Dominic,

I just spent over half of an hour writing a response, but mysteriously my computer just decided to reboot...I didn't press anything, it just decided it hated me...SO pissed off...I was screaming curses at it!

I need to sleep, so I can't reproduce everything I said (it just did this automatically...and I was almost done!), but to sum up a bit until tomorrow:

I think that it is possible to see Bonhoeffer saying something paradoxical, yes, but not antiJewish in the proposed relationship between Jews, Gentile Christians, and Jewish Christians. I also think that he was attempting to at once be faithful to what he understood as the good news (particularly Luther's sola gratia sola fidei) and the sociological concerns of living in a racist state in his disallowing of the Christian community to be determined by anything but the word of God...but finally, I think that B. can be read charitably here as doing a sort of third way between sociological demands for racial unity as a divine law that determines the constitution of Christian Community and the demands of state law. This sort of third way makes a little more sense to me when I remember that this book was written, and then compiled and completed by Bethge around the time when Bonhoeffer was trying to explain--in a stumbling and frustrating fashion--to his friend the notion of a "secular" or "religionless" Christianity. Perhaps this connection can free the paradox from antinomianism, per se. Thanks for your wonderful post. All three of these have been as fascinating as they were fabulous.
Dave Belcher | 01.06.06 - 10:03 pm | #

If I don't say something substantial in a day or two, I will dedicate a post of mine in the near future to this quite helpful trilogy. thanks d
old | 01.06.06 - 10:47 pm | #

Ok, a bit more. In the last sentence of your next to last paragraph you ask: "But, as Bonhoeffer himself has noted that there were Gentile Jewish-Christians, does this not mean that a 'modern Jewish Christianity' might equally mean a church where Jew and Gentile stand together?" I think the answer here is Yes, but Bonhoeffer is less concerned with the mere coherence of Jew and Gentile than how it is they stand together...as you have already said, "under the Word of God." And the Pauline defense for this is the baptismal formula from Galatians (which has become something of a cliche in talks about "equality"): "there is no longer Jew or Greek." B.--in my opinion--is thinking that this is the only determining factor for the constitution of the gathered Community [Gemeinde], and this does have sociological implications for race-relations. But, it is the Word of God which affects the constitution of the Christian Community and subsequently these relations, rather than these relations affecting the Christian Community through a mediating standard such as "justice" or "liberation," etc. In this way, I think that Bonhoeffer--radically--offers a helpful correction to the oft-deployed caricature of "liberation theology" (though there is also a helpful distinction here between B.'s sort of protestant version of something like liberation theology and the more popular Catholic version).

Thanks again.
Dave Belcher | 01.07.06 - 8:07 am | #

(Now that i've read the piece all the way through; haven't read all the way through Dave's comments):

Rhetorical ingenuity indeed, but i'll be damned if Lutheranism isn't the most twisted form of religion ever. This is really intriguing and valuable work. At the end of the day, Bonhoeffer would have been better off to just give up the lutheran ghost, but that wasn't even thinkable for him I suppose. Given the lengthy quotes, it does seem like you have rightly noticed two serious problems with his reasoning - Judaism is/isn't determined racially; conflation of divine and state law. I'd like to see or hear more on the latter because of my particular interests.
old | 01.07.06 - 9:47 am | #

I'm also wondering, given the original definition of Judaism as adhering to the law, whether there are actually Jewish Christians in Germany at the time (i.e. Christians who keep Jewish law). Now that would be interesting! I suspect, however, that Bonhoeffer is constantly equivocating.

Dave, I think that law keeping and blood descent are so intregal to Judaism that denying either (at least from the outside) is necessarily a form of anti-judaism, though of course there are greater and lesser degrees of anti Judaism. This is why I think that Bob Gibbs (phil. prof. here at Toronto who works on Rosenzweig and Levinas) is justified to a great extent in suggesting that Zizek, Badiou, and Agamben's work is finally anti Jewish.
old | 01.07.06 - 9:58 am | #

If Agamben's work can be considered "anti-Jewish," then there's no hope for any of us.
Adam Kotsko | Homepage | 01.07.06 - 10:02 am | #

Old, perhaps, but Bonhoeffer is decidedly not doing what Zizek and Badiou are doing...and I think Badiou's book on Paul--maybe even especially in his section on "anti-Semitism"!--demonstrates an "anti-Judaism" without question. I also would not necessarily include Agamben in that list.
Dave Belcher | 01.07.06 - 10:33 am | #

Well, let me rephrase...I think there is an affinity between Zizek's and Badiou's "immanentist" orthodoxy and Bonhoeffer's "secular" or "religionless" Christianity, but Bonhoeffer's account of grace puts a great deal of distance between them.
Dave Belcher | 01.07.06 - 10:35 am | #

I first heard of Bonhoeffer through reading John Robinson's Honest to God, which places a somewhat disproportionate emphasis on "religionless Christianity". Coming from there, the Bonhoeffer one encounters in the Ethics is somewhat of a surprise: socially conservative in many ways, but conversant with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and liberated, I would say, to engage with the extreme difficulty and out-of-jointness of his situation precisely by his Lutheran-Christian filiation and fidelity. He's the kind of theologian you think with, rather than agree with.

I hope I've shown, however, that thinking with him about Judaism can lead into blind alleys; and I think the case could be made (but this time, please, by someone else...) that the problems he runs into there are operative elsewhere in his work.

Certainly the topic of "religionless Christianity" brings into focus the question of "religion", and the weight of Christianity's Jewish inheritance (and "brotherhood") bears strongly on that question.
Dominic Fox | Homepage | 01.07.06 - 11:23 am | #

Dominic: These posts have been wonderful. Bonhoeffer's argument is, indeed, strange--so strange, one might well take it as proof that humane thinking is a Sisyphean labor under certain conditions. The best one can say on its behalf, I guess, is that the notion of "a people" joined in covenant with God is a racial idea insofar as it remains rooted in a tribal experience. But this is certainly not a biological understanding of race, and equating it with the racialism of the Nuremberg laws is monstrous indeed, however humane the motive.

Old: I understand Edith Stein entered the Church without ever renouncing her Judaism. I don't know if this makes her a Jewish Christian, but it does make me wonder where a dialogue between her and Bonhoeffer might have led.

Thinking a lot here of Levinas's line, from his essay on Celan, "the passion of Israel under Nazism."

Ben F
Ben Friedlander | Homepage | 01.07.06 - 2:03 pm | #

In as much as the above article delves into religion, I figure my comment has some relevance, albeit, peripherally so.


President George W "dum'ya botch" Bush thinks he's Jesus Christ ... there, I wrote it.

Likely enough, your curiosity was piqued enough for you to open this e.mail. If so, for once, your curiosity has done you a good turn. If I may, I should like to call upon your patience to peruse the text, immediately following.

Maybe on one fine day, your instructor had you undertake a certain exercise to determine just how well you're inclined to follow directions. Anyway, as you read the text, you noticed that the directions requested performing certain actions, some of which would be rather, say, noticeable. This e.mail is very much like that so-called test. So, please click on the embedded hyperlinks, after reading this entire e.mail.

I'm doing so for two reasons. First, I'd like to re-assure you that I came upon your blog as an individual, and not as a spammer in the pay of this or that company. And second, I would like to give you some idea of how I traversed a rather unusual train of thought. Now let's begin our journey. Incidentally, I found the U.R.L for your blog under the Illinois heading.

Wood'ja (?) buh-leave! I was so taken with my piece on eminent domain that I began a somewhat desultory campaign to call attention to it. To find people, who might concern themselves with the effects of the Supreme Court's decision, I went to this website, whose U.R.L is just underneath:

http://www.reachm.com/amstreet/s...ates- writes.htm

Well, it was through that website that I discovered how to tell you about that piece ... don'cha just feel ever so lucky?!


http://hewhoisknownassefton.blog...ss- commies.html

That "supremes-godless-commies-" excerpt in the above can easily enough get you conjecturing that I richly deserve my reputation for being a wild-eyed iconoclast cum "this gun for hire" ... aaaay, that's my nature. And you might also easily enough surmise that I've paid for it.

Anyway, here's the U.R.L for the piece, about which I am now enthusiastic,

http://hewhoisknownassefton.blog...ng- germans.html

I believe it's only fair to clue you in that the article in question was inspired by the recent scandal of domestic spying without search warrants. I'm surmising you'll get a chuckle out of it.

oh, alright (!) already, so, it's easy to make fun of a president, who thinks he's Jesus Christ.

toodles
......
.he who is known as sefton

If you've gotten this far, without previously clicking on any of the preceding hyperlinks, congrats. Otherwise, so (?) what! Anyway, what follows is the new and improved footnote to the "german" piece.

enjoy, enjoy

according to rumor, which I'm starting, the previous title to this piece had "germans" preceded by stark Anglo-Saxon for "illicitly copulating". Just to put the dear Reader's mind at ease, that rumor is grossly exaggerated.

Although, however, I was thinking of inserting the participle of the "fire truck word" within a certain nom de gloire. However, even for a wild-eyed iconoclast cum "this laptop for hire", there are constraints.

Nonetheless, within those constraints, I believe I'm entitled to stating this conjecture, which recent experience has impelled me to dope out. Here goes.

Whenever we hear a politician, of whatever orientation, claim to have "Jesus" in their heart. More than likely, that sapsucker has "cotton candy" for brains.

.... aaaay, you, whyz.ache.err, take my word for it. I'm having a hard time being diplomatic
A Alexandr Stella | Homepage | 01.07.06 - 2:54 pm | #

Adam and Dave, I might not go quite so far as Gibbs as to call Agamben's work anti-Jewish, but I'm very, very sympathetic to the claim. The suggestion that Paul's letters mean the abolishment of the law is and always has been foundational to Christian anti Judaism. That's why it is such a central issue for Trypho/ Tarfon in his dialogue with Justin. That's what is at stake in the quatrodeciman disputes over easter between Pope Victor and Melito's crowd. That's the critical issue even now for Jews like Michael Wyschogrod who goes a long way down the road with Christian, especially catholic, theology, but insists that Augustine and Aquinas' position that keeping the law is a mortal sin must be abandoned. Now the starkness of that position isn't on display in Agamben, but the same damn misreading of Paul is, and it must be banished. Lutheranism must die, whether in its secular philosophical form or otherwise. Paul never once suggests that Jews shouldn't keep the law; Gentile Christians just aren't required to keep anything beyond the sexual law (or if you go all the way with the Jerusalem council, a few other things).
old | 01.07.06 - 6:11 pm | #

Whatever happened to putting longer posts in that other webpage?
Adam R. | Homepage | 01.08.06 - 10:44 am | #

Old, I agree with you re: abolition of the law and anti-Judaism. I made a similar case way back in the Badiou-Zizek debate of last year. (There I was levying the charge of a nascent anti-Semitism on the basis of the fact that there is a direct correspondence in the 18th c. between anti-Semitism and, not the rise of liberalism per se, but the quest for a "new" universal.) But your uncharitable reading of Lutheranism in particular, and (what appears to me to be) Western Christianity in general, I think forestalls any understanding of what is going on in either case. The mere persistence of the language of sanctification in Western Christianity suggests that it is not the abolition of the law that is in dispute but the locus of the law's fulfillment. (And Luther, by the way, did not neglect sanctification; he simply separated it from justification - perhaps a mistake, but not an evacuation.) Jungel, the Lutherian, following Barth's own rejection of the ordo salutis, states it as a matter of anticipating the law's requirements over-against self-exertion in the face of the law's demands. Inasmuch as this is not excluded from Judaism per se, I think that you have a good case. But, to cast this as an issue of anti-Judaism, I think, is to make a category mistake - a mistake that, granted, both Christianity and Judaism have made throughout history, the causes of which we should all do better to more clearly isolate. Any talk of "abolishing" the law inevitably leads to anti-Judaism; but, since no one other than the most secular of Pauline interpreters (I would include Luther here) really takes that seriously, I think the charge of anti-Judaism is ultimately on really shaky ground.
Josh | 01.08.06 - 11:57 am | #

Adam R., we should probably do that. It's my responsibility. I'll put up all three of Dominis's early next week.
old | 01.08.06 - 2:28 pm | #

Josh, thanks for the long, thoughtful treatment of the question. I just disagree as to your main points regarding Lutheranism and think you are having to read way to much back into things to rescue it. Luther was anti semitic even by the standards of his own day. His friends had to tell him to tone his ass down on the Jewish rhetoric. Jungel is not at all representative. The entirety of Lutheranism rests ever and anon on an odious dualism between law and gospel. As for Western Christianity in general, I think it fair to say that I came off uncharitably. At Duke I was priviliged to be made to deal carefully and at length with the tradition. While I am severely critical of the tradition on the 'jewish question,' I deeply respect the figures such as aquinas and augustine on whom I wrote and learned immensely from them even though I ultimately want to point the tradition in a different direction. In fact, I see what I do in my thesis as making an argument against the tradition continually on its own terms, which is, I think deeply respectful. My thesis adviser was Hauerwas, and otherwise he wouldn't have been at all shy to tell me to get lost.
old | 01.08.06 - 2:39 pm | #

I think that underneath these issues--latent anti-Judaism, the question of "the Law"--lies the most significant issue in 20th century theology: viz. (in my mind at least), the question of human agency, particularly within social substrata such as "Israel," or "the Church." The particular issue at hand for Augustine and Aquinas with regard to "keeping the law" is not a strict dialectic, but the capacity of human praxis in relationship to God and world. So, first of all, to say that these two are to be abandoned along the way to Jewish-Christian reconciliation eschews their central concern. I think that Josh is right...both Augustine's and his predecessor's accounts of "sanctification" are attempts to delineate the way in which Christ is the fulfillment of the Law (and thus Thomas' Summa Contra Gentiles used for missionary work to "Jews" and "Muslims" is quite interesting), and the way in which creation--particularly human agents--is caught up in that fulfillment.

Forgive me for saying so, Old, but on the surface your argument seems to project the more explicit anti-Jewish Luther--late in his life--onto the concept of "justification by faith." And, this seemed most evident to me in your first comment to Dominic's first post when you said that Bonhoeffer must have read the entirety of Luther's works to find the quotes which demanded a Christian humility with regards to Jews. I admit that Luther at the end of his life seems just plain bitter...but I think it is a historical mistake to project this nearly blatant racism onto the instantiation (or even development) of sola fide sola gratia. And I think that Bonhoeffer had indeed read pretty much all the Luther he could get his hands on, so I think he came to grips with this.

I should also add that my comment about "religionless Christianity" was an attempt to draw (at least a chronological) connection between his letters to Bethge when he begins to think through this concept and the time that he began working on Ethics. Not for a moment do I think that "religionless Christianity" was ever a fully-developed thought for Bonhoeffer, but I think it would be somewhat shortsighted to not see the connection between this undeveloped concept and what he is grappling with in Ethics, particularly the stuff on the "Church" in the latter text.

peace
Dave Belcher | 01.08.06 - 2:44 pm | #

Sorry, I meant "Augustine's and his progenitor's accounts... (i.e., Thomas)" NOT predecessor's.
Dave Belcher | 01.08.06 - 5:41 pm | #

I don't know if anyone is still reading these comments--I confess that I might be talking to myself at this point!--but one more thing on the Law and faith.

Old, this is from Augustine's On Spirit and the Letter: "By the law is the knowledge of sin, by faith the aquisition of grace against sin, by grace the healing of the soul from the fault of sin, by the health of the soul the freedom of the will, by free will the love of righteousness, by the love of righteousness the accomplishment of the law. Thus as the law is not made void but established through faith, since faith obtains the grace by which the law is fulfilled; so free will is not made void but established through grace, since grace cures the will, by which righteousness is loved freely" (30.52).

Augustine made these comments right around the turning point in the development of his doctrine of grace...when he began writing his commentary on Romans actually. If you want to contend with this--I would be a little befuddled if you did--then I think you'd also have to contend with Paul's letter to the Romans (particularly, of course, Romans 7...but my guess is that you wouldn't, based on your strong and correct disagreement with recent "rereadings" of Paul...and specifically Romans 7).

This is what I was referring to, actually. Christ is the Redeemer who makes all of this possible, and thus is "the fulfillment of the Law"; He does not make it "void" but establishes it.

And Thomas is one of the few Augustinians who follows this same path holding these notions of paradoxical grace (as Pelikan calls it) in tension. But, more importantly I think, Luther says nearly the same thing (though I'd want to look at it a little more closely before I said they were the same thing) in his commentary on Romans--late in his life. It is true that he here exposes very anti-Jewish sentiments: "the arrogance of the Jews," etc., but it is also true that this same anti-Judaism seems to be counter-acted (perhaps even non-intentionally so) by adherence to [Pauline] Scripture which trumps this chief of sinners' most anti-Jewish intentions. So, there is no doubt anti-Judaism lies within Luther's commentary, but there is also a profound connection (and here the Luther references from Bonhoeffer that Dominic quoted in his first post are not merely coincidental but essential) required between Jew and Christian. So, I think that while you are somewhat justified in your statements, you have just gone a bit too far. If we get rid of anything that stinks of Lutheranism, we lose more than anti-Judaism indeed.
Dave Belcher | 01.10.06 - 10:35 am | #

http://nomorefundamentalists.blo...s.blogspot.com/

I am a Jew that was raised in the south, so we went to the Church of Christ to "fit in". Now that was a fucked-up childhood.
nomorefundy | 01.10.06 - 3:04 pm | #