Bonhoeffer's Spoke in the Wheel, or, "You keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means."

I have seen this meme on Facebook more than once. It is one of Bonhoeffer’s more frequently quoted statements. Here at Union Theological Seminary, it is a popular sentiment, used to refer to the need for revolutionary social change.

Following Reggie Williams’ narrative of Bonhoeffer as an academic-theologian-turned-black-theologian due to his stay at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, Bonhoeffer is often portrayed as a social justice hero.[1] He was a radical theologian of Christian resistance, a precursor to liberation theology, a revolutionary who advocated fighting for justice by any means necessary—and that is why he was imprisoned and later executed.

The "spoke in the wheel" metaphor is a powerful one, almost immediately evoking images of revolution for resistance-minded folks. And yet, it is almost never contextualized, Bonhoeffer’s meaning by it is almost never considered, and instead its meaning is almost always assumed. When its actual meaning is sought after, the result is…well, rather boring, compared to the implications usually associated with the phrase.

Bonhoeffer did engage in resistance, and he had a theology of resistance—a rather intentional, and systematic one at that. But we would do well to clarify Bonhoeffer’s own theology of resistance, instead of just conforming it to our own.

For Bonhoeffer, generally speaking, the church is “not encouraged to get involved directly in specific political actions of the state … neither to praise nor to censure the laws of the state.”[2]

We need to let that set in, because Bonhoeffer's thought is already more boring and less radical than that of liberationists (like myself).

According to Bonhoeffer, the state’s purpose is to preserve a godless world for Christ by establishing order through the law and the sword. This a thoroughly Lutheran understanding of the two kingdom. Church: preaches the gospel. State: preserves the world through law and order so the world can hear the gospel.[3]

It is possible, however, for the state to institute “too little law and order or too much law and order.”  He explains, “There is too little law and order wherever a group of people is deprived of its rights,” and there is too much when the state develops “its use of force to such a degree as to rob the Christian faith of its right to proclaim its message.”[4] When a group of people is being deprived of its rights, or when the state is endangering the church’s ability to preach the gospel, the church’s responsibility concerning politics changes.

However, when he talks about groups deprived of their rights, he didn't think in the same way we tend to. He said, it is “extraordinarily difficult to distinguish actual deprivation of rights from a formally permitted minimum of rights.”[5] So, it is not that, any time you see a group deprived of rights, that constitutes a situation pastors have to speak out about. It has to be clear that it is a systemic issue, and that it is done "without any scruples."[6]

However, Bonhoeffer distinguishes between “the responsibility of the pastoral office” of the church, and “the responsibility of [individual] Christians.”[7] Individual Christians can be more actively political than pastors. On the pastoral, church level, Bonhoeffer states that while the church should not infringe on the state’s territory by taking direct political action, “it can and must … keep asking the government whether its actions can be justified as legitimate state actions, that is, actions that create law and order, not lack of rights and disorder.”[8]

This is the first possibility for church political action: pastors publicly calling the state's decisions into question, when they seem to imply too much or too little law and order.

The second possibility for church political action is “service to the victims of the state’s actions,” because the church “has an unconditional obligation toward the victims of any societal order.”[9] The church, Bonhoeffer says, has to take a “view from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled—in short, from the perspective of those who suffer,” and this view necessarily has practical implications.[10]

I would call this treatment of the symptoms and not of the system! But I am a revolutionary, and Bonhoeffer wasn't interested in revolution.

The final possibility of church political action is the most serious for Bonhoeffer, and it is here where we get the spoke in the wheel analogy. “The third possibility,” he says, “is not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself.”[11] This is the possibility of “direct political action,” and it is only possible if “the state, without any scruples, has created either too much or too little law and order,” so much so that it threatens “the existence of the state and thus [the church’s] own existence as well.”[12]

What would this actually look like? The answer: A public confession of the church established by an evangelical council.[13]

This might seem like a child opening up a Christmas present only to find socks moment, but for Bonhoeffer it is a big deal. This is when the church boldly and intentionally infringes on the state’s territory and tells it what to do. It is the church’s concrete commandment to the world, and takes the form in a definitive No to the state’s actions.

Bonhoeffer thinks this should be rare because the church does not specialize in governance and so does not always know best how to establish law and order. Only an extreme situation could demand direct political action, and only a group committed to the truth of the gospel can together justifiably determine if the situation demands such a response.

Bonhoeffer’s own example of this was “the obligatory exclusion of baptized Jews from our Christian congregations or a ban on missions to the Jews.”[14] Such state actions infringe on the church’s business and endanger the church’s proclamation of the gospel, and so must be resisted definitively. This is too much law and order.

The church cannot always be getting into politics, but should do so sparingly, in order to preserve the state’s integrity as an order of preservation, in order to preserve the integrity of the gospel, and in order to preserve the integrity of the church’s concrete commandment.

The church cannot be subject to the same whimsicalness and low standard of accuracy that political commentators are subject to. He says, “with every word [the church] speaks it is putting its entire authority at stake.”[15]

A revolutionary, Bonhoeffer most certainly was not. While we find in Bonhoeffer’s work a robust and systematic theological approach to the topic of resistance, it does not look like what liberationists (again, like me) would like it to.

He did not base his political thought on a theology of God's identification with the lowly and oppressed. He was not turned into a black liberation theologian after his time in Harlem. Nor did his time in Harlem "transform" his thinking and make him capable of resisting Hitler. His political thinking was thoroughly Lutheran, and already established before Harlem.

When he returned from New York to join the resistance, he did so with the framework that he had already adopted as a Lutheran, with his own understanding of its implications for his time.

Take Bonhoeffer's political thought or leave it. Agree with it, or argue with it. But don't simply conform it to your own. Those like Eric Metaxas, Stanley Hauerwas, and Reggie Williams have all done this in different ways. Bonhoeffer is widely misunderstood on this point. Everyone want to claim the theologian that resisted Hitler for themselves. But ultimately if we are appropriating someone's work, we should care about what that person cared about, and try to understand that person on his own terms.



Notes:
[1] Reggie L. Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014).
[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” in The Bonhoeffer Reader, ed. Clifford J. Green and Michael P. DeJonge (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 372
[3] See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Clifford Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 112. Also see, Michael P. DeJonge, Bonhoeffer’s Reception of Luther (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
[4] Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” 373-374.
[5] Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” 373.
[6] Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” 374.
[7] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Theological Position Paper on State and Church,” in The Bonhoeffer Reader, 713.
[8] Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” 373.
[9] Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” 374.
[10] Bonhoeffer, quoted in Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, “Poverty and Public Theology: Advocacy of the Church in Pluralistic Society,” International Journal of Public Theology, 2 (2008), 156.
[11] Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” 374.
[12] Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” 374.
[13] Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” 375.
[14] Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” 374.
[15] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “To Helmut Rößler,” in Berlin: 1932–1933, ed. Larry L. Rasmussen, trans. Isabel Best and David Higgins (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 83.

Karl Barth's Black Jesus

Karl Barth is famous (and in some places infamous) for conceiving of God as "wholly other" to human beings. Barth's God is radically transcendent, radically other, and quite hidden. Barth is often criticized on this point for failing to do justice to God's immanence, for making God so inaccessible that speech of God becomes substance-less. How can we make affirmations about God if God is always wholly other and hidden?

Setting aside the fact that this is a rather one-sided picture of Barth's theology, I want to emphasize one of the ways Barth addressed this problem. That is, Barth conceived of God not merely as completely veiled to human beings in general, but particularly veiled in lowly communities. It can be said that, for Barth, there is potential for seeing God in people who suffer and are oppressed, because God makes God's self wholly other to human greatness, and not just to humanity in general.

In order to understand this, we have to understand the origin of Barth's radically transcendent conception of God. The identification of God with the German war effort by many of Barth's contemporaries was the occasion for Barth's decisive NO to liberal theology. Liberal theology, Barth came to see, was a theology of glory; it identified divinity with the glory of humanity, with strength, with success, and we could add, with whiteness. Barth saw this as idolatry.

As black theologian James Cone describes, Barth's criticism of liberal theology was a criticism of "nineteenth century liberalism with its emphasis on the goodness and worth of humanity (which always meant white European humanity)."[1] He adds that, "Every black intellectual is aware that when liberals spoke of 'inevitable progress' and the 'upward movement of Western culture,' it was realized at the expense of blacks who were enslaved and colonized to secure 'progress.'"[2]

Barth was similarly aware that it always meant a divine sanction of human corruption. Nations continually claim God for their side, touting themselves as the innocent and the others as the enemy. "It is sheer blasphemy to relate God to our human strivings in this way," Barth preached.[3] Selfishness, arrogance, hatred, anxiety, and violence are all "completely alien to the innermost being of God," so that if they become the rule of the day, it can only mean "God's innermost being is also completely alien to humankind."[4]

Barth's No to liberal theology, then, was not merely a No to humanity on principle because humanness is evil. His No was fundamentally a No to a human attempt to raise the human up by identifying divinity with human ideas of greatness. Included in Barth's protest against this was an affirmation of God's lowliness. "Against all those who want to be great in this world," Barth said in first commentary on Romans, "I must espouse the standpoint of those little people with whom God makes his beginning." God, he says, "is one-sidedly a God of the lowly."[5]

Because God is a God of the lowly, God can never be identified with human greatness, with human vanity. To identify God with human greatness is to put human glory (which is really arrogance and domination) on a high place, on a pedestal, to be worshiped as an idol.

The hiddenness and otherness of God for Barth is not simply a divine attribute of anti-humanity. We must never forget that God did not come in the form of some kind of extraterrestrial alien being, but as a human. The decisive point is that God came in the form of a lowly human, he came in the form of a servant.

Martin Luther similarly stated that "God destroys the wisdom of the wise" by hiding God's self "in suffering," in "the humility and shame of the cross."[6] It is in this spirit that Barth understands the hiddenness of God in lowly communities. Barth says in his second Romans commentary, the otherness of the other "reminds us of the WHOLLY OTHER."[7]

Consequently, "all Titanism, all mounting of high places, is excluded. ... In order to correspond with their veritable situation men must therefore--bow."[8] That is to say, recognizing that the otherness of the other points to the otherness of God, recognizing that God is the crucified Christ, who veils God's self in a servant-form, who unconditionally identifies God's self with the lowly--all of this means not an exaltation or glorification of human greatness, not a divinization of the human, or a sanctioning of human glory, but, rather, a humbling of one's self, a prostration.

If God is identified with the lowly, then we must makes ourselves lowly to glorify God. If God is identified with the lowly, then we should not look to high places, to human greatness, to domination and success, in order to find God's glory, but should rather look to those who are exploited, oppressed, who suffer at the hands of human glory.

Barth stayed true to this understanding in his Church Dogmatics as well. He says, "God stands at every time unconditionally and passionately on this and only on this side: always against the exalted and for the lowly, always against those who already have rights and for those from whom they are robbed and taken away."[9]

It is in God's revelation in Jesus Christ that we have this knowledge, not in some natural knowledge of God, as the liberal theologians would have it. "Far from being founded upon any sort of general anthropology," Barth says, "our proof is absolutely related to Christology."[10] Precisely in the servant-form lies "a veiling of the divine majesty." This is how "the Word enters hiddenness."[11] Jesus' lowliness is not inconsequential, but is precisely how God reveals God's self as both hidden and revealed. “In [Jesus Christ] God reveals Himself inexorably as the hidden God."[12]

Barth's problem with liberal theology was not merely that they identified God with something human, but that they identified God with human greatness, with human glory, and so exalted themselves even more. They were the exalted ones exalting themselves through theology. They were the ones with rights claiming a divine sanction for furthering their own rights over against the rights of others. Barth declared this to be idolatry.

This critique of idolatry was James Cone's starting point as well. Cone's black theology of liberation was aimed at white idolatry, at the identification of divinity with whiteness, and so at the supposed divine sanction of white supremacy. Cone's protest against this idolatry was to boldly proclaim that God is not a God of whiteness, but is wholly other to the white God, and so identifies with oppressed blacks and fights for them.

Similarly, Barth's theology can be described as a black theology. It at least lends itself to black theology. This is so because, for Barth, God reveals God's self in the servant-form of Jesus Christ. The human constructs idols of human glory that are at odds with lowly servant-forms, and so God elects the servant-form to veil and unveil God's self. Jesus is black because Jesus reveals God's self in human lowliness and suffering.

To fail to understand this about Barth's theology is to make Barth's God an abstract concept of otherness, reducible to the idea of the "unconditioned" or the "undeconstructable" in philosophy. Barth again and again insists that the hiddenness of God is not this, that God's hiddenness is not merely a general mysteriousness, or a general concept of that which is beyond human conception. God veils God's self, and God does this not just in defying human thinking, but in veiling God's self in what humans deem undesirable, unworthy, and unwelcome.

To fail to witness to God's hiddenness in those who are lowly is to fail to witness to the Word of God. To fail to see Christ in the otherness of those who are suffering is to fail to see Christ altogether. To fail to see God suffering with the black community is to fail to see the cross.

And even further, to fail to understand one's self as responsible for acting on behalf of the poor and oppressed is to fail to understand our God-given responsibility. As Barth says, we cannot hear and believe God's identification with the lowly "without feeling a sense of responsibility in the direction indicated." Specifically, he says,

There follows from this character of faith a political attitude, decisively determined by the fact that man is made responsible to all those who are poor and wretched in his eyes, that he is summoned on his part to espouse the cause of those who suffer wrong. ... He cannot avoid the question of human rights. He can only will and affirm a state which is based on justice. By any other political attitude he rejects the divine justification.[13]

According to Barth, God is particularly concerned for the poor and oppressed, particularly concerned for their liberation. To hear and believe God's Word then behooves one to be responsible for the poor and oppressed, and to work for their liberation.

So then, to hear and believe God's Word today means to be moved by the suffering of the black community, and to act accordingly. To fail to do so is, as Barth said, to reject divine justification.


Notes:
[1] James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 40th anniversary ed. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2010), 19-20)
[2] Cone, 20.
[3] Karl Barth, A Unique Time of God: Karl Barth's WWI Sermons, ed. and trans. William Klempa (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016), 109.
[4] Barth, A Unique Time of God, 111.
[5] Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief, 1st ed., quoted in George Hunsinger, "Toward a Radical Barth," in Karl Barth and Radical Politics (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976), 225.
[6] Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation, in The Annotated Luther, Vol. 1: The Roots of Reform, ed. Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 99.
[7] Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 6th ed., trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933), 444.
[8] Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 444.
[9] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. II: The Doctrine of God, Part 1, eds. G. W. Bromily and T. F. Torrance, trans. T. H. L. Parker, W. B. Johnston, Harold Knight, and J. L. M. Haire (New York: T&T Clark, 1957 [repr. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2010]), 386.
[10] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. I: The Doctrine of the Word of God, Part 2, eds. G. W. Bromily and T. F. Torrance, trans G. T. Thomson and Harold Knight (New York: T&T Clark, 1956 [repr. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2010]), 44.
[11] Barth, CD I.2, 37.
[12] Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 369.
[13] Barth, CD II.1, 386-387.