What is striking about the reception of the account of worldliness in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison writings is how few commentators have drawn attention to the fact that Bonhoeffer concentrates on the status of nature. To be sure, nature is not part of the definition of ‘the coming of age of mankind’. But the aim of such ‘coming of age’ is ‘to be independent of nature’. Bonhoeffer writes: ‘Our immediate environment is not nature, as formerly, but organization. But with this protection from nature’s menace there arises a new one — through organization itself.’ So the claim that ‘organization’ is now the environment of humanity is to be understood dialectically: the emancipation of humanity from nature leads to new forms of domination.

For Bonhoeffer, the attempt to escape nature thus raises once more the question of humanity. Or, as Bonhoeffer puts it, if the menace of nature is displaced by the menace of social organization, ‘What protects us against the menace of organization?’. ‘Coming of age’ is thus an anthropological development (the theme of worldliness) predicated upon the emerging independence of humanity from nature which, in turn, requires a theological response (the theme of ‘secular interpretation’). Such interpretation must address the fact that nature is now mediated to us by social contexts. So the theological interpretation of a ‘world come of age’ includes judgements about the status and significance of nature for humanity.

The difficulties raised here for Christian theology by the place of nature in a ‘world come of age’ are acute for we are driven back to the origins of modernity.

In recent years and in separate spheres Dorothee Sölle and René Girard have developed work relating to a theological account of the Cross of Christ which amounts to a strong refutation of substitutionary atonement. Both these thinkers come from distinct backgrounds. Sölle, a political theologian, was a student of Bultmann and has often referred to his importance for her theological development. Girard is not a theologian as such, but rather, a literary critic with strong sociological influences and considers his work to be influenced by Emil Durkheim. Nevertheless there are strong implications in his work for theology and especially christology. These two thinkers are compared here because their work has consequences for theological praxis which carries us beyond the more ‘privatised’ accounts of the Cross of Jesus Christ in many contemporary religious settings.

The work of both thinkers shall be interpreted here and then a discussion on the relevance of that work will follow. This is especially important when it comes to the issue of violence and religion. Violence is used broadly here and refers not only to physical violence, but also to psychological violence within interpersonal relationships and human communities. Both argue against substitution as a christological concept since it reflects sacred or divine violence. Both see the Cross of Christ as a refutation of violence rather than the sacred justification or sanctioning of that violence. It seems, especially in Sölle, that the Cross is intimately linked to the concept of God, as far as Christian faith is concerned. If one perceives God in the face of the crucified, then it is all too easy to think of God as the one who sanctions the violence done to Christ on the Cross.

“It wasn't that I particularly supported their policies” a colleague said to me on the day after the election “but I just wanted to get rid of that other lot.” In many ways a natural conservative, she seemed to represent that vast change of mood among the electorate, for whom the Tory government had become the image of corruption, self-interest and hypocrisy, and for whom New Labour seemed to offer the hope of a re-birth of political innocence, a new national consensus about the common good. Coming from a different standpoint, it was a mood I could fervently share with her, and with so many friends who are still reliving the exhilaration of that historic night. Yet I am conscious of a paradox with regard to this great upsurge of new political hope. For the longing to avoid harm and be blameless is at the root of our highest spiritual and moral aspirations; but it is also a dangerous and corrosive passion. The lust for innocence can also be detected in the desires of the recently disgraced.

In the Guardian some months before the election Hugo Young analysed the particular form of corruption that had overtaken British politics—not so much systemic financial corruption, as a form of intellectual corruption. Ministers, defending their actions after the Scott Report or in the Neil Hamilton affair, had apparently come to believe that ‘the mere fact that words and actions are theirs, unfailingly performed for the best of all possible reasons, guarantees their rectitude’. They were scandalised that the public might actually believe that they had been privately milking the political system to protect or advance their political interests.

The postmodernist perspective is so amorphous as to almost defy description. A good deal of imprecision inevitably flourishes. Its description ranges from the superficial level of popularist culture and its images, to an anarchistic nihilism. Many of its adherents are refugee post-Marxists sheltering under the banner of a relativistic abandonment of all ideological absolutes. Where is one to find the link between the post-structuralism of literary criticism and the postmodernism in the field of architecture and art? There are many who regard the process as a fundamental transformation in human self understanding. They regard it as a radical de-centring of the self and as a comprehensive embracing of relationality and relativism, (which seems to be generating such concern in the breast of Cardinal Ratzinger and his colleagues), as a complete disavowal of the enlightenment project. Others, rather strangely on the other hand, see it simply as the next sequential stage in the modernising process, and equally a threat to the purity of faith. The emphasis, for them, is on its continuity with the past.

It is a difficult area and to be approached with diffidence. I am myself heavily dependent upon the contribution of Gerard Loughlin, who gave me my first introduction to the writings of Levinasian ethics in his article in New Blackfriars in January 1994.

Both the enlightenment and the reaction against it in postmodernity have at their heart an exploration of the significance of the self as it is confronted by a world in which it feels itself to be an alien.