this problem through the experience of attempting to be a Christian under a totalitarian regime. Under such a regime it is not an option merely to condemn the world for that leaves the world in the hands of the worldly powers. Christians must give thought to how they can transform the world. Bonhoeer expresses this task in terms of his distinction between the ultimate and the penultimate. Bonhoeer on the ultimate and the penultimate In his study of Bonhoeers thought William Kuhns describes Bonhoeers notion of the ultimate and the penultimate as one of his most original and fertile concepts.24 Bonhoeer develops his distinction between the ultimate and the penultimate in order to reect on how the nality and ultimacy of Gods word can be integrated
20 21

Thieme, Durch So ren Kierkegaard zu Karl Marx. Thieme, So ren Kierkegaard und die katholische Wahrheit, 33. 22 Adorno, Kierkegaard noch einmal, 563. 23 That it is a mistake to read Kierkegaard as a forerunner of fascism is evident from Kierkegaards distaste for the nationalist feelings that seized Denmark in 1848 (JP, 5:6125; Pap. IX B 64, 3778) and his rejection of the Christian nationalism advanced by Grundtvig (JP, 4:4121; 4171; 5044). See Kierkegaard, Sren Kierkegaards Journals and Papers, and Sren Kierkegaards Papier. For Kierkegaard, Christianity rules out any glorication of the idea of the nation. He states that, It is obvious that one of the factors in Christs death was that he repudiated nationalism, wanted to have nothing to do with it, and points out that the collapse of Gods chosen people became an everlasting memento that Christianity is not related to nationality (JP, 4:4171). Further evidence for the non-fascist character of Kierkegaards thought is also provided by the surprise of contemporary reviewers at Hirschs reading of Kierkegaard as a supporter of National Socialism. See Greve, Kierkegaard im Dritten Reich, 35. 24 Kuhns, In Pursuit of Dietrich Bonhoeer, 125.

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into the penultimate or pre-eschatological reality in which human beings have their lives. In introducing this distinction Bonhoeer, Kuhns claims, sees an entire dimension which the Reformation and for the most part, Protestant tradition, missed and which needs fresh emphasis.25 It is my contention that Bonhoeers distinction between the ultimate and the penultimate oers a way of conserving the insights of Kierkegaards conception of discipleship while simultaneously showing how Christian discipleship entails not withdrawal but engagement with the world. In the opening sentence of the fourth chapter of Part One of his Ethics,26 which Bonhoeer has entitled The Last Things and the Things before the Last, Bonhoeer states: The origin and essence of all Christian life are comprised in the one process or event which the Reformation called justication of the sinner by grace alone.27 The response to this gracious gift of justication is faith, which Bonhoeer describes as founding my life upon a foundation which is outside myself, upon an eternal and holy foundation, upon Christ.28 Gods pronouncement of the justication of the sinner is something nal, for Gods compassion on a sinner must and can be heard only as Gods nal word. Bonhoeer identies two respects in which Gods Word is nal or ultimate. First, it is nal in a qualitative sense, by the nature of its contents. This is because there is no Word of God that goes beyond His mercy and nothing that goes beyond a life which is justied by God.29 The nality of Gods Word is indicated by the fact that it implies the breaking o of everything that precedes it, of everything that is before the last.30 This means that Gods Word can never be the culmination of a human process of development. It is not something that can be achieved by human endeavours and methods. As Bonhoeer puts it, Gods word of justication is never the natural or necessary end of the way which has been pursued so far, but it is rather the total condemnation and invalidation of this way.31 The word of justication is Gods own free word, which is subject to no compulsion; for this reason it is the irreversible nal word, an ultimate reality.32 Gods free, nal, and ultimate word is simultaneously the judgement on the ways and the things before the last.33 Gods ultimate word is the nal, unsurpassable, eschatological word that both judges and justies the sinner. It judges everything in which the sinner had had his life until the sinners reception of Gods Word and yet it simultaneously justies the sinner, so that his life in the penultimate is no longer an impediment to his life in the ultimate. The second respect in which the justifying word of God is a nal word is in the sense of time.34 Here the penultimate, i.e. what we might call the preeschatological reality in which human beings live their lives, plays a role in laying the ground for the coming of Gods nal word. The penultimate prepares for the coming of Gods word not, however, in the sense of being a method of forcing Gods hand. This can never be the case for Gods word is always a freely given gift that is
25 26

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Ibid. Bonhoeer, Ethics. 27 Ibid., 98. 28 Ibid., 99. 29 Ibid., 100. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 1001. 32 Ibid., 101. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 102.

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utterly independent of human eorts. Yet at the same time the penultimate in which human beings have their lives prepares the ground for human beings reception of the divine word, because it is through their existence in the penultimate that human beings become guilty. Bonhoeer states that the justifying word of God is always preceded by something penultimate, some action, suering, movement, volition, defeat, uprising, entreaty or hope, that is to say, in a quite genuine sense by a span of time, at the end of which it stands.35 The penultimate prepares the ground for human beings reception of Gods Word by creating an awareness of human beings need for Gods Word. To put it another way, the pre-eschatological prepares the way for the eschatological. A key question is whether human beings can live by the ultimate alone. The issue is, as Bonhoeer puts it, whether faith can, so to speak, be extended in time, or whether faith does not rather always become real in life as the ultimate phase of a span of time or of many spans of time.36 That is, we are asking whether this faith ought to be realisable every day, at every hour, or whether here, too, the length of the penultimate must every time be traversed anew for the sake of the ultimate.37 To put it another way, the question is the relation between the punctiliar and the linear, the vertical and the horizontal. If Gods word is something which descends vertically from above, to borrow Barths phrase, then what is its relation to the horizontal plane in which human beings have their lives? How can the ultimate be integrated into the penultimate without the ultimate losing its character as the ultimate and without the penultimate absorbing and emasculating the ultimate? Kierkegaards answer to this question, at least in the attack literature of 185455,38 would seem to be that the only relation possible is the ultimates condemnation of the penultimate. Bonhoeer asks, however, whether, one [does] not in some cases, by remaining deliberately in the penultimate, perhaps point all the more genuinely to the ultimate, which God will speak in his own time.39 There are two extreme relations between the ultimate and penultimate which Bonhoeer wishes to rule out, namely the radical solution and the compromise. The radical solution sees the ultimate and the penultimate as mutually exclusive opposites. Bonhoeer writes: The radical solution sees only the ultimate, and in it only the complete breaking o of the penultimate. Ultimate and penultimate are here mutually exclusive contraries. Christ is the destroyer and enemy of everything penultimate, and everything penultimate is enmity towards Christ. Christ is the sign that the world is ripe for burning. There are no distinctions.40 For Bonhoeer, the result of this radical solution is that the Christian bears no responsibility for the world, which is condemned to destruction. Consequently, The last word of God, which is a word of mercy, here becomes the icy hardness of the law, which despises and breaks down all resistance.41
35 36

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Ibid. Ibid., 103. 37 Ibid. 38 See Kierkegaard, The Moment and Late Writings. 39 Bonhoeer, Ethics, 104. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 1045. Kierkegaards attack on the Church in the name of New Testament Christianity would seem to fall under Bonhoeers condemnation of the radical solution. From the Bonhoeerian perspective Kierkegaards critique could be read as a failure to appreciate the reality of the incarnation.

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The second extreme relation between the ultimate and the penultimate is described by Bonhoeer as compromise. Compromise sets the penultimate apart from the ultimate and treats it in isolation as if it possessed rights on its own account. The result is that the penultimate is not threatened or imperilled by the ultimate. The world still stands; the end is not yet here; there are still penultimate things which must be done, in fullment of the responsibility for this world which God has created.42 The isolation of the penultimate from the ultimate means, however, that The ultimate remains totally on the far side of the everyday; it is thus, in fact, an eternal justication for things as they are.43 According to Bonhoeer, the result of the compromise solution to the relation between the ultimate and the penultimate is the justication of the status quo. For Bonhoeer, both the radical solution and the compromise are equally extreme, and both alike contain elements both of truth and of untruth.44 The reason for the extreme character of these two solutions is that they place the penultimate and the ultimate in a relation of mutual exclusiveness.45 In the one case the penultimate is destroyed by the ultimate; and in the other case the ultimate is excluded from the domain of the penultimate. In both cases, thoughts which are in themselves equally right and necessary are absolutised, the result of which is the distortion of the truths they contain. The truth in the radical solution is that it has as its point of departure the end of all things, God the Judge and Redeemer.46 The truth in the compromise solution bases itself upon the Creator and preserver.47 The task is to bring both of these truths together into a coherent whole, so that the penultimate has its life in the ultimate and the ultimate does not destroy but consecrates the penultimate. To separate these two truths, Bonhoeer warns, is to sunder the unity of God.48 It is Bonhoeers radical Christocentrism that allows him to avoid the two extremes. He writes: In Jesus Christ there is neither radicalism nor compromise, but there is the reality of God and men. There is no Christianity in itself, for this would destroy the world; there is no man in himself, for he would exclude God.49 Both radicalism and compromise are opposed to Christ.50 The question of Christian life is decided by neither of these solutions, but only by reference to Christ himself: In Him alone lies the solution for the problem of the relation between the ultimate and the penultimate.51 For Bonhoeer, Christs opposition to the two extremes of radicalism and compromise is evident from the three elements of Christs ministry, namely, incarnation, crucixion, and resurrection. Extreme conceptions of the relation between the ultimate and the penultimate arise when one of these elements is emphasised at the expense of the others. All three elements must be held together, however, if we are truly to know Christ. If they are broken up, if one is given precedence over the others, then we utterly fail to know Christ as he truly is:
42 43

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Bonhoeer, Ethics, 105. Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 106. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 108. 51 Ibid.

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In Jesus Christ we have faith in the incarnate, crucied and risen God. In the incarnation we learn of the love of God for His creation; in the crucixion we learn of the judgement of God upon all esh; and in the resurrection we learn of Gods will for a new world. There could be no greater error than to tear these three elements apart; for each of them comprises the whole. It is quite wrong to establish a separate theology of the incarnation, a theology of the cross, or a theology of the resurrection, each in opposition to the others, by a misconceived absolutization of one of these parts; it is equally wrong to apply the same procedure to a consideration of the Christian life. A Christian ethic constructed solely on the basis of the incarnation would lead directly to the compromise solution. An ethic which was based solely on the cross or the resurrection of Jesus would fall victim to radicalism and enthusiasm. Only in the unity is the conict resolved.52

A genuine Christian life thus means holding the incarnation, crucixion, and resurrection together.53 The practical consequence of this is that Christian life means neither a destruction nor a sanctioning of the penultimate.54 As Bonhoeer puts it, The penultimate remains, even though the ultimate entirely annuls and invalidates it.55 The penultimate has its rights but only so long as it recognises that it is the penultimate and does not seek to usurp the role of the ultimate. This emphasis on the subordination of the penultimate to the ultimate means that in contrast to Kierkegaard Bonhoeer wants to nd a role for the naturally human, but wishes to do so in a way that robs it of its hegemony. For Bonhoeer, it is not sucient simply to condemn the natural as the realm of sin for human beings continue to have their lives in the natural. Protestantisms failure to deal with the natural indicates, Bonhoeer claims, that Protestant thought was no longer conscious of the true relation of the ultimate to the penultimate,56 and failed to see that in the incarnation Christ conrms the value of the natural as the penultimate.57 This failure meant that The sole antithesis to the natural was the word of God; the natural was no longer contrasted with the unnatural. For in the presence of the word of God both the natural and the unnatural were equally damned. And this meant complete disruption in the domain of natural life.58 The result was that there were no longer any relative distinctions to be made within the fallen creation. Consequently, the way was open for every kind of arbitrariness and disorder, and natural life, with its concrete decisions and orders, was no longer subject to responsibility to God. If natural life is regarded as under condemnation, then there is no compulsion for the Christian to become involved in the world. On the contrary, the task becomes that of withdrawing oneself as far as possible from the world, a policy which Kierkegaard seems to advocate in his 185455 attack on the Church and in his condemnation of marriage and the procreation of children.59 Bonhoeer points to the far-reaching and dangerous consequences of this withdrawal from the world:
If there were no longer any relative distinctions to be made within the fallen creation, then the way was open for every kind of arbitrariness and disorder, and natural life,
52 53

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Ibid. Ibid., 110. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 102. 56 Ibid., 120. 57 Ibid., 121. 58 Ibid., 120. 59 Kierkegaard, The Moment, 2458, 2502.

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with its concrete decisions and orders, was no longer subject to responsibility to God.60

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The task, then, is not to separate the ultimate and the penultimate, but to recover an understanding of the penultimate on the basis of the ultimate.61 This means two things. First, it means recognising that the natural is the form of life preserved by God for the fallen world and directed towards justication, redemption, and renewal through Christ.62 The naturally human in which human beings penultimately have their lives is not to be condemned but to be transformed. The role of Christian discipleship in this is to prepare the way for the coming of grace by removing whatever obstacles obstruct grace. This manifests itself in such concrete acts as feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, giving justice to the dispossessed, fellowship to the lonely, order to the undisciplined, and freedom to the enslaved. To provide the hungry man with bread, Bonhoeer states, is to prepare the way for the coming of grace.63 Second, recovering an understanding of the penultimate on the basis of the ultimate means recognising that living in relation to the ultimate within the penultimate manifests itself in rights and duties. Bonhoeer writes:
For the sake of Christ and His coming, natural life must be lived within the framework of certain denite rights and certain denite duties. To repudiate or annul or destroy these rights and duties is to place a serious obstacle in the way of the coming of Christ and to strike at the roots of the gratitude which reverently preserves the life that has been received and which at the same time commits this life to the service of the Creator.64

This requires the Christian to get involved in the world; not, however, on the basis of the values of the world, but in the name of the crucied and Risen Christ, who in his incarnation arms the value of this world but in his crucixion and resurrection reveals that the value of the world lies not in the world itself, but in its relation to God. Conclusion: redeeming the penultimate The understandings of discipleship advanced by Kierkegaard, especially in his later writings, and that advanced by Bonhoeer in Cost of Discipleship are strikingly similar. Both men emphasise the costliness of grace and the challenge this presents to would-be followers to take up their cross and follow Christ. After Cost of Discipleship, however, Bonhoeers view of discipleship moves in a dierent direction from that of Kierkegaard. Bonhoeer seems to be liberating himself from Kierkegaard and striking out in new directions. Whereas Kierkegaard at least in his later writings takes discipleship to mean that the Christian must be in irrevocable conict with the world, Bonhoeer sees discipleship as living in the world and cultivating a holy worldliness.
60 61

Bonhoeer, Ethics, 120. Ibid., 1201. 62 Ibid., 122. 63 Ibid., 114. 64 Ibid., 1267.

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The problem facing the two men can be describing as the problem of redeeming the penultimate. Kierkegaard emphasises the ultimate at the expense of the penultimate. Indeed, he does so to such an extent that the penultimate is virtually eliminated and the Christian disciple is called upon to live in a state of constant eschatological tension which manifests itself as opposition to the world and withdrawal from the Church. Bonhoeer on the other hand is searching for ways of integrating the ultimate into the penultimate. The diering notions of discipleship advanced by Kierkegaard and Bonhoeer arise from the political contexts in which they were living and writing. Kierkegaard was writing at the beginning of Denmarks industrialisation, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the appropriation of Christianity to sanctify early Danish capitalism. In Bonhoeers terms, the penultimate has assimilated and domesticated the ultimate. For this reason Kierkegaard resolved to arm the ultimate in the most vigorous and uncompromising way by confronting his contemporaries with New Testament Christianitys opposition to the world. The Church, however, had failed to arm New Testament Christianity and had become merely an instrument for sustaining an increasingly secular worldview. This analysis led Kierkegaard to develop an understanding of Christian discipleship without the Church. Because the Church had accommodated itself to the world, it could not function as a witness to Christ. This prompted Kierkegaard in the last year of his life to reject the Church altogether.65 Bonhoeer was writing in an age of totalitarian dictatorship, a situation which called for costly engagement on the part of the Christian disciple. This led to reections on how the eschatological can be integrated into the naturally human and prompted Bonhoeer to search for ways in which the Christian disciple can engage with the world without being in the world. It was such considerations that prompted Bonhoeer to get involved in the contemporary debate concerning Schopfungsordnungen, orders of creation, or mandates, as Bonhoeer preferred to call them, because the word mandate refers more clearly to a divinely imposed task rather than to a determination of being.66 Institutions such as labour, marriage, government, and the church were considered to be mediators of the divine word or channels of divine grace.67 Nazi theologians such as Hirsch, however, extended the notion of orders beyond their traditional application and spoke of the German people under Hitler being united as comrades in work, companions in battle, united in the blood bond of our nation in which we are bound to the communal destiny of our state.68 For Hirsch, the nation is willed by God; it is a divine institution which demands the surrender of the individuals heart and soul, and his unconditional commitment to serve the German people. Looking at Hirschs theology of orders from a Bonhoeerian perspective, we can see that Hirsch was guilty of confusing the ultimate and the penultimate, the result of which was the pernicious conation of the Gospel with Nazi ideology and the identication of the state with the Kingdom of God. For Bonhoeer the way to resist such political appropriation of the Gospel is
65

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For a discussion of Kierkegaards attack on the Church, see my Kierkegaards AntiEcclesiology; also The Contested Notion of Christianity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Denmark: Mynster, Martensen, and Kierkegaards Antiecclesiastical Christian Invective in The Moment and Late Writings. 66 Bonhoeer, Ethics, 179, cf. 254. 67 Ibid., 179, 295. Bonhoeer also holds that culture can be considered as a mandate (ibid., 255). 68 Hirsch, Das kirchliche Wollen der deutschen Christen, 17.

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not to withdraw from the world but by means of a costly discipleship to work in the world to subordinate the penultimate to the ultimate and to place it at the service of Christ. This creates a role for the Church, and in the latter part of his Ethics Bonhoeer sketches an understanding of the Churchs relation to the state in terms of the Churchs commission to summon the world to submit to the dominion of Jesus Christ. Bonhoeer thus gives his notion of discipleship a communal basis lacking in Kierkegaards thought. He provides two theological justications for this. First, in Christology he grounds his notion of the humiliated, suering Christ in a notion of Christ as pro me and pro nobis,69 while in the Prison Letters he develops a notion of Christ as the man for others.70 These two notions mean that the Christian disciple must also be there for others. Christology leads to community, which opens up a space for Church, for, The church is the church only when it exists for others.71 Second, Bonhoeer extends the notion of oence to the Church and its sacraments.72 As the community of the exalted and humiliated Christ the community is itself paradoxical and the cause of oence. Bonhoeer thus seems to have found a way of taking up Kierkegaards insights in a way which integrates them with a role for the Church. The Church is the paradoxical, oensive witness to the suering, humiliated Christ. What is intriguing about Bonhoeer is that he shows what might be built on the ground cleared by Kierkegaards critique. Bonhoeer provides us with a way of seeing how Kierkegaards critique of culture Protestantism could be taken forward in a concrete programme of Christian praxis. Neither Kierkegaard nor Bonhoeer lived long enough to work out in detail the consequences of their notions of discipleship and Church, but left us with thoughtprovoking hints of new ways of being Church. How might these hints be applied to the current context? Perhaps following Christ today means recognising that being human is not exhausted by the consumerist construction of the human. Christian discipleship is both an act of resistance to the commodication of human beings and a witness to an alternative vision of what it is to be human. This entails recovering the eschatological notion of discipleship underlying the thought of Kierkegaard and Bonhoeer. If the Church is truly to be Church it must be a disciple Church, a Church that does not capitulate to and sanctify the secular ideologies of the present age, but which is countercultural, standing in judgement of the secular world. The disciple Church is a beacon which points to and lights up new possibilities for human ourishing that have their source not in secularity but in a transcendent beyond that has come and dwelt among us and has given us a new paradigm of being human, a paradigm of seless, self-giving service of others. It is only when Christians live their lives in the face of the ultimate that the penultimate can be redeemed. Notes on contributor
David R. Law is Reader in Christian Thought at the University of Manchester and a priest in the Diocese of Chester. He is author of Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian (1993), Inspiration

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69 70

Bonhoeer, Christology, 4365, 110. Bonhoeer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 1389. 71 Ibid., 140. 72 Bonhoeer, Christology, 54, 57, 59.

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(2001), Briey: Sartres Existentialism and Humanism (2007), and numerous articles in academic journals.

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