Chapter 4
he has with Bethge in the 9 March 1944 letter, where he favors an understanding of Christian suffering contained within the physical rather than the so-called “spiritual.” His thought here is centered in the fact that the vicarious representative action of the Christ is precisely linked with the removal of guilt through forgiveness. “We so like to stress spiritual suffering; and yet that is just what Christ is supposed to have taken from us, and I can find nothing about it in the New Testament, or in the acts of the early martyrs.”198 Ironically, in this letter Bonhoeffer distances himself from any first-hand knowledge of genuine Christian suffering, yet later in the prison period he will speak of the church as a fellowship of persons who participate in the sufferings of Christ. His christology of Jesus as a genuine human being who suffers actual bodily pain informs how he speaks of suffering in this letter. The 30 April, 1944 letter contains a linguistic analysis of how Christ, faith, and the church all must be understood ontologically. “What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today.”199 When Bonhoeffer questions who Christ is, he simultaneously questions who the church is as well. His christo-ecclesiology leaves no middle ground. He equates “religious” with “intellectual dishonesty.” Within the “religion-less” context of a “western form of Christianity” as a possible “preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion,” Bonhoeffer’s primary concern is both christological and therefore also ecclesiological. As he says, “How can Christ become the Lord of the religionless . . . what kind of situation emerges for us, for the
198 LPP, 232. 199 Ibid., 279. 246