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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Karl Barth once said that we must always think three times before contradicting Hegel's system, ‘because we might find that everything we are tempted to say in contradiction to it has already been said within it’. Hegel wanted his thought to mirror the full movement of life, and to Barth (avid moviegoer no less than Mozart aficionado), this movement proceeds like the film of the cinematograph, though one so extraordinary that it depicts ‘the rhythm of life itself’, running exhaustively through the fullness of history, capturing the ‘exact recollection’ of the observed plenitude of being. When Hegel in the Phenomenology concludes the magisterial section on absolute knowledge with the statement that here ‘Spirit has wound up the process of its embodiment’, he is not, as Richard Rorty cavalierly suggests, recommending a new and improved vocabulary, but is celebrating the complete infusion of truth into the dialectic of knowing. As Barth says, ‘Truth is necessary to [Hegel] and, indeed, necessary to him in its unity, in its actuality, in the divine rigor inherent in it.’
page 427 note 1 Barth, Karl, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century Translator not given. (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1959), p. 396.Google Scholar
page 427 note 2 Barth, , Protestant Thought, p. 283.Google Scholar
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page 428 note 8 Although Bonhoeffer refers occasionally to the Philosophy of Right and the Encyclopedia, his critique is primarily engaged with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.
page 428 note 9 Jorg Rades notes that Bonhoeffer's phrase came from Professor Seeberg's Christliche Dogmatik II, Deichertsche Verlagsbuchhandlung Erlangen, 1925, p. 299. Rades, Jorg, ‘Bonhoeffer and Hegel from Sanctorum Communio to the Hegel Seminar with some perspectives for the later works,’ unpublished essay, St Andrews University.Google Scholar
page 429 note 10 The recent edition of Bonhoeffer's 1933 Hegel seminar is informative. The Hungarian student Ferenc Lehel recalls his surprise at Bonhoeffer's sympathetic reading of Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Unlike much contemporary anti-idealist theology, Bonhoeffer recognized an undeniable value in Hegel. Lehel writes, ‘In a way Dietrich Bonhoeffer handled Hegel eclectically to the extent that he examined and emphasized that which to him — to the theologian — appeared useful’ (Lehel, p. 10 in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Hegel-Seminar 1933, edited by Todt, Ilse. Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1988)Google Scholar.
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page 432 note 19 Hegel, , Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 477Google Scholar. One such cognitive representation would be Kant's categorical imperative. Cf. Hegel, ‘Christianity and Its Fate’.
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page 437 note 31 Karl Rahner gets to the heart of the distinction between unity and identity in an interesting comment on Cardinal Hoffner's proposition at the Würzburg Synod of 1974 that ‘Jesus of Nazareth is God’. Rahner says: ‘Of course, that is a Christian, irreversible, finally binding truth, but one can misunderstand this sentence too. While other sentences with the verb to be express an identity of a simple type with the content of the predicate, such an identity between the humanity of Jesus and God's eternal logos does not exist. A unity exists here, not an identity.’ Imhof, Paul and Biallowons, Hubert, Editors, Karl Rahner in Dialogue. Translated by Egan, Harvey D. (New York: Crossroad, 1986), p. 250Google Scholar.
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page 440 note 35 Importantly, Bonhoeffer is responding to Barth's dialectical literature in the two dissertations.
page 440 note 36 Bonhoeffer, , Act and Being, p. 92.Google Scholar
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page 447 note 59 Eberhard Jüngel, Evangelische Kommentare 2, quoted in Küng, Hans, The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel's Theological Thought as Prolegomena to a Future Christology. Translated by Stephenson, J. R.. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1987), p. 552.Google Scholar
page 447 note * Of course, there are resonances of Hegel in Bonhoeffer's proposal. In the ‘Tübingen Essay’ of 1793 Hegel protests the arid scholasticism of his Lutheranism by distinguishing between subjective and objective or positive religion. The former is alive in the ‘inwardness of our being’ and ‘active in our outward behavior;’ (484) the latter is derivative and abstract — it is ‘cold reflection’. While the distinction is interesting for my comparative-critical essay, Bonhoeffer resists the turn to subjectivity. It remains the other — whether as person, community or God — whose claim on the I draws it out into responsible selflessness. Also, Hegel's early essay on the positivity of Christianity (1795) delineates morality, i.e. Kantian ethics, as the essential content of the religion of Jesus, a religion which immediately lost its originary freedom to the authoritarian bondage of personality, institution and doctrine. Again while there might be loose structural affinities with Bonhoeffer's program, the capabilities of the autonomous moral agent have no room in his theology. More to the point of Bonhoeffer's critique is Hegel's later view that ‘ethical life is the most genuine cultus’ (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Appendix, p. 451, 1831). Peter Hodgson remarks, ‘That is, when the subjective appropriation of reconciliation that occurs in the cultus takes on objective, ethical structure or substance, the true and universal actualization of divine-human reconciliation is achieved’ (p. 451). This point is deserving of greater treatment. However, one noteworthy qualification in ascribing Hegel's view to Bonhoeffer is that Hegel investigates this correlation in terms of the orders of creation which represent organic extensions of the cultus. Further, Bonhoeffer is not equating community with ethical life. Ethics as formation is not primarily about the person's conformity to Christ — although the active conformation to Christ is not relinquished — but about Christ's becoming real and taking form in the person. (See Love, Robin, ‘Biographical Context’ in New Studies in Bonhoeffer's Ethics. Edited by Peck, William J.. Lewiston: Edwin Mellin Press, 1987), p. 205.Google Scholar) In other words, formation amplifies new possibilities of conformation. Bonhoeffer says, ‘Ethics as formation, then, means the bold endeavour to speak about the way in which the form of Jesus Christ takes form in our world, in a manner which is neither abstract nor casuistic, neither programmatic nor purely speculative. Concrete judgments and decisions will have to be ventured here’ (Ethics, p. 79).
page 448 note 60 I wish to thank Merold Westphal, James Buckley and the members of an NEH summer workshop at Fordham University for helpful comments on this essay.