Bonhoeffer and religionless Christianity:

Born on 1906 in Breslau, Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the son of a prominent
psychiatrist. After studying at Tubingen and Berlin, he secured a licentiate degree with
his thesis “The Communion of Saints.” In 1930, he began to teach at the University of
Berlin. He left Berlin to spend a year at Union Theological Seminary in New York as a
Sloan Fellow. He was then appointed Youth Secretary of the World Alliance for
Promoting International Friendship through the Churches.
With Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, Bonhoeffer became a leader in the Confessional
Church. In 1935 he was asked to direct its seminary which stated in Zingst and soon
moved to Finkenwalde. Though urged to remain in the United States where he had
influential friends, Bonhoeffer elected to cast his lot with his own people and especially
with the resistance movement. Following and abortive attempt to assassinate Hitler
Bonhoeffer was arrested on April 5, 1943, and sent to military prison in Berlin. He was
later removed to Flossenburg, where he was hanged on April 9, 1945, a week before
Hitler committed suicide.
The Center of his faith:
Bonhoeffer agrees with Barth that God discloses Himself only in and through Jesus
Christ. In his answer to the question “Who is God?” Bonhoeffer says: “Not in the first
place and abstract belief in God, in his omnipotence, etc., that is not a genuine experience
of God, but a partial extension of the world. Encounter with Jesus Christ. The experience
that a transformation of all human life is given in the fact that “Jesus is there only for
others.” His “being there for others” is the experience of transcendence. Faith is
participation in this being of Jesus. Our relation to God is a new life in ‘existence for
others,’ through participation in the being of Jesus.”
Bonhoeffer affirms the Christocentricity of his faith. He says, “ the key to everything is
the “in him.” All that we may rightly expect from God, and ask him for, is to be found in
Jesus Christ… In Jesus God has said Yes and Amen to it all, and that Yes and Amen is
the firm ground on which we stand.” Christology is the very heart of his method of
theology, including the final ‘non-religious interpretation of biblical concepts: “God is
God become human, the man Jesus Christ, and that is all we can concern ourselves with
as human being. The only majesty, sovereignty, glory and freedom of God which we
know are what he has revealed in Jesus Christ. God is God-turned-toward-human in the
incarnation. He is ‘have-able’, ‘graspable’ in the concrete, historical affairs of human
beings.
The World Come of Age:
One is that the world in the 20th cent., has come of age. Philosophically and
technologically it is now mature or adult world, a world which human can run
autonomously without the need of either divine truth or divine grace. It is the stage of
human development described by the renowned scientist F. von Weizacker in his book
The World View of Physics, which are Bonheoffer mentions explicitly as one text he had
been reading in prison. Bonheoffer reflects in his letter of June 1944. He says, “Human
being has learnt to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to
the ‘working hypothesis’ called “God.” It is becoming evident that everything gets along
without “God” and in fact, just as well as before. As in the scientific field, so in human
affairs generally, “God” is being pushed more and more out of life, losing more and more
ground.”
The world come of age, Bonheoffer realizes, a world that is godless, proves to be
nihilistic. It is a world without idols, a world that worships nothing, a world completely
devoid of religious illusions, a world that refuses to bow down before human in an act of
self-deification. Yet this world come of age is, as Bonheoffer sees it, not a world of
despair, chaos and violence, a world which provides opportunities for evangelism in
keeping with the pious dictum. Here Christianity has no option but to adjust its witness
gratefully to this emerging phenomenon of Western history. To oppose it in the name of
faith is to do faith a grave disservice. Not only in opposition to the world’s maturity an
apologetic blunder, it is likewise proof of spiritual blindness, a failure to perceive God’s
will and purpose in the course of human affairs:
We cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world. And this is
just what we do recognize – before God! God himself compels us to recognize it, so our
coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have
us know that we must live as human being who manage our lives without him. The God
who is with us is the God who forsake us (Mk. 15:34). The God who lets us live in the
world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand
continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed
out of the world on to the cross.
Religionless Christianity:
Another of Bonheoffer’s troubling concepts is that of religionless Christianity. The
following passage brings out this arresting paradox:
 What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or
indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told
everything by means of words, whether theologically or pious, is over, and so is the
time of inwardness and conscience and that means the time of religion in general.
We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now
simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves
as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean
something quite different by ‘religious.’ Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old
Christian preaching and theology rest on the ‘religious a priori’ of humankind.
‘Christianity’ has always been a form – perhaps the true form of ‘religion.’ But if
one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically
conditioned and transient (temporary) form of human self-expression, and if
therefore human becomes radically religionless – and I think that is already more or
less the case (else how is it, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous
ones, is not calling forth, any ‘religious’ reaction?) – what does that mean for
‘Christianity?’
Exactly what does Bonheoffer have in mind when he refers to religionless Christianity?
One clue is his insistence that he himself is not religious. In June 1942 letter he expresses
a growing disdain for ‘all religiosity’:
Again and again I am driven to think about my activities which are now concerned
so much with the secular field… I feel the resistance growing in me against all
religiosity, sometimes reaching the level of an instinctive horror – surely this is not
good either. Yet I am not a religious nature at all. But all the time I am forced to
think of God, of Christ, of genuineness, life, freedom, charity – that matters for me.
What causes me uneasiness is just the religious clothing. Do you understand me?
This is no new concept at all, no new insights, but because I believe an idea will
come to burst upon me I let things run and do not offer resistance. In this sense I
understand my present activity in the secular sector.
Despite this vigorously expresses disdain of religion per se, Bonheoffer confesses that
‘all the time’ he is thinking of ‘God, of Christ, of genuineness, life, freedom, charity,’
matters which he evidently identifies as non-religious!
Bonheoffer concurs with the NT and Karl Barth in viewing religion as the supreme
manifestation of human disobedience and idolatry. He argues,
(i) For religion is a matter of speculative metaphysics, an attempt as in German idealism,
to deduce a kind of Supreme Being from finite reason, arguing that a person with his/her
capacity for God is really one with God in the depths of his/her psyche. Human being is
thus elevated to deity, while God is identified with humanity. Religion, so construed is a
metaphysical affair, which devotes itself to an explanation of reality, a matter of
hairsplitting, and logic chopping over the nature of whatever is.
(ii) Religion is individualistic or privatistic, it concerns itself almost exclusively with
inwardness, the subjective, the emotional, and the moralistic.
(iii) Religion, limited, as a rule to the spiritual, the otherworldly, the post temporal
dimensions of human experience, is segmental. It does not embrace the whole human and
all of life. It does not demand a total response from its devotees.
(iv) Religion tends to be magical, viewing God as a deus ex machina who intervenes in
moments of crisis, answering prayer, solving problems, providing miraculous escape-
hatches for an elect in-group. It thus likewise tends to minimize human’s responsibility
and discourage his self-activity, inculcating a childish dependency hard to distinguish
from slavish servility.
(v) Religion with its in-group of the elect invariably fosters an attitude of pharisaic
superiority, it assumes an aristocracy of true believers separate from the lost world except
for occasional evangelistic forays into that God-forsaken territory.
It is this interpretation, then which motivates Bonheoffer to affirm that as a matter of
unelectable destiny, “we are moving towards a completely religionless time, people as
they are now simply cannot be religious any more.”
There are times when Bonheoffer acknowledges and praises true religion. Perhaps what
he desires therefore is a reinterpretation of Christianity, which will bring it into alignment
with God and his Word. He says,
Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Human’s
religiosity makes him look in his/her distress to the power of God in the world: God is
the deus ex machina. The Bible directs human being to God’s powerlessness and
suffering; only the suffering God can help. To that extent we may say that the
development towards the world’s coming of age outlined above, which has done away
with a false conception of God, opens up a way of seeing the God the Bible, who wins
power and space in the world by his weakness. This will probably be the starting
point for our ‘secular interpretation.’
Does Bonheoffer demand, consequently the religion, which the Bible demands,
traditional religiosity transformed into true religion by a total human response to God’s
revelation in Jesus Christ? Yet Bonheoffer ponders the possibility of a religionless
Christianity, he has misgivings: “In what ways are we ‘religionless-secular” Christians,
in what way are we the ekklesia, those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from
a religious point of view as specially favoured, but rather as belonging to wholly to the
world? In that case, Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite
different, really the Lord of the World.”
Bonheoffer ponders the question of how to speak of God without religion, how to speak
of him in a secular fashions. As Christians we are not to think in two spheres as if the
sacred and the secular stood side by side. The religious and the secular, the supernatural
and the natural, have their unity in Jesus Christ as the God-human. The redeeming God
has reaffirmed his creation in the incarnation. We cannot have the Christian without the
natural. It was his conviction that the world ‘had come of age’ that the time for ‘religion’
as a separate compartment of human’s existence was over. We can no longer use God as
a stopgap for our incomplete knowledge, rather we must make room for God in the
world. Worldly people at times may take God more seriously than religious people who
are bent upon their inward life and detached from the world.
Bonheoffer is also concerned with the fact that Jesus Christ is lord of the church.
Discipleship means commitment and involvement. It is a personal response to Jesus who
calls and who demands obedience. Discipleship is not a law, not a set of principles, not a
program, not an ideal. The deadly enemy of the church is ‘cheap grace,’ grace understood
as a doctrine, a principle, a system. The grace given to Luther was a ‘costly grace’, which
shattered his whole existence. His followers took up his doctrine and repeated it word for
word, but they left out the obligation of discipleship. Justification for the sinner
degenerated into the justification of sin and the world. Costly grace was turned into cheap
grace.
Otto W. Heick, A History of Christian Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966).
Stanley N Gundry, etc. Tensions in Contemporary Theology (Michigan: Grand Rapids,
1976).