Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T06:31:19.656Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Lebensraum – just what is this ‘habitat’ or ‘living space’ that Dietrich Bonhoeffer claimed for the church?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2014

Donald Fergus
Donald Fergus*
Affiliation:
PO Box 13 508, Christchurch, New [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's liberal use of spatial concepts in constructing an ecclesiology served his theological purpose in the articulation of a concrete ecclesiology. In particular, Bonhoeffer uses the themes of taking-up-space and the visibility of the church. The visibility of the church is depicted as a proclamatory space, a liturgical space and an ordered space, all encapsulated in the concept of Lebensraum. Within this space, witness is given to the foundation of all reality in Jesus Christ. The church is the place where this reality is proclaimed; a space no bigger than that required to serve the world in witness to Christ. As opposed to any idea of a ‘privatised’ or individual space, Bonhoeffer insisted on the public and territorial nature of this space as essential to the church's witness, for it was in this very visibility that the church gains space for Christ.

Lebensraum, an idea popularised by Adolf Hitler and incorporated into the foreign policy of the Third Reich, was a highly charged political concept taken over by Bonhoeffer to represent a living space diametrically opposed in form to that proposed by the Reich. A useful way of thinking about the Christian form of Lebensraum as proposed by Bonhoeffer is to regard it as the space in which the ‘social acts that constitute the community of love and that disclose in more detail the structure and nature of the Christian church’1 are to be demonstrated and observed. These ‘social acts’ are built upon the foundational concepts, first found in Sanctorum Communio, of Stellvertretung or vicarious representative action, Miteinander or church members being with-each-other, and Füreinander or church members actively being for-each-other. Bonhoeffer proposes that, as its life is lived out in this way, the church will take the form of its suffering servant Lord. It is in this particular space and no other, grounded and upright in Christ, that Christians are to live their lives in witness to Christ.

Keywords

(Dietrich) BonhoefferdiscipleshipLebensraumspatialityStellvertretungvisibility
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 70 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, ed. Victoria J. Barnett and Barbara Wojhoski, 16 vols (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996–). Sanctorum Communio, vol. 1, p. 178.

2 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship = Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 4, pp. 225–52. There is an earlier section in Discipleship (pp. 110–15) with the same title, embedded in Bonhoeffer's explication of Matt 5:13–16.

3 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, p. 225. Bonhoeffer will return to this theme – using these same words – in the Ethics = Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 6, ‘Christ, Reality and Good’, pp. 62–3.

4 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, p. 226.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., p. 244.

7 Dumas, Andre, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian of Reality, trans. Brown, Robert McAfee (London: SCM Press, 1971), p. 119Google Scholar.

8 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, p. 226.

9 In Sichtbare Kirche in Neuen Testament, in Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. Kelly, Geoffrey B. and Nelson, F. Burton (New York: HarperOne, 1995)Google Scholar, Bonhoeffer argues against two dangers facing the ‘church of the Word of God’. The first is a docetic ecclesiology derived from idealism ‘which calls in question the very claim that the church has a place in the world’, since idealism regarded the church ‘as an incorporeal concept which can lay no claim to such a place’; and (secondly) ‘a secular ecclesiology, derived from materialism, associated with a magical attitude to the sacrament’, pp. 153–4.

10 Hauerwas, Stanley, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004), p. 34Google Scholar.

11 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, p. 225.

12 Yeago, David S., ‘The Church as Polity? The Lutheran Context of Robert W. Jenson's Ecclesiology’, in Gunton, Colin E. (ed.), Trinity, Time, and Church: A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 218–19Google Scholar.

13 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, p. 225, n. 2.

14 Hamill, B., ‘Beyond Ecclesiocentricity: Navigating between the Abstract and the Domesticated in Contemporary Ecclesiology’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 14/3 (2012), pp. 277–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, p. 225.

16 Hamill, ‘Beyond Ecclesiocentricity’.

17 The first of these two points is the one that Hamill makes when he says, ‘the meeting of church and eye involves the theological formation of the eye’. ‘Beyond Ecclesiocentricity’, 3.

18 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, p. 226.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., p. 228.

21 Kolb, Robert and Arand, Charles P., The Genius of Luther's Theology: A Wittenberg Way of Thinking for the Contemporary Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), p. 188Google Scholar.

22 Though it should be noted that Zimmerling, Peter, Bonhoeffer als Praktischer Theologe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), p. 90Google Scholar, finds Bonhoeffer's sacramentalisation of preaching ‘highly problematic’.

23 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, pp. 228–9.

24 Yeago, ‘Church as Polity?’, pp. 222–5.

25 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, p. 230.

26 Ibid., pp. 232–3. Bonhoeffer notes ‘that all Christian community exists between word and sacrament. . .and begins and ends in worship’, p. 233.

27 Ibid., p. 234.

28 Hauerwas, Stanley, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Howard Yoder’, in Spencer, Stephen R., Larsen, Timothy, and Greenman, Jeffrey P. (eds), The Sermon on the Mount through the Centuries (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2007), p. 210Google Scholar.

29 Yeago, ‘Church as Polity?’, p. 224.

30 Phillips, John A., The Form of Christ in the World: A Study of Bonhoeffer's Christology (London: Collins, 1967), p. 120Google Scholar.

31 Yeago, ‘Church as Polity?’, p. 219.

32 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, p. 237.

33 Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, p. 178.

34 Ibid.

35 The nineteenth-century German ethnographer, Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), first used the concept of ‘living space’ in the way that the National Socialists would later utilise it. Ratzel believed that a naturally healthy and vibrant species would of necessity and as of right expand to fill other spaces where they would then take root, expand and exclude any original species.

36 Shirer, William L., The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960), p. 82Google Scholar.

37 Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1999), p. 646Google Scholar.

38 Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 305.

39 Ibid., p. 307.

40 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, pp. 245–6.

41 Ibid., p. 247.

42 Ibid., p. 232.

43 See Bonhoeffer, Testament to Freedom, pp. 154–6.

44 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, p. 233.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., p. 234.

47 Ibid., pp. 234–5.

48 Ibid., pp. 236 and 238.

49 Ibid., pp. 245–6.

50 Ibid., p. 246. Leidensgemeinschaft is translated here as ‘the community of suffering’. Leid is the verb ‘to suffer’, while Leiden are ‘the trials and tribulations and suffering of life’.

51 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, p. 247.

52 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, pp. 63–4.

53 Ibid., p. 64.

54 Lovin, Robin W., ‘The Christian and the Authority of the State: Bonhoeffer's Reluctant Revisions’, Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, 34 (March 1981), pp. 32–48, 36Google Scholar.

55 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 63.

56 Yeago, ‘Church as Polity?’, p. 224.

57 Webster, John, ‘On Evangelical Ecclesiology’, in Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics 2 (London: T&T Clark International, 2005), pp. 176–7Google Scholar.

58 Rasmussen, Larry, ‘The Ethics of Responsible Action’, in de Gruchy, John W. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 206CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Dumas, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian of Reality, p. 16.