Bonhoeffer's Serious Vision of Christ
A family from our church recently left because we were talking too much about “social justice.”
Now, we’re a gospel-centered, theologically conservative Baptist congregation—not exactly a candidate for progressivism. But we had been talking about racism. I’ve written a few blog posts; I’ve been somewhat active on social media, and I’ve been leading a study through the book Divided By Faith. Nothing terribly jarring.
And yet there’s something about justice talk that makes church folk uneasy. Why?
The problem is due, in part, to the fact that evangelicals—white evangelicals in particular—struggle to reconcile the gospel with social engagement. Those who tend toward activism instinctively feel they must do something, but they often do so without a clear and robust theology of social action. Others fail to see a clear biblical rationale to engage beyond the individual and end up viewing social action as a distraction from the necessary work of gospel proclamation.
Neither approach is sufficient. We need a better way. And Dietrich Bonhoeffer can help us out.
THE ULTIMATE AND PENULTIMATE
While Bonhoeffer’s writings in The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together have challenged me in many ways, a section in his book Ethics recently helped in reframing my thinking about social engagement.
In his chapter on the “Ultimate and Penultimate Things,” Bonhoeffer begins by anchoring the Christian life to the “ultimate” reality of the new creation into which we have been called through Christ. We live, however, in a world of “penultimate” things—the earthy existence of our eating, paying bills, playing, and going to work.
The struggle to grasp how we as Christians should relate gospel and society is really a struggle to reconcile these two realities. Bonhoeffer helpfully points out how we can fall off the horse in two ways.
On the one hand, we can take the radical approach of believing the Christian has made a complete break with this world, not merely in terms of loyalty but also in terms of concern. This view sees the world as consigned to the fires of judgment. Those following the radical approach ask, “If it’s going to burn, what’s the point of trying to make it better?”
On the other hand, we can take the compromise approach by seeing creation as having “inherent rights, [yet not] threatened or endangered by the ultimate.”[1] In other words, the world is understood as intrinsically valuable, worth living in and making beautiful now.
Bonhoeffer calls both positions unserious. Why?
Because neither take Jesus seriously. They are theological abstractions that detract from true discipleship with Jesus.
TAKING JESUS SERIOUSLY
The better way, Bonhoeffer argues, is to take Jesus seriously, because it is only through a serious vision of Jesus that we can truly understand the world and our life here (the penultimate).
When we take Jesus seriously, we see in his incarnation God’s profound love for the world. When we take Jesus seriously, we behold in his crucifixion God’s judgment on sinful humanity. When we take Jesus seriously, we find in his resurrection God’s redemptive purpose for creation. To break apart this unity is to break apart Christ. Jesus brings God’s justice, love, and restorative grace together in a single glorious Person.
But it’s more than merely grasping the true nature of this world. We must, Bonhoeffer counsels, work to preserve the penultimate.
Now, this is odd. By definition, isn’t the penultimate subsumed by the ultimate and rendered irrelevant? Not in this case. We believe and receive Christ in this world, which means that if the conditions for belief are destroyed, belief is made difficult or impossible.
The ultimate, therefore, allows us to see what the penultimate is and what it is for. It is the world loved by God through Christ, and it is the place wherein those loved by God encounter him in his grace.
THE INSUFFICIENCY OF EXTREMES
I find Bonhoeffer’s argument compelling and useful in conceptualizing an approach to social engagement. His explanation of these two extremes corresponds nicely with two insufficient approaches often seen in contemporary evangelicalism.
On the one hand, his radical approach is on display in the “just-preach-the-gospel” crowd—Christians who hold that individual transformation through conversion and discipleship is the primary task.[2] For them, social change is not the goal, because the world is evil and consigned to destruction.
Rather, they contend, we ought to paddle along on D.L. Moody’s life raft, seeking to save as many out of the shipwreck as possible.[3] If social change does happen (perhaps due to a kind of spiritual herd immunity), excellent! But few believe systemic change is possible.
On the other hand, the compromise approach manifests in the theological liberalism of the early twentieth century and progressive evangelicalism today. Whereas Moody saw the world as a shipwreck, this approach sees the ship as taking on water. Our job is simply to find the leak and fix it.
Those who embrace a compromise approach share a deep concern for the environment, social justice, and care for the marginalized, but they don’t quite know where to put individual conversion. As a result, the gospel easily morphs into a pro forma addendum.
Both approaches are insufficient because both reject the unity found in Jesus Christ.
THE BETTER WAY
In order to integrate the gospel and social change, we must, as Bonhoeffer puts it, become serious about Christ. We must set Jesus in our vision with all his glorious fullness, disrupting the diminishing rationalizations we force him into, unsettling the equilibrium through carefully constructed theological systems.
To be serious about Christ is to stop emphasizing particular elements of Christ and instead elevate all of Christ. Here is what this looks like in practice:
A serious vision of Christ marvels at his incarnation.
A serious vision of Christ takes God’s world seriously, not because the world demands our loyalty and love, but because God loves the world. The incarnation reveals his breathtaking love and intention for this earth and those on it. What kind of God puts on the flesh of finite creation?
When we grasp that Jesus did not merely take on a body but he also took on humanity, becoming the second Adam and remaking what we had corrupted, we cannot help but see God’s deep concern for his creation. By entering into our material existence—experiencing bodily pain and suffering, healing broken bodies, feeding hungry bellies—Jesus demonstrates that the God who made us to live in this world cares about us in this world, and he cares about the world in which we live (see Matt. 6).
A serious vision of Christ treasures his death.
An understanding of Jesus’s incarnation divorced from the cross loses sight of the true condition of creation. Jesus’s cross-work reveals that this beloved world is desperately lost, deserving of God’s wholly justified judgment. The death of the Son of God reveals the magnitude of God’s wrath for our sin and the culpability of humanity in welcoming sin into the world.
But in his death, we also learn of the perfect union of divine love and justice; they are not mutually exclusive. In Christ’s work on the cross, we behold the full weight of love expressed through justice and the full quality of justice executed in love. To tear these two apart is disastrous, as it selects one or the other as supreme.
The one who minimizes God’s justice diminishes her capacity to love her neighbor. For while she may seek her neighbor’s economic, social, or medical good in love, she fails to see her deepest need: reconciliation with God. And the one who minimizes God’s love develops an emaciated vision of the world marked by ruthless rule.
A loveless, naked justice that issues from “thou shalt not” rather than “I am the chief of sinners” will almost certainly center on retribution rather than redemption. The world desperately needs to see justice in the form of a cross.
Finally, a serious vision of Christ anchors itself in his resurrection.
Death without resurrection may help us know the seriousness of sin, but it leaves us without hope. Apart from a confidence rooted in the victorious resurrection of Jesus, we can do little more than hedge hope for a better society and future. It is in the resurrection that the story begins in re-creative victory.
Jesus forges a renewed humanity, bringing the beloved imago Dei through the fires of judgment into the glory of new life. We live this new life in hopes that “what we will be has not yet been revealed” (1 John 3:2). We remain an in-between people. But this hope is not inert; it is alive (1 Pet. 1:3) and strains forward in expectation and joy, producing both private and public works of righteousness (Matt. 5:14–16; 1 Pet. 2:9ff). Having tasted of the goodness, justice, and love that is and will be, we eagerly seek to bear this good fruit in our land of exile.
Of course, we are also realists. We know that if this world refuses to see the love of God in creation and the judgment of God for sin that we will never experience this same goodness, justice, and love. But that does not stop us from embodying this hope in our own spheres and spaces, seeking to bring goodness and righteousness to our own lives, systems, and society.
SEEING JESUS CLEARLY
A serious vision of Christ in no way seeks to build a Christless utopia. It recognizes the impossibility of such a task. But it also knows that choosing a fatalism that devalues attempts to bring love and justice into this world obscures Christ’s glory.
The world desperately needs to see all of Christ, the Ultimate. And our privilege is to help the world see him clearly—by whatever means necessary.
[1] Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 88.
[2] https://statementonsocialjustice.com/
[3] Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 90–91.
Bob Stevenson is a husband, father of four and serves as Lead Pastor of Village Baptist Church. He is passionate about encouraging and strengthening the local church through written and spoken word. He writes at https://medium.com/@thebob and on Twitter.