Dietrich Bonhoeffer by demandside

This is a pre-publication author’s version. For the final, published version, see T&T Clark Handbook of Suffering and the Problem of Evil edited by Matthias Grebe and Johannes Grössl.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Michael P. DeJonge

The theodicy problem solved in the cross

Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) strikingly claims, “The question why there is evil is not a theological question”. Why? Because, he says, the question “presupposes that it is possible to go back behind the existence that is laid upon us as sinners. If we could answer the question why, then we would not be sinners”.1 The question “why evil?” is, in other words, a speculative philosophical question posed from an existential position of sovereignty over the world and God. In contrast, theological questions about suffering and evil must come from the position of the redeemed sinner. In ruling out “why evil?” from theology, Bonhoeffer applies a favorite distinction, that between philosophical and theological reflection (Tietz 2009).

In refusing “why evil?” as a theological question, then, Bonhoeffer does not ban the topic of suffering and evil from theology. Indeed, he offers some of the twentieth century’s most influential theological reflections on suffering. Rather, he insists on approaching the topic in a particular way: “The theological question is not a question about the origin of evil but one about the actual overcoming of evil on the cross”.2 The cross of Christ is the place where evil is overcome and where the sinner’s existential position is transformed into that of a redeemed sinner. So, theological reflection on suffering starts at the cross.

Bonhoeffer’s approach is therefore resolutely a theology of the cross. This is so in the straightforward sense that his thinking about suffering takes its orientation from the cross. Beyond this, his thinking about suffering is a theology of the cross because its prototype is

1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, ed. John de Gruchy, trans. Douglas Bax (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004), 120.

2 Ibid.

This is a pre-publication author’s version. For the final, published version, see T&T Clark Handbook of Suffering and the Problem of Evil edited by Matthias Grebe and Johannes Grössl.

Martin Luther’s theologia crucis. As Luther puts it in the Heidelberg Disputation: “That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened. He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross”.3 Following Luther, Bonhoeffer argues that theologians do not speculate toward conclusions about suffering but rather begin their reflection with the cross and its suffering.

In another context, Bonhoeffer goes so far as to say, “The theodicy problem [is] solved in the cross”.4 To see what he means, we need to follow his theological reframing of the theodicy question. The question is not about God’s goodness in the face of human suffering and evil. Rather: “How can God be defended against the accusation of being unrighteous, if God enters into a relationship with sinners? How can the sinner be righteous and God still remain righteous?”5 The theological context is justification: If God declares sinners righteous, does this count against God’s own righteousness? Is not the justification of sinners an affront to God’s holiness, bringing God’s own righteousness into question? It is this version of the theodicy problem, originating in God’s gracious justification of sinners, that Bonhoeffer says is solved in the cross.

How so? On the cross, “God kills the Son of God who bears our flesh; and with the Son, God kills everything that bears the name of earthly flesh. Now it is evident that no one is good but the triune God, that no one is righteous but God alone. Now, through the death of God’s own

3 Martin Luther, “Heidelberg Disputation”, in Career of the Reformer, ed. and trans. Harold Grimm (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1957), 52.

4 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theological Education at Finkenwalde: 1935-1937, ed. H. Gaylon Barker, and Mark Brocker, trans. Douglas Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 345–346.

5 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, ed. Geffrey Kelly, and John Godsey, trans. Barbara Green, and Reinhard Krauss, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 254.

This is a pre-publication author’s version. For the final, published version, see T&T Clark Handbook of Suffering and the Problem of Evil edited by Matthias Grebe and Johannes Grössl.

Son, God has supplied the terrible proof of the divine righteousness”.6 God’s own righteousness, which comes into question when God freely justifies sinners, is proven on the cross where God’s Son bears the punishment for sin. In this sense, the theodicy problem is solved in the cross.

Costly grace

In treating the cross as the solution to the theodicy problem, Bonhoeffer also provides a framework for understanding at least some of the suffering in the Christian life. This is because God’s self-justification on the cross provides the background for God’s justification of the sinner. “The theodicy problem [is] solved in the cross. Our gaze is directed to the cross that we might recognize: God alone is righteous; if we recognize that, then we ourselves are justified. If we allow God alone to be justified, then we are justified”.7 That is, the sinner’s justification is effective only if the righteousness it grants is true righteousness, which can only be the case if it comes from a God who is truly righteous. The proof of God’s own righteousness on the cross, then, is also the proof of the sinner’s righteousness in justification.

Seeing how the cross provides a framework for understanding Christian suffering further requires recognizing that, with this dynamic of God’s self-justification and God’s justification of the sinner, Bonhoeffer provides the theological backing for his famous treatment of cheap and costly grace. God’s self-justification on the cross shows that God’s grace for sinners is not cheap; it comes at the cost of divine suffering. Furthermore, God’s self-justification on the cross shows that, in the dynamics of God’s grace, the need for obedience in the face of God’s righteousness is not set aside. So, the justification God offers sinners on the basis of God’s self-justification, while freely given, requires repentance and ongoing obedience to God’s commands. And this is

6 Ibid., 255.

7 Bonhoeffer, Finkenwalde, 345–346.

This is a pre-publication author’s version. For the final, published version, see T&T Clark Handbook of Suffering and the Problem of Evil edited by Matthias Grebe and Johannes Grössl.

the very definition of costly grace: a grace which freely justifies but nonetheless includes the obligation for repentance and obedience.8

Here the other, more familiar sense of costly grace comes into focus: grace is costly not only for God but also for the believer. The believer remains faithful to God’s commandments, even unto suffering. Bonhoeffer concisely captures this understanding of Christian suffering in a letter to a brother-in-law. “Either I determine the place where I want to find God, or I let him determine the place where he wants to be found […]. But if it is God who says where he is to be found, then it will probably be a place that is not at all commensurate with my own nature and that does not please me at all. This place, however, is the cross of Jesus. And those who want to find God there must live beneath that cross just as the Sermon on the Mount demands”.9

Beginning with the epistemological principle derived from the theology of the cross, Bonhoeffer draws the conclusion regarding Christian suffering.

This completes the logic of the “theodicy problem”, as Bonhoeffer understands it. We begin by asking about the origin of evil, often asking why we suffer if God is good. Bonhoeffer directs this question to the cross, reframing it theologically as a question about God’s goodness in light of justification. The cross not only proves God’s goodness but also reveals the divine cost of justification. The human cost of justification, then, consists in the obedience and suffering that accompanies it. This logic does not answer all speculative questions about evil and God’s goodness, but it tells a story of divine and human suffering centered on God’s self-revelation on the cross.

Only a suffering God can help

8 See Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 45-52

9 Bonhoeffer, Finkenwalde, 168.

This is a pre-publication author’s version. For the final, published version, see T&T Clark Handbook of Suffering and the Problem of Evil edited by Matthias Grebe and Johannes Grössl.

While later imprisoned, Bonhoeffer again wrote on suffering and the cross, generating the provocative and influential claim that “only the suffering God can help”.10 The starting point for his thinking about the suffering God is again the distinction, familiar from the theologia crucis, between the philosophical or metaphysical God we imagine, and God as revealed in suffering on the cross. In Letters and Paper from Prison, Bonhoeffer describes the philosophical God as the God desired by human religiousness, the “God of the gaps” who swoops in as the all-powerful “deus ex machina” when humans are at their weakest. The revealed God of a religionless Christianity, on the other hand, appears in the powerlessness and suffering of the cross.11

Bonhoeffer’s description of God as suffering seems to follow directly from the ancient Christian conviction that Jesus of Nazareth, who suffers on the cross, is fully God. But, in fact, most of the Christian theological tradition resisted drawing the conclusion that God suffers. This majority position rests on two ideas. First is what Bonhoeffer would criticize as a philosophical conception of God as immutable and impassible so that suffering is incompatible with God’s perfection. Second is a model of the incarnation in which certain of Jesus’s actions and attributes can be referred to his human nature while others can be referred to his divine nature. Accordingly, the majority position refers Jesus’s suffering exclusively to Christ’s human nature, thus protecting the impassibility of the divine nature and resisting the conclusion that God suffers.

An important minority voice in the tradition was Luther, who saw in the idea that “the Deity surely cannot suffer” the influence of “the old witch, Lady Reason”. He challenged this position on its Christology, arguing against the tendency to refer Christ’s actions and attributes to

10 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John de Gruchy, trans. Isabel Best et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), 479.

11 Ibid.

This is a pre-publication author’s version. For the final, published version, see T&T Clark Handbook of Suffering and the Problem of Evil edited by Matthias Grebe and Johannes Grössl.

the one nature or the other, insisting that “the divinity and the humanity are one person in Christ”.12 Because Christ is one person or agent, his suffering is the suffering of both his human and divine natures. Bonhoeffer’s own Christology pursues Luther’s single-agent logic (DeJonge 2017, 42–76). With appeal to Luther, he emphasizes the unity of natures in the person: “We say of this man, Jesus Christ, that he is God”.13 This means, for him, that we cannot “begin with the two natures in isolation, but rather with the fact that Jesus Christ is God”.14

Bonhoeffer’s prison reflections on the suffering God can thus be seen as an overcoming of the dominant, impassible position in two steps. First, following the logic of a theology of the cross, he begins not with a philosophical conception of God but with God as revealed in the suffering of the cross. Second, he replaces a Christology of two natures acting in one person with a christology of one divine-human person or agent, thus clearing the chief theological obstacle to the conclusion that God suffers.

How does such a suffering God help? Bonhoeffer suggests at least two ways (Tietz 2011, 112–115). First, a suffering God helps by disabusing us of a God of the gaps who drops from heaven to solve our toughest problems. A suffering God, instead, urges us into the “worldliness” of life with the conviction that God is present there. “Before God, and with God, we live without God”.15 That is, we live without the metaphysical God but before and with the suffering God.

Second, if God suffers, paradoxically enduring even the agony of God-forsakenness, then there is no human suffering foreign to God. For the suffering God, omnipotence and perfection are not the inability to suffer but rather the ability and willingness to suffer all that humans endure and

12 Martin Luther, “Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper”, in Word and Sacrament III, ed. and trans. Robert Fischer (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1961), 210.

13 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Lectures on Christology”, in Berlin: 1932-1933, ed. Larry Rasmussen, trans. Isabel Best, David Higgins, and Douglas Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 353. Translation altered.

14 Ibid., 350

15 Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 479.

This is a pre-publication author’s version. For the final, published version, see T&T Clark Handbook of Suffering and the Problem of Evil edited by Matthias Grebe and Johannes Grössl.

more. Such a God wills to be present in the depth of human suffering. The suffering God helps, then, not by answering the question “why evil?” but by carrying that question alongside suffering humanity.

This is a pre-publication author’s version. For the final, published version, see T&T Clark Handbook of Suffering and the Problem of Evil edited by Matthias Grebe and Johannes Grössl.