Bonhoeffer's Footnote and the Moral Absolute

Extract

In much contemporary discussion of ethics, the Roman Catholic tradition — particularly in questions of sexual morality — has been characterized as the last refuge of the absolute. On questions such as the morality of contraception, the Church has been remarkably out of phase with other churches and other ethical traditions, insisting on a particular approach to natural law theory which has, by now, become identified with the Roman Catholic tradition.

It is interesting then, to find the following footnote in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, as edited from Bonhoeffer’s papers by Eberhard Bethge:

Marriage is not founded upon the purpose of reproduction but on the union of man and woman. Woman is given to man as ‘an help rheet for him’ (Gen.2:18). The two shall be ‘one flesh’ (Gen.2:23). But the fruitfulness of this union is not something that is commanded. For biblical thought this would have been impossible; it was only in the age of rationalism and technology that it could come to be understood in this way.

Writing at a time when the Roman Catholic tradition maintained a strong consensus on the question, Bonhoeffer notes that this tradition “does not indeed, as is often asserted, maintain that reproduction is the only purpose of marriage. No one did that before Kant”.