My major concern focuses on Bonhoeffer’s theology in terms of the public sphere of civil society and postcolonial condition. Public theology can be defined as a constructive-ethical way in effectively dealing with problems of stratification and reification in society and culture, which are embedded with postcolonial conditions (problem of immigration, refugees, and a new form of racism and biopolitical control under neoliberal Empire).
The year 1492 implies the beginning of the European hegemony and its artificial ideology of Eurocentrism over and against the other peoples in America, Africa, and Asia. The philosophy of Enlightenment (at the time of Lessing and Kant) was bound to slavery trade and colonial exploitation. European modernity is juxtaposed with, and penetrated into ‘under-modernity’ in the periphery. The colonial side of European modernity gave rise to misrecognition of the colonized Other.
As Charles Taylor writes, “It is held that since 1492 Europeans have projected an image of such people as somehow inferior, ‘uncivilized,’ and through the force of conquest have often been able to impose this image on the conquered... Within these perspectives, misrecognition shows not just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred. Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need.” (Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism, 26).
A politics of recognition is made an indispensable part of shaping public theology in postcolonial formation. In the dialectic of the Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno express that Enlightenment always has a task to liberate human beings from fear, while installing them as masters. Enlightenment’s program is defined as the disenchantment of the world in terms of power of choosing whether the subjugation of human beings to nature or subjugation of nature to them. (Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 25). The hunchback of the dialectic of Enlightenment perpetuates its neocolonial logic of blackmail in the present reality of late capitalism.
In the complex reality of the postcolonial condition, I involve analyzing Bonhoeffer’s theology at a genealogical level, by emphasizing the significant regime of effective history of the subjugated in the anamnestic frame of theologia crucis. This postcolonial position facilitates re-examining Bonhoeffer’s analysis of modernity as Janus face in reference to the Jews, the secular ungodly, and the poor.
Modernity with Janus Face
Bonhoeffer’s analysis of modernity continues to occupy his theological reflection during his imprisonment, in which he took seriously questions raised by the Enlightenment and challenges of modernity in accordance with his teacher, Adolf von Harnack. In doing so, public theology is differentiated from a wholesale attack on modernity under the slogan of under-modernity, which can be seen in the camp of liberation theology.
Gutierrez in his critical analysis of the limitations of modern theology seeks to reread the history of the Other from the side of the poor. He draws attention to the religious socialist dimension in Barth, who “is sensitive to the situation of exploitation in which these broad segments of humanity live.” However, Gutierrez takes issue with limitations of Bonhoeffer, because he does not find the protest movement of the poor or the labor movement in Bonhoeffer’s writings. His protest to National Socialism, as Gutierrez argues, did not move him to a deeper analysis of the crisis in today’s society. Thus, “Bonhoeffer was less sensitive to the world of injustice upon which the society was built.” (Gustavo Gutierrez, The Power of the Poor in History,176. 203).
Againat Gutierrez’s critique, Bonhoeffer, in his critical assessment of modernity and its blackmail, holds that a human being is emancipated in his/her tremendous power and restraints from all repressive authority and coercion. The modernity ushers into the unparalleled rise of technology, which turns into master over nature.
In fact, reason espoused with the Bourgeoisie became a working hypothesis and therefore an end itself. Bourgeoisie created a position of nobility of achievements, which is equal to the class of birth. “However, behind Bourgeoisie rose, dark and threatening, the masses, the fourth estate, with no other name than just the mass and its misery.” (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, vol. 6, 118-9).
The blackmail of modernity brings such unparalleled misery to the revolt of masses, while its promise to human rights brings nobility of achievement to the Bourgeoisie. Such revolt reached its peak in National Socialism and Fascism. Working class was assimilated to the political propaganda of the National Socialism and was made its army.
However, bourgeoisie and reason came to terms with each other for power and domination, but the underprivileged classes began to stir. The dark menace of the masses, the fourth estate, has loomed behind the bourgeoisie, as the masses and their misery. The millions of the undeserved wretchedness now raised their accusation and claim against the bourgeoisie. Their own law is that of misery rather than the law of emancipated reason. Technology, mass movement, and nationalism are the historical inheritance which the French Revolution has bequeathed to western modernity. It created a new unit which lies in the emancipation of humanity by means of reason, the masses, and the nation. (Ibid., 120).
Bonhoeffer's theology of the maturity of humanity is grounded in his critical, genealogical analysis of the project of the Enlightenment and the legacy of the French Revolution. The source of all sovereignty resides in people and their nation, which is contrasted with authoritative statism. The French Revolution has liberated the people from the absolutism of the state, subsequently, modern nationalism was born. But in Bonhoeffer’s view, the complex unity of reason, the masses and the nation entails the seeds of decay within itself. The demands for absolute liberty have brought people to the depths of slavery. Nationalism inevitably went to war (Ibid., 120-2).
At the end of modernity initiated by the French Revolution, there is secular nihilism, a reality of western godlessness, which is a religion of hostility to God. This is the deification of the human being in the proclamation of such secular nihilism, as seen in the religion of Bolshevism as well as penetrating its secularist spirit into the midst of the Christian church.
What is characteristic of Bonhoeffer’s time was National Socialism, religious nationalism, and Socialist Bolshevism. In the genealogical analysis of the history of the subjugated, Bonhoeffer can be seen in his concern with reparative justice for the dignity of innocent victims in the midst of biopolitical Fascism. If history in an anamnestic frame of reference includes its genealogical analysis of revealing universal history as power and domination, it breaks through ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke), which hides the brutal reality of violence and injustice of the masses.
Herein, there is no place for the insignificant and the different as subjugated under European reason and its modernist face of colonialism as displayed through power and domination. Walter Benjamin can be consonant with Bonhoeffer, because Benjamin underwent a ruined experience of German Fascism as the destruction of reason; here, biopolitical genocide was undertaken in the name of a racist ideology of progress and utilitarian collectivism or eudemonism. History is no longer known by virtue of progress and enlightened reason. Its continuity in a linear way is denounced as plots and fictions of the ruling class, since the ruin of the past and sacrifice of the victim grow skyward behind the marching history of rationalization and homogenization of all differences into the sameness.
In a like manner, Bonhoeffer champions his christological politics by emphasizing the Gospel against the bourgeois faith in progress and its utilitarian individualism. He reacts against bourgeois self-satisfaction in its convenient reversal of the radical meaning of the gospel. Bonhoeffer draws attention to Nietzsche, who undertook anti-Christian appropriation of the Greek heritage. Nietzsche might be taken as one of the greatest examples, at least in Bonhoeffer’s view, breaking with the bourgeois encapsulation of the gospel of the Reformation through his unparalleled critique of the metaphysic of the Enlightenment and its related nihilism. (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, vol. 6. 107. 64).
In fact, modernity has a Janus face in bringing out profound change in human life and emancipation from religious superstition and dominion, especially in Weber’s sense of disenchantment of the world. But it causes a reality of iron cage or social pathology of reification in the colonization of life-world in still justifying the neocolonial condition in today’s context. The reality of modernity is unsatisfied, yet incomplete, while requiring a meticulous exploration between reason, the subaltern and emancipation in light of God’s reconciliation in Christ with the world.
In so doing, Bonhoeffer does not reject entirely the world’s come of age, but brings the Gospel of reconciliation and theologia crucis to the incomplete legacy of modernity in favor of politics of recognition, theology of the subaltern, and human rights in the postcolonial spheres of civil society.
Modernist Phenomena and Its Challenge
Modernist phenomena in the aftermath of French Revolution and European humanism would be classified, according to Bonhoeffer, into the problem of anti-Semitism, the 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.” (Ibid., 105).
Indeed, Bonhoeffer might be ready to hear Jesus’ 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’ 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.
The Secular and the Poor
Bonhoeffer furthers to characterize a godlessness as full of promise, which is against pious godlessness corrupting the church. More than the secular atheism, the poor belongs to an essential part of the church’s confession of guilt, since this confessional stance denounces the spoliation and exploitation of the innocent victim and the poor by the enrichment and corruption of the strong (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, vol. 6. 140).
In the discussion of modernity with Janus face, Bonhoeffer brings his Christological position to advocate for the working class alienated in the system of capitalism. The capitalist society causes a reality of reification in the colonization of life of the working class.
Already in his study of ecclesiology (Sanctorum Communio), Bonhoeffer articulated the significance of the sociological category, in which his position of the Gospel is not value-neutral, but he takes into account the deliberation of Church and Proletariat. His sociological type of the church cuts through the limitation of distinction between church and sect (proposed by Weber and Troeltsch), and engages with social problems in a vast and complicated spectrum. “It [social problem] includes the problem of the capitalist economic period and of the industrial proletariat created by it; and of the growth of militaristic and bureaucratic giant states; of the enormous increase in population, which affects colonial and world policy; of the mechanical technique… that mobilizes the whole world for purposes of trade, but also that treats people and labor like machines.” (Bonhoeffer, Santorum Communio, 236).
Hence, Bonhoeffer emphasizes his Christology in dealing with the working class in his Christology lectures. “The church is an institution for promoting stupidity and the sanctioning of the capitalist system…Jesus the worker is present in the shops of the factories…He is in the midst of the working class, a fighter in the ranks of the working class struggling against the enemy, capitalism.” (Who Is Christ for US? eds. and trans. Nessan and Wind,36).
Obviously in Bonhoeffer’s concern, the “poor” or the subaltern serves as a hermeneutical-genealogical lens, which is bound to his preferential option for Jesus Christ present in solidarity with them. His subaltern theology cannot be adequately understood without a serious consideration of his reconciliation as a politics of recognition.
Politics of Recognition, Suum Cuique, and Parrhesia
Bonhoeffer conceptualizes his ethical position within the framework of the biblical symbol of reconciliation, which would be consonant with a phenomenology of life-world. This reconciliation embraces the forlorn and the godless into itself, while the ultimate holds open to the penultimate, which is connected with and empowered by the freedom of the ultimate.
Ethics of reconciliation empowers Christian discipleship involving creative activity in all social cultural realms and challenging the ruined aspect of the penultimate, where “human beings become things, commodities or machines.” (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, vol. 6. 165). In dealing with the reality of the penultimate, Bonhoeffer takes into account the regime of justice in terms of Roman antiquity and its law of suum cuique, to each one’s own. Bonhoeffer is concerned with diversity of the natural life and multiplicity of its rights in reference to the unity of justice, as expressed in the Roman law dictum for the supreme principle of the determination of the rights.
This stance defends one’s own from taken to mean the same, which results in destroying the multiplicity for the sake of abstract law. On the other hand, one’s own must not be arbitrary and subjectively determined, in which the unity of the rights would be abolished for the sake of unconstrained arbitrariness (Ibid., 181).
Bonhoeffer’s reflection of suum cuique can be obviously seen in his approach to reification of the human being in the capitalist order with its Fascist face, thus it sharpens the meaning of reconciliation in connection with reparative and distributive justice of the victim.
In the question of the good and the right, it is obviously important to conceptualize ethics of reconciliation in the sense of life-world for politics of recognition, which acknowledges validity of multiple life-worlds in the democratic, pluralist sphere. It is the religious symbol of reconciliation, as it were, which recognizes the life-world by correlation with it. In fact, God’s reconciliation does not negate or totalize specific unique cultural value and creativity of each life-world in comparative religions.
Having said this, I argue that Bonhoeffer’s non-religious interpretation paves a path to a model of interreligious dialogue or comparative theology, which is grounded in the universal horizon of the Gospel of reconciliation. Its postcolonial politics of recognition stands in solidarity with and emancipation of those marginalized in the world of comparative religions.
Furthermore, Bonhoeffer elaborates an ethical contour of life-world, insofar as the question of good is posed and is decided in the midst of our living relationships with people, social order of things, institutions, different histories, and power relations. He is positioned in discourse ethics (parrhesia), which characterizes and reinforces his ethics of discipleship through immanent critique, truthful validity, and emancipation.
In Bonhoeffer’s account, telling the truth is based on, and indebted to, the living God who entered into the world through Jesus Christ. God’s truth has become flesh and is alive in the real. The God sets us in a living life, because God is not a general principle nor a metaphysical idol. Our speech activity must be truthful in actual concrete life situation before God. (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 361).
Bonhoeffer’s mode of parrhesia shapes his ethical formation by challenging the church’s failure to speak the right word in the right way and at the right time. Violence and wrong were done in the covering of the name of Jesus Christ and for the sake of justification of corruption of the strong against the poor and countless victims slandered and defamed—the subaltern. Jesus and the subaltern play a decisive role in Bonhoeffer’s ethical formation.
In fact, there is a parallel between Bonhoeffer and Foucault in their respective resistance to Fascist way of life in the history of the present. Fascism is described as a type of religion of nature, as cultivated with a religious sensitivity and venerated with biological-national life. For Foucault a parrhesiatic mode of speech is rooted in the mystical, critical tradition of Christianity, which risks one’s life with the personal frankness and the unspoken confidence in God.
Foucault’s position can be described as a form of negative theology in its challenge of a divinization of western ‘man’ in the project of modernity. In a confidence in God’s love, effective resistance to power could take place. Foucault’s promotion of the non-fascist life strives for reconciliation and politics of recognition in unveiling the system of power-knowledge as a mechanism of exclusion and subjugation. (James Bernauer, “Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religion” in Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience, 77-94.
Thus, historical effect, language hierarchy, and social condition are all incorporated into the regime of life-world and analyzed in their relation between social discourse, material interests, different histories, and power relations. It requires an immanent critique of and emancipation from what is sedimented in obscurities, prejudices, and religious fanaticism. This ethical stance takes into account the postcolonial epistemology, in which public theology scrutinizes the extent to which biopolitical control of the human body reifies human life as givenness.
Effective History and Theologia Crucis
It is of significance to locate the biblical symbol of reconciliation in its double reference to the recognition of the Other and also to anamnestic reasoning of theologia crucis. The latter strengthens the critical import of reconciliation in challenging the unreconciled reality of society and culture stratified and reified in the public sphere by the reproducing mechanism of injustice and violence. It implies Christian transvaluation of all values, which strengthens the politics of recognition. This remains crucial in Bonhoeffer’s synthesis of theologia crucis with his genealogical approach to history from below along with the standpoint of: the outcast, the suspect, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, and the reviled.
More than that, Bonhoeffer’s genealogy of history sharpens a biblical symbol of reconciliation in the sense that all other cultures and religions have their own validities and truth claims in the framework of life-world. It underlies correlation, inter-textuality, and mutual recognition. Each culture may become a semantic realm underlying a metaphor of the book of creation as the penultimate reality, which entails a wider spectrum of exegesis and interpretation.
Bonhoeffer’s idea of reconciliation knows no abyss of evil hidden from God, because the world is reconciled with God. It embraces even the most abysmal secularism of the world. Following in the footsteps of Luther, he holds: “The curses of the godless sometimes sound better in God’s ear than the hallelujahs of the pious.” (Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, 160. Endnote. 59).
This perspective incorporates significant ruptures and discontinuities in the course of history (in the sense of effective history concerned with the margins) into Christian social imagination of public theology. It problematizes the extent to which exclusion would take place along with domination, foreclosure, and omission, when it comes to race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality.
The position of effective history finds its significance in Walter Benjamin’s anamnestic reasoning of history and progress tainted with European Fascism. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another” (thesis VII) (Benjamin, Illuminations, 256).
An archeological reading strategy is required for those in their fight against politics of manipulation and barbarism, which swallowed them into the abyss of capitalist modernity. Indeed, Bonhoeffer can be allied with postcolonial critique of Fascism, Eurocentric modernity, and colonial racism.
In James Cone’s account, the Christian political realism of Reinhold Niebuhr takes the point of departure on the basis of self-interest and power. What characterizes Niebuhr is seen in his approach to the cross as ‘transvaluation of values’ (Nietzsche), in which God’s love and mercy is sought in the cross of Jesus Christ as ‘the very key to history itself.’ (James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 35).
However, Cone argues that Niebuhr retains a complex position on racial issues, but the problem of race never becomes one of his central concerns. In Cone’s view, Bonhoeffer during his study at Union Seminary (1930-1931) took an existential interest in engaging with African American history and literature, while even preaching at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. This perspective affirms Bonhoeffer’s conversion to Black Jesus and his emersion experience with the poor and oppressed within the black American narrative in the Harlem Renaissance. (Reggie L. Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus).
This earlier stance can be seen in Bonhoeffer’s attitude against violence and abuse of the power in his sermon in London in 1934: “Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its apologia for the weak… It should give much more offense, more shock to the world, than it is doing. Christianity should… take a much more definite stand for the weak than to consider the potential moral right of the strong.” (Bonhoeffer, London: 1933-1935, DBW, vol. 13, 402-3).
His position finds its culmination in his genealogy of effective history, anamnestic form of theologia crucis, and the politics of recognition. Bonhoeffer’s political stance calls the church “not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself.” (Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” in: Berlin: 1932–1933, DBW, vol. 12, 365).
Conclusion
Of special significance in this paper is a genealogical skill in reinterpreting Bonhoeffer in order to reclaim his prophetic legacy in the discussion of public theology in postcolonial formation. In social, historical analysis of European modernity with Janus face, Bonhoeffer takes issue with the bourgeois encapsulation of the gospel. His critique of bourgeois modernity entails symbolic–materialist signifier in protest to systems of domination and the marching progress of the victor and violence in perpetrating the innocent victim and burying them in the underside of history. Theologia crucis in the politics of recognition reinforces Christian ethics of discipleship to advocate the life of the subaltern which is caused and stratified in the public realms by means of the wave of immigration and refugee issues, while caught into neo-racism in the neoliberal phase of global capitalism.
A social scientific approach to diverse public spaces facilitates public theology in dealing with the reality of hierarchy and stratification in social formation under control, discipline, and oppression inflicting upon the life of the subaltern. To rewrite the history of the present requires a genealogical-anamnestic reading strategy underlying a radical critical reflection, or a subversive memory of Jesus, an innocent victim. This configuration of Jesus as representative of collective suffering emphasizes the significance of messianic eruption in our midst for rupture, transformation, and revolution.
History as constellation is of a pluralist and democratic character like stars in the sky, as invested in each unique life-world in the light of reconciliation, which undergirds a postcolonial politics of recognition against Eurocentric modernity, neo-racism, and the brutal reality of biopolitical violence. Indeed, God speaks to the church through their face and bare life, that is, most defenseless weakest brothers and sisters standing in the life of Jesus Christ. It shapes the parrhesia of the discipleship involving the effective history in contradiction to Euro-American hegemony, any fundamentalist form of religious fanaticism, and its ideological legitimacy.