Bonhoeffer on the Interplay of Mystery and Joy

In the latter part of his biography of Bonhoeffer, Charles Marsh carefully works through Bonhoeffer’s prison writings. The prison letters have come to be seen as some of Bonhoeffer most important and challenging theological work, and in this post I’d like to reflect on two recurring themes from those letters, namely the themes of hilaritas and arcnaum. Hilaritas is Christian joy that embraces the this-worldliness experience of life and Being, while arcanum is the unfathomable mystery of God as God. I’d like to suggest that these two themes are deeply entwined, that the proper response to mystery is in fact joy, that the recognition of arcanum is not a throwing up of the arms in the face of mystery but a joyful embrace of life as life and God as God.

Bonhoeffer’s reflections on these themes speak to his understanding of the vocation of theology. In a purely academic setting there might be no place for mystery at all, expect perhaps to solve it or to dispel it. But this is not how Bonhoeffer ever saw his own theological vocation, and especially not in prison at the end of his life. As Marsh writes: “It was a great mistake, Bonhoeffer said, to think of theology’s purpose as being the unveiling of mystery, ‘to bring down to the flat, ordinary wisdom of experience and reason!’ Theology should rather, as its sole mission aim to ‘preserve God’s wonder as wonder, to understand, to define, to glorify God’s mystery as mystery,’ ‘In the arcanum,’ he said, ‘Christ takes everyone who really encounters him by the shoulder, turning them around to face their fellow human beings and the world.’ Theology’s task was to preserve the eternal mystery in a catastrophically demystified time.” (from Strange Glory)

And it is precisely at this point that joy enters the conversation because the preservation of mystery is not a dour task, but a deeply joyful invitation into the life of God and into the world itself. Bonhoeffer sums this theme up as hilaritas. Bonhoeffer’s initial reflections on hilaritas emerged from his reading of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics II.2 in prison. In that volume, Marsh notes, “Bonhoeffer discovered the value of hilaritas—good humor—as the quality of mind, body, and spirit most important to animating the greatest human achievements.” But it was more than this too. Hilaritas is also a joyful resistance to the nihilism Bonhoeffer saw around him. It is a refusal to accept the construal of the world as nothing more than power, an absolute determination to not surrender. But it is more than a No; it is first a Yes. As Marsh writes, “hilaritas is “saying the Yes and the Amen in gleeful defiance of the Nothing” (366).

Thinking of the interplay of mystery and joy, I’m struck that the book of Ephesians is both the most extended meditation on the mystery of God as revealed in the gospel and the most breathlessly doxological book epistle in the New Testament.

Joyful doxology is the proper response to mystery. If mystery becomes simply something to be solved, then two possible dangers emerge, one being a throwing up of the hands and the other being the temptation to move on once the mystery is “solved”. Balthasar expounds on this second danger, writing, “Problems do not exist in order to be solved; we can never get ‘behind’ Being. We always look with mild contempt on everything we have solved. Problems should always become more luminous in the light of the great mystery in which we live, move, and have our being.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat

Bonhoeffer and the Crisis of the German Church

I recently finished reading Charles Marsh’s excellent biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Strange Glory. There is much to reflect on in the book, and I would commend it to any one not only interested in Bonhoeffer but also to anyone interested in the question of what difference theology might make in a given life or given historical moment.

Along those lines, I was particularly struck by Marsh’s damning critique of theological liberalism and the German Church’s complicity with and acceptance of National Socialism. Marsh writes, “The German Christian movement did not so much destroy as emerge from the ruins of the once-grand Protestant liberal architectonic. It was perhaps a predictable dénouement for a tradition that increasingly turned theology intro anthropology, surrounding the disciplined language of belief to the habit of speaking about God as if of human nature write large.” As a consequence of this anthropological reduction of theology, “the clerics of the German Christian Church would recast the Holy Spirit as an ethos instead of a person: ‘a nature spirit, a folk spirit, Germanness in its essence.’”

Marsh’s critique aligns with Bonhoeffer’s own misgivings about the German theological establishment, which Bonhoeffer harbored even in his own university days. But it is not just this theology that contributed to the German church’s fall to Nazism. As Marsh observes that theology was part of a dangerous cocktail that included Lutheran understandings of the relationship of Church and State, as well as the deep resentments within Germany in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles, and perhaps most dangerously, the long standing legacies of Germanic warrior culture and blood and soil nationalism. In other words, bad theology may not have been the only cause, but it certainly didn’t help, and the bad theology had no resources of real protest, no prophetic counter-witness to offer.

So how to respond? That question sits at the center of Bonhoeffer’s own life work, and while a part of his response to these conditions was protest, more central in my view was his reimagined vision of theological education as a kind of Protestant monasticism centered on a rule of life and the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount. Speaking of his written reflections on these issues, Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, Marsh observes that Bonhoeffer’s call to radical discipleship and his renewed emphasis on the Sermon the Mount is at one and the same time a needed corrective and an overstatement. On one hand the state church’s captivity to the Nazis and the underlying complacency of German Christianity needed to be challenged, as Bonhoeffer rightly does. But on the other hand, there is a danger within his vision of radical discipleship in laying “upon the individual soul not just his cross but the weight of the world.” Such a burden can “too easily (become) a recipe for a tortured soul or, worse, for an unforgiving perfectionism and sanctimonious bravado.” Despite these dangers, however, the book succeeds because “it was addressed to the crisis at hand.”

Addressing the crisis at hand, in other words, might, or maybe must, take the form of overstatement. This is a helpful reminder as we look at the past and assess Christian theology in different historical moments. What may have been the right book then, may not be the right book now or the right book for another moment with different challenges and conditions. Faithfulness does not necessarily look like a timeless response. It’s more like driving the conditions of the road.