Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Public Theology: Christianity-Israel-Islam
Written by Paul S. Chung, Director, International Public Theology in Forum-Center
Introduction
Religion becomes a reservoir for cultural formation, social organization, and political way of governance. Shared value and cultural systems are grounded in religion. Thus, religious construction of cultural reality is at work in various forms of Muslim practice. Religion, a system of meaning and social formation, might be shaped and organized in culturally variable ways in different parts of the world. Each specific life-world provides its clarification of religious discourse and world construction, making its own path to social cohesion, moral solidarity, and cultural modernity.
A life-world approach to Islam can be articulated in a social scientific framework, in which a historical-critical study of Islam can be synthesized with social phenomenon of involvement, compromise, and change in the correlation of the universal history of religions.
With this approach in mind, I seek to explicate the extent to which religious discourse and symbols would be bound to material interests and power relations in social organization and politics in underlying Islamic general order of existence. It facilitates public theology, whether Christian or Islam, in dealing with the problems of the public sphere (gender, interreligious relation, and collaboration for common good and peace) toward politics of recognition.
Recently, Prof. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen has presented his thought-provoking article “Towards Mutual Recognition” to stimulate our forum discussion and scholarly exchange for theological collaboration. He makes the case for interfaith engagement from the multidisciplinary Recognition Paradigm. He “seeks fresh resources for interfaith engagement, including using the Recognition paradigm,” advocating for comparative theology of reading various Sacred Scriptures together.
According to Kärkkäinen, the multidisciplinary paradigm facilitates an attempt to negotiate the challenges of unity and difference or inclusion and exclusion among religious traditions. He actualizes Axel Honneth’s critical interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of recognition for interfaith implication in Christian-Muslim context. Honneth has contributed to bringing Hegel’s theory of rationalization and ethical significance closer to Emile Durkheim’s sociology of division of labor and organic solidarity (Honneth, The I in We, 65).
In fact, Hegel’s philosophy of recognition in Phenomenology of the Spirit is grounded in Luther's theologia crucis and universal dimension of reconciliation, which made a strong impact on Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer’s theology of reconciliation embraces the Other, without violating their own self-identification and dignity. His prophetic insight can be contextualized in furthering common good and justice of interreligious relations on behalf of integrity of life-world and politics of recognition in the cosmopolitan condition.
Following in the footsteps of Hegel and Honneth, I locate Bonhoeffer in Christian-Israel-Muslim interaction in Palestine, by advancing the standpoint of public theology, common good and mutual recognition. My interest in comparative theology is more of sociological character involving a genealogical analysis by undertaking discourse clarification and world construction in terms of power relations and material interests. It critically complements significance of comparative theology in interfaith interaction, articulating a wider spectrum of religion, culture, and power.
First, I thematize some aspects of Bonhoeffer, actualizing his insights into the Janus legacy of European modernity and his theology of the cross from the postcolonial standpoint and in terms of public theology. Second, I attempt to bring Bonhoeffer's theology of Israel to problem in Palestine, taking on politics of recognition between Israel’s position of land promise and Palestinian Christians with an Islamic cultural background. Third, I shall deal with Islamic contribution to modernity, public theology, and interfaith dialogue, featuring significance of Jesus in Islam as an example of mutual recognition.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Actualization
Bonhoeffer’s insights into the legacy of European modernity with Janus face. His articulation between modernity and under-modernity facilitates an appreciation of justice and solidarity in the public sphere by means of postcolonial reading. His theology of the cross is, at a methodological level, grounded in Christological collectivism and a biblical symbol of reconciliation. This combined position reinforces politics of recognition and a critical appraisal of his theology of Israel and promotes solidarity with innocent victims in Palestine.
Modernist phenomena in the aftermath of French Revolution and European humanism would be classified, according to Bonhoeffer, into the problem of anti-Semitism, secular atheism, and the fourth estate—the working class in poverty.
In fact, the major issue occupying Bonhoeffer’s concern was the Jewish pogrom espoused with Kristallnacht (1938). This is the blackmail of the capitalist modernity bequeathed with its tradition of European humanism. At the height of Hitler’s power and popularity in 1941, Bonhoeffer wrote that “Western history is by God’s will inextricably bound up with the people of Israel, not only genetically but in an honest, unceasing encounter. The Jew keeps open the question of Christ… Driving out the Jew(s) from the West must result in driving out Christ with them. For Jesus Christ was a Jew” (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, DBW. 6. 105).
To the degree that Jesus came to the world as the promised Messiah of Israel and the Lord of the church, the people of the world and western history are inseparably bound to Jewish people in a genuine uninterrupted encounter, while including dialogue with contemporary Judaism, which keeps open the question of Christ. In fact, the church “has become guilty of the lives of the weakest and most defenseless brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ” (Ibid., 139).
This position finds its underlying significance in his proposal for a post-Holocaust confession of guilt, as obviously seen in his “Unfinished Draft of a Pulpit Pronouncement following the Coup” (DBW 16: 572-574). However, Bonhoeffer’s theology of Israel is accused by post-Holocaust Zionists of being trapped into the witness-people myth with an anti-Jewish orientation of German theology (Haynes, The Bonhoeffer Legacy, 98).
That being the case, how would post-Holocaust Zionist theologians respond to Israel’s colonialism and its illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories and their violation of human rights in the acts of atrocity against the Palestinians? If Post-Holocaust theology underwrites Jesus Christ without becoming anti-Jewish, his Jewishness is not of an anti-Palestinian character at all. If a left hand of Christology is anti-Jewish, should its right hand be anti-Palestinian?
Given this cul-de-sac, Bonhoeffer has his own legacy in problematizing a position of biblical promise of land only to Israel in a Christian Zionist Post-Holocaust quarter. He would not be portrayed as a philo-Semite at all with the blind attitude to Jewish teaching of the Torah through the Pharisees (in rabbinic Judaism), as well as the Jewish State in its brutal violence of the Palestinian people.
Indeed, Bonhoeffer might be ready to hear Jesus’s admonition in Matthew 23:1-3. “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach.”
The centrality of Jesus Christ is not relativized nor obscured in his recognition of the Jewish teaching of the Torah on Moses’s seat. Bonhoeffer would be in threshold to the formulation of post-Shoah theology, yet without losing prophetic warning to any colonialist ideology and religious justification of brutal violence and discriminatory politics of Arab Palestinians and Christians by depriving their rights.
Bonhoeffer: Isarel and Palestine
Bonhoeffer’s theology of Israel needs to be reinterpreted in dealing with God’s promise of the land to Abraham as a blessing to all nations—this problem does not occupy his major concern, but it can be refined through a cross-reconciliation doublet.
God’s pledge to the land promise to Israel in various biblical passages (Gen. 15: 18-20; Num. 34:1-12; Deut. 1:7-8; 11: 24) can be, first of all, seen in the context of God’s covenant for survival of Israel’s descendants. But the border of the promised land is not eternally fixed at all in the exclusion of the inhabitant rights of non-Jews. It should be seen, in hermeneutical circle, with reference to the life of Abraham, whose descendants include Ishmael.
In the historical development it also does not discard the existence of a mixed multitude (Ex. 12:38), fellow travellers with Israelites from Egypt. A mixture of the people—perhaps from descendent of patriarchal clans—was incorporated into God’s covenant at Mount Sinai (Seltzer, Jewish People, Jewish Thought, 18).
The land belongs to God such that those dwelled in it are aliens and tenants (Lev. 25:23). God allows for the non-Jewish to be occupants of the land, because God “loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing” (Deut. 10: 18). The aliens have right to receive the tithe, together with the orphans and the widows (Deut. 26:12).
This biblical position comes to terms with Martin Buber’s argument; historic right of the land promise cannot be defended, especially seen from the standpoint of Arab Palestinians dispossessed by the Israelites.
Indeed, Ishmael came into covenant with God through circumcision, and he received the promise of many descendants (Gen. 17 and 25). Ishmael and Isaac coexist in friendship and fraternal relationship, even to the degree that they bury Abraham together. This relationship can be further seen in the reconciliation between Esau and Jacob.
Abrahamic inclusion of Christians is radicalized in Paul’s Christological interpretation of the land promise, which refers to Abraham’s offspring, Jesus Christ. God’s ratified covenant with Abraham must not be nullified by virtue of the law (Gal. 3:16).
In sharing God’s promise of land, a universal dimension of blessing to all nations is seen in its fulfillment in the life of Jesus Christ and his reconciliation. This nullifies any discriminatory barrier among Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female. They are all one in Christ Jesus, and Abraham’s offspring, therefore, heirs according to the promise (Gal. 3: 28-29) (Isaac, From Land to Lands, from Eden to the Renewed Earth).
Bonhoeffer would be ready to affirm God’s blessing to Abraham for all nations. It recognizes the right of Arab Palestinians in the inheritance of great people of Ishmael or descendants of Esau, while Isaac and Jacob are respected as people of God’s covenant.
In fact, a public theological reading of Bonhoeffer is positioned in the standpoint of victim in dealing with the problem of land in Palestine in a reparative and distributive sense (in the sense of suum cuique). It does not follow a metaphysic of double predestination in consolidating God’s blessing to Israel, while God’s rejection to Arab Palestinians.
Nor can public profile of theolgia crucis be built upon a stereotype of anti-Semitic accusation of the Jews as the murderers of Christ. Instead, it respects and confirms the Hebrew source of liberation from Egypt and God’s new covenant with Jeremiah (Jer. 31: 31-34), which is fulfilled and confirmed in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ and Pentecost. The church does not disinherit the promise of the new covenant with Israel, or by making it obsolete for its own sake.
Nevertheless, this position also cannot be misused as an excuse for the Jew to drive out Palestinians from their homeland, or a form of ethnic cleansing through a separation wall. Rather, the Arabs must be respected as people of God’s covenant in their relationship with the Jews. In fact, the interest of Arab Palestinians should be taken into account by looking at cultural recognition, political freedom, and common good.
Postcolonial Retrieval of Martin Buber
In Edward Said’s view, a discourse of Zionism is religiously justified and politically culminated in the foundation of the State of Israel. Jewish Zionism is blended with colonialist vision with racist ideology and practice for accumulation of power, land, and legitimacy and displacement of Palestinian Arabs. Zionist politics built upon Manichean dichotomy does not allow Arab Palestinians to join Kibbutzim, but they develop their own life in the Arab Gulag Archipelago (“Zionism from the Standpoint of the Victims,” in The Edward Said Reader, 162. 167).
This political problem, in my view, is more imbued with Fundamentalist Christian Zionists in the US in their millennial end time scenario. They are piling sin upon the social crime against humanity by underwriting political apartheid in the Arab Gulag Archipelago.
On the contrary, I find it meaningful to ascribe Palestinian Christians to a role of John the Baptist, the preacher in the wilderness. Such imagination respects a prophetic mandate of Palestinian Christians in challenging the Jewish State back to its own prophetic vision of justice and peace.
At this point, Bonhoeffer’s theologia crucis finds its encounter with Jewish theology of divine pathos in the life of the Jewish prophet, which corrects a limitation of metaphysical monotheism in an Aristotelian framework. “The divine pathos alone is able to break through this rigidity and create new dimensions for the unique, the specific, and the particular” (Selections from the Writings of Abraham J. Heschel, 120).
This bilateral prophetic mandate and inspiration relocates Luther’s polemic dictum —“suffering, suffering, cross, cross is the Christian right”—within the effective history of Palestinian people and their own rights as God’s covenant people.
A differentiated argumentation can be seen in acknowledging the original Jewish Zionism and its experience of anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus affairs and several other pogroms in Europe or Russia. It does not discard the legacy of Martin Buber’s theo-political vision from below, in other words, “Paths in Utopia,” as embodied in Palestine spirit and reality; it is premised on egalitarianism and fraternal relationship within Palestine between Jews and Arabs.
For Buber: “A Zionism that believes it can rely on ‘life,’ [instead] fascist Zionism, is not merely distorted in its idea, but, seen just from the point of view of reality, nonsense and without any future” (“Martin Buber as a Socialist Zionist,” in Theological Audacities Selected Essays Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, 65).
This position would be ready to legitimate the struggle of the Palestinians as innocent victims and the subaltern for liberation movements under leadership of Palestine National Authority (or better, the State of Palestine).
Indeed, God made a covenant with people, not with a terrorist organization of Islamic Resistance Movement nor with the political organ of the State itself, which is tainted with revisionist, fascist, terrorist forms of Zionism (Vladimir Jabotinsky). God’s promise of the land includes a blessing for the Palestinians who are entitled with sharing the land with the Jews (Klappert, Der Name Gottes und die Zukunft Abrahams, 204).
A public, critical approach problematizes a general accusation of Zionism as Western colonial power, while challenging a blackmail of revisionist, fascist Zionism in utilizing the Holocaust as its justification of defense mechanisms. Such revisionist Zionism with an underground militia is unveiled as a disguised form of European fascism and imperialism in favor of Jewish State apparatus equipped with biopolitical control and its terrorism.
Bonhoeffer and Politics of Recognition
A genealogical approach to the Holocaust/Zionism doublet seeks a new path, which can be reformulated in the sense that God has attacked and broken with the system of sacrifice and victimhood in the death of Jesus. From there, God summoned a call to the word of the cross, which establishes and elevates the ministry of reconciliation in opposition to the defense mechanism of human victimhood. It takes into account Islam for mutual recognition and cultural exchange.
This stance refers to politics of recognition and it takes seriously Bonhoeffer’s theology of reconciliation, which is framed in the dialectical relationship between the penultimate and the ultimate. It turns upside down the Christian Zionist fanatic interpretation of the second coming of Christ.
From Bonhoeffer’s perspective, I concur with the position of pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, in which a love-oriented emancipatory Judaism becomes an effective bulwark against the settler Judaism. As Rabbi Michael Lerner maintains, “The Hebrews were ancient boundary crossers, and through the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the children of Abraham have been noted precisely for this capacity to cross existing boundaries and popularize boundary-shattering ideas” (Lerner, Embracing Israel/Palestine,19).
Buber once affirmed Islam as a much greater reality, and we have to acknowledge this reality in shaping and conditioning the Arab people. “Religion for the Arabs is also a matter of culture,” and he calls for the politics of mutual understanding (“The National Home and National Policy in Palestine (1929),” The Martin Buber Reader, 285).
Religious Construction of Islamic Reality
In an approach to Islam, I draw attention to the Quran’s definition of its religion as al-din (actually meaning the yom al-din, day of judgment related to obligation and law). God sends to the Prophet Muhammad the same religion (din) through Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus: “Steadfastly uphold the [true] faith, and do not break up your unity therein” (Q 42:13).
Covenantal dimensions of religion in the monotheistic, or Abrahamic religion is centered around religious discourse and practice (the five pillars: the profession of the faith, prayer, almsgiving, fasting, and pilgrimage).
For the religious construction of reality, I am concerned with a critical epistemology while taking into account a democratic sociology of Islam; the latter focuses on the relation between Islam’s prophetic message and al-nas (the people), which ushers to Islam Protestantism committed to people’s sovereignty and emancipation from despotic governance (Shariati, On the Sociology of Islam, 49-50).
A social scientific study of Islam and modernity would allow a space of respect for Jesus, which is to be undertaken in Islamic tradition of rational thinking and independent opinion (ijtihad) and democratic consultation.
Be that as it may, Islamic contributions to the European Renaissance can be traced back to the translation of the works of Greek philosophers in Baghdad in the period from 750 to 850 under the rule of Abbasid caliphate. Cordoba, the capital of the caliphate in Spain, was the jewel of the earth in the tenth and eleventh century in terms of economic flourishing and cultural and intellectual aspects; one caliph’s library among seventy libraries retained 400,000 volumes (Küng, Islam: Past, Present and Future, 376).
At the dawn of the sixteenth century Islam—the Ottoman in Anatolia, the Near and Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans and other European regions; the Safavid in Iran; and the Mughal in South Asia—was the most vital civilization in the world, holding a hegemonic potential over the East and West.
According to Marshall Hodgson, the term Islamdom in analogy to Christendom is in one sense “the society in which the Muslims and their faith are recognized as prevalent and socially dominant.” In other words, it implies “a society in which non-Muslims have always formed an integral, if subordinate, element” (Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 58).
In a nutshell, the Islamic world could hardly be thought of as assuming a subordinate role by looking at Europe up to 1869. But after 1869, as the new Suez Canal was opened to navigation. European politicians, journalists and scientists began to perceive their power in drawing a radical line of Europe as the bulwark of modern civilization over against the rest of the world (including the Islamic countries). Insofar as the year 1869 was a turning point in Europe-Islam relations, Oriental countries were to be judged exclusively by Eurocentric position within the structure of the imperial powers and colonialist discourse (Schulze, A Modern History of the Islamic World,15).
Islam, Modernity and Public Theology
In the Islamic context, it is worthwhile to involve Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (1839-97), who was born and brought up in Iran. He is called Islamic ‘Martin Luther’ who stands between the traditionalists in recourse to the Quran and the model of Medina and the secularists in favor of European education. He favored representative rule against the authoritarian monarchies and acknowledged that European progress was made possible through Reformation and progress of natural science.
“The Europeans have now put their hands on every part of the world … In reality this usurpation, aggression, and conquest has not come from the French or the English. Rather it is science that everywhere manifests its greatness and power. Ignorance had no alternative to prostrating itself humbly before science and acknowledging its submission”(Cited in Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism, 102).
Al-Afghani challenges traditionalism of following the ancestors, or taqlid (following the precedents) among legal scholars and reclaims ijtihad (independent reasoning), while critiquing some religious scholars’ rejection of modern learning. He provoked Muslim nationalism and pan-Islamism for freedom, away from the colonial pressure. He propagated an international union of all Muslim people for commitment to modernization, while fighting against traditional Islamic political institutions.
In fact, religious source and cultural practice can serve as intellectual background to redefine and reinforce Islamic signifier of modernity in reference to Nahda (renaissance). Religion in the sense of al-din and its covenantal dimension provide social integration, democratic reason, consensus, and moral solidarity. Such sociological inquiry synthesizes shared values of modern society (ethos) with the religious worldview for semantic retrieval in individual life and public sphere.
This epistemic stance helps us to construct a viable notion of public theology in Islam in terms of a cultural system, or a system of meaning, which is rooted in religious worldview and cultural ethical values. It can be expressed and embodied in its various forms of Muslim practice across the world (Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 141).
The social scientific approach to religion and cultural systems of meaning does not necessarily stand in contradiction to a genealogical, critical position of religion, because the former characterizes religious tradition as an ensemble of practices, in other word, semantic realm of the text. Cultural systems of meaning can be seen in terms of the historical product of discursive formation and power relations.
It is in need of social scientific analysis of elective affinity in the daily life practice among religious carriers, while involving the relationship between religious discourse, material interests, social formation, and instructional power. It does not demarcate cultural practices and agencies from institutional type of bureaucracy and power relations (Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 29).
Accordingly, hermeneutical retrieval of a viable concept of life-world and its cultural practice remain crucial in helping public theology to explicate the extent to which moral practice and politics of piety in Muslim woman’s movement would remain the source for immanent critique and emancipation in the Islamic path to modernity (Mahmood, Politics of Piety).
According to Fazlur Rahman, a hermeneutic of effective-historical consciousness fails to acknowledge each different episteme (the objective ascertaining of the past) in break, rupture, difference, and transformation. There is a number of different model or paradigm in the history of intellectual traditions in Islam: an eighth-century Mutazilate, a tenth-century al-Ashari, an eleventh-century al-Ghazali, eleventh–century philosophical enlightenment in Cordoba (Avicenna and Averroes), and a fourteenth-century Ibn Taymiya.
Indeed, Islamic intellectual tradition is not monolithic at all. In every critique or modification or revolution of a tradition, human consciousness is guided by critical rational thinking in dealing with history, tradition, and knowledge system rather than moved within effective-historical consciousness in a generic sense (Rahman, Islam and Modernity, 10).
As a matter of fact, effective historical consciousness can be sought in hermeneutical reading of the sacred text as the source of immanent critique and emancipation, then it can be explicated in critical method by problematization in dealing with specific system of knowledge or paradigm (episteme) and discourse formation, institutional ratification, and power relations in society and culture.
At this juncture, public theology, at the critical method of interpretation, is of archeological character in textual reading, and archeological hermeneutics facilitates public theology in undertaking a genealogical analysis of the relationship or intertextuality between religious discourse, social cultural formation, bureaucratic rule, and political governance.
This social scientific approach to religion helps Islamic scholars to conceptualize Islamic public theology, which strives to actualize Islam as a living religion in terms of its cultural vitality and social ethical integrity in consideration of contemporary challenges and public debates in civil society (Hosen (2012), “Public Theology in Islam: A New Approach,” 59-72).
Jesus in Islam: An Example of Mutual Recognition
Drawing upon Islamic public theology, I pay attention to Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad (1889-1964), who was a staunch critic of Nazism as the great threat to freedom, modernity, and human existence. In his seminal book The Genius of Christ he undertook a positive appraisal of Jesus exclusively based on Christian gospels in a historical frame of reference (Al-Aqqad, The Genius of Christ, 170-22).
In al-Aqqad’s view, Jesus would be respected as God’s anointed, and also the light of the world (Surah 24:35). In Islamic understanding of Jesus, we find the significance and actuality of Jesus with his subversive recasting of collective consciousness of humanity and society. For al-Aqqad Jesus is in advocacy of collective self-emancipation from an oppressive york of tradition (Maquardt, Das christliche Bekenntnis zu Jesus, dem Juden, Bd.1, 20-21).
The comparative theology remains crucial for Palestinian Christians to involve faith in their own life-world and its unique cultural-spiritual dignity and rebirth, while reading the biblical scripture together with the Quran and Islamic successive achievements of civilization. Such comparative study credits its cultural-spiritual renewal with a theological, philosophical Enlightenment, cultural Renaissance and alternative path to modernity and emancipation.
A comparative study of Islam, modernity and the people constitutes a fruitful regime of dialogue with Martin Buber’s vision of the Jewish people and his respect for Islam. Such comparative study contradicts a crude nationalist, assimilating form of Zionism as a betrayal of the name Zion, Shalom. It underlays its significance and inspiration in the future study of Bonhoeffer with the postcolonial, prophetic vision which underwrites the common covenant of the two independent nations with equal rights as united for common homeland and God’s shalom.
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