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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 June 2018
This essay examines and compares the treatment of the Decalogue in the theological ethics of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It argues that while both theologians orient their exposition of the Decalogue by attending to its primary character as divine self-revelation, approach it with a view to a Christian ethics of divine command, and frame their understandings in decisively christological terms, they differ markedly on the extent to which the commandments themselves can and ought to be understood as representing concrete divine commands.
1 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Theological Education Underground: 1937–1940, ed. Barnett, Victoria J., trans. Barnett, V. J. et al. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (English language edition, hereafter DBWE) 15 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), pp. 633–44Google Scholar.
2 DBWE 15, pp. 496–526.
3 See ‘The Christian and the Ethical as a Topic’, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. C. Green, trans. R. Krause et al. DBWE 6 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), pp. 378–87.
4 Barth, Karl, ‘Gospel and Law’, in Herberg, W. (ed.), Community, State, and Church, trans. Hall, A. M. (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1968), pp. 71–100Google Scholar. The Bonhoeffer Nachlaß includes two brief typescripts of theses (registered as A 57,10 and B 13,2) made by J. Mickley (a student in the fourth Finkenwalde class), in which Bonhoeffer reacts directly to Barth's lecture. See Nachlaß Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1987), pp. 82, 125. In the Staatsbibliothek Berlin there is also a further uncollected and unpublished typescript of eight theses (NL 299, A57, 10), ‘Thesen (wahrsch. Von Bonh) zu Barth. “Evg. u. Gesetz” bei Disputation Finkenwalde Winter 36/37’, which confirms Bonheoffer's direct engagement and interest in Barth's arguments. For discussion of Bonhoeffer's reading of Barth's Church Dogmatics, II/2, see Pangritz, Andreas, Karl Barth in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, trans. Rumscheidt, H. M. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 62–9Google Scholar. For discussions of this as well as wider discussion of the matter of ‘Law and Gospel’ in Bonhoeffer's theology see Sorum, Jonathan, ‘Barth's “Gospel and Law” and Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship’, in Kelly, G. B. and Webong, C. J. (eds), Reflections on Bonhoeffer: Essays in Honor of F. Burton Nelson (Chicago: Covenant Publications, 1999), pp. 210–27Google Scholar; Müller, Nortbert, ‘Gesetz und Evangelium bei Bonhoeffer’, in Schönherr, A. and Krötke, W. (eds), Bonhoeffer-Studien: Beiträge zur Theologie und Wirkungsgeschichte Dietrich Bonhoeffers (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt Berlin, 1985), pp. 51–60Google Scholar.
5 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, II/2, ed. Bromiley, G. W. and Torrance, T. F., trans. Bromiley, G. W. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), pp. 683–4Google Scholar.
6 On the neglect of Bonhoeffer as a biblical theologian, see Webster, John, ‘Reading the Bible: The Example of Barth and Bonhoeffer’, in his Word and Church: Essays in Christian Dogmatics (London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2016), pp. 89–90Google Scholar. In this section citations from Bonhoeffer's works are by volume and page.
7 This point of emphasis is supported exegetically by other interpreters, see e.g. Weinfeld, Moshe, ‘The Uniqueness of the Decalogue and its Place in Jewish Tradition’, in Ben-Tsiyon, Segal and Levi, Gershon (eds), The Ten Commandments in History and Tradition (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1990), p. 9Google Scholar.
8 In correspondence with Helmut Rößler in Dec. 1932, Bonhoeffer stressed this disjunction between the deliverances of human reason and the commandment. In relation to his claim that God concretely commands peace upon and from the church, Bonhoeffer writes, ‘As for the question of whether the commandments can be accounted for: we cannot account for the commandment. What can be accounted for, or better, demonstrated, is its content, which can never of itself lead to the hearing of the commandment’; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Berlin, 1932–1933, ed. L. Rasmussen, trans. I. Best et al., DBWE 12 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), p. 84. The point, it seems, is that offering up a reasoned account of the content of any particular commandment does not as such amount to receiving it as the commandment of God.
9 Acts 7:38 speaks of the λόγια ζῶντα given to Moses, echoing the language of Exod 20:1 and Deut 4:13.
10 In a lecture outline on ‘confirmation instruction’ prepared in 1936, he invokes this inseparability of the law from God: ‘How can you recognise God's will? God has revealed his law to us. Only if God actually speaks his commandment to me can I know it – Mic. 6:8; Ps 119:18.’ Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Theological Education at Finkenwalde, 1935–1937, ed. Barker, H. Gaylon, trans. Barnett, V. J. et al. DBWE 14 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), p. 787Google Scholar.
11 Cf. DBWE 15, p. 503.
12 Cf. DBWE 14, p. 789, where Bonhoeffer suggests that the ‘assurance’ that accompanies the commandments is precisely God's declaration: ‘I am’, for ‘thus speaks the one who is at both the beginning and the end, God, the Creator . . . the Reconciler, Christ’.
13 In a sermon note on Exod 20:12 (the fourth commandment) from 1936, Bonhoeffer makes precisely this hermeneutical claim: ‘Everything depends on the first commandment’ (DBWE 14, p. 645).
14 Cf. Bonhoeffer's identical emphasis elsewhere upon the evangelical force of the word that ‘I am your God’: with the commandments ‘God is seeking us, wants to be your God’ (DBWE 14, p. 789).
15 Much of the exposition Bonhoeffer provides on the opening verses of Psalm 119 in his unfinished commentary upon that text attends to the way in which God's word of Torah provides a ‘path’, and he associates this with the work of the Spirit; see DBWE 15, pp. 496–7. For insightful analysis and discussion of this text see Brock, Brian, ‘Bonhoeffer and the Bible in Christian Ethics: Psalm 119, the Mandates and Ethics as a Way’, Studies in Christian Ethics 18/3 (2005), pp. 7–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 The treatment of the Decalogue is concentrated in Church Dogmatics, II/2, pp. 673–700. Page references in this section of the article refer to this volume.
17 Nimmo, Paul T., ‘The Command of God’, in his Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth's Ethical Vision (London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2007), pp. 17–40Google Scholar, provides expert discussion of Barth's understanding of the command of God as a ‘concrete eschatological truth’, and related issues.
18 Miller, Patrick D., The Way of the Lord: Essays in Old Testament Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2007), pp. 3, 5–6Google Scholar.
19 For it is ‘not a code of detailed laws’ but rather formulates ‘those conditions required for membership in the community’, in effect representing ‘a distillation, so to speak, of the core demands made by the God of Israel on those covenanted to him’; Weinfeld, ‘Uniqueness of the Decalogue’, pp. 9, 11. Weinfeld emphasises this view later in the essay, comparing the Decalogue to the Shema in its form and function, and styling it as a ‘sort of Israelite catechism’, p. 20.
20 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, III/4, ed. Bromiley, G. W. and Torrance, T. F., trans. Bromiley, G. W. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), p. 12Google Scholar.
21 Ibid.
22 Barth, Ethics, p. 329.
23 As Barth says in so many places, ‘The Word of God, when it addressed to us and when we are allowed to hear it, demonstrates its unity in that is it always grace, i.e., it is free, non-obligatory, undeserved divine goodness, mercy, and condescension’ (‘Gospel and Law’, p. 72, cf. pp. 80, 82, 83).
24 Barth writes at the outset of his ‘Gospel and Law’ essay of how, ‘the Law would not be the Law if it were not hidden and enclosed in the ark of the covenant’ (p. 71; cf. p. 80). It is not at all unlikely that Bonhoeffer had these comments in mind when he drew upon the same image.
25 The Barmen Theological Declaration, Article 2.
26 Bonhoeffer, DBWE 12, p. 83.
27 Nimmo, Being in Action, p. 30.
28 Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/4, p. 12. Of course, the Decalogue, like all scripture, can become God's living address and so the commanding Word of God; this is a feature of it as scripture. But it is not in any way uniquely fitted for such ‘becoming’.
29 This is not to say that Barth is in any sense disinterested in or detached from theology's horizon in proclamation; quite the opposite is the case overall, of course. But in this particular and related expositions of the Decalogue itself, it does not press in so formatively as with Bonhoeffer. It may also be that it is precisely Barth's view of theology as more strictly second-order discourse, critically assessing the substance and form of Christian proclamation, that distinguishes him here from Bonhoeffer, for whom the relation of theology and proclamation – second- and first-order discourses – is perhaps less clearly demarcated.
30 Bonhoeffer, DBWE 15, p. 637.
31 This theme is nicely developed inter alia in Bonhoeffer's 1941 position paper on the ‘Primus Usus Legis’, where he stresses that the law is singly preached but triply used by God such that the question of the usus legis has to do with ‘different effects of the one single law’ when we acknowledge that the ‘subject of the use of the law must be seen to be not the preacher but God’ (DBWE 16, p. 585). Elsewhere Bonhoeffer similarly asserts that ‘the usus legis is not in the hands of the church but rather in God's hands’ (DBWE 14, p. 337).
32 Forde, Gerhard O., Theology is for Proclamation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), p. 5Google Scholar.
33 de Quervain, Alfred, ‘Das Gesetz Gottes: Die ertste Tafel’, Theologische Existenz Heute 34 (1935), p. 6Google Scholar. Barth explicitly appeals to de Quervain's treatment of the commandments in this volume and its second partner volume – ‘Das Gesetz Gottes: Die zweite Tafel’, Theologische Existenz Heute 39 (1936) – in support of his own account, Church Dogmatics, II/2, p. 883.
34 Lehmann, Paul L., The Decalogue and a Human Future (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 18, 19Google Scholar.
35 Barth, ‘Gospel and Law’, p. 81.
36 Bonhoeffer, DBWE 15, p. 525.