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Bonhoeffer’s New Beginning: Ethics After Devastation
Andrew D. DeCort
Fortress Academic (2018). 300 pp.
Human autonomy is the great idolatry of our time. Human agency, human initiative, is the power that fuels the modern world, a power that has taken upon itself, after the death of God, the power of God to create a new world, to begin again.
In his book Bonhoeffer’s New Beginning: Ethics After Devastation, Andrew DeCort, Guest Professor of Peace and Conflict at Wheaton College and Founder of The Institute for Faith and Flourishing, brings Dietrich Bonhoeffer into conversation with modern autonomy and its project of creating a new beginning. He does this through a deep reading of Bonhoeffer’s theological vision of God as the beginning. Tracing the theme of “beginnings” in Bonhoeffer, DeCort finds a hermeneutical key that unlocks fresh insight into both Bonhoeffer’s theological ethics and his call to the church to live her calling in the world as those who do not have our own autonomous beginning, but who live only from the creating Word of God as revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus. This dependence on God frees the church to lay down our self-initiated and self-protective projects in the world so that we might truly love our neighbor. This is a message the church today, awash in human agency and initiative, conformed to human political and cultural projects, needs to hear.
In DeCort’s telling, modernity is fundamentally a project pursuing a new beginning. Having rejected the vision of God and the world that shaped the West for over a millennia, modernity set out to create a new world, to create new forms of social organization and cultural meaning. This new beginning required thinkers who would reframe the nature of the world and history, working to infuse a moral framework into this vision that is not based on the revelation of God or on the political structures of Christendom, but instead on human rationality and agency.
DeCort positions Friedrich Nietzsche as the symbol of this human project of a new beginning. (While he also engages with three other thinkers, Hannah Arendt, Jonathan Glover, and Jonathan Lear, ultimately, he concludes that these other three are species of the Nietzschean genus, a conclusion that in some ways makes them superfluous to the story DeCort is telling). Nietzsche’s philosophical project sought to courageously face up to the reality of God’s death in a way that Western philosophy up to his time had not. For Nietzsche, although the modern West had rejected the God of Christianity, it had not rejected the Christian moral vision. Instead, European philosophers had been working to build the world after God but with Christian morality, or what Nietzsche called “slave morality,” a moral vision that was, in Nietzsche’s telling, the way for the weak to gain power of the strong. Nietzsche’s project, then, was to initiate a new moral vision, following the devastation of the death of God, that fully rejected the Christian grounds of morality, and so offer a new beginning for moral reasoning based on the will to power of humanity, or, on human autonomy. This autonomy was essential to the modern project, but Nietzsche was the “new European” who sought to truly embrace human autonomy by creating a new beginning initiated by a full embrace of human will.
DeCort brings Bonhoeffer into conversation with Nietzsche, seeing in Bonhoeffer a theologian who recognized and grappled with the moral devastation of the West, a devastation that was coming to a destructive climax in his time with the rise of Hitler and his project of a new beginning for Germany. For Bonhoeffer, there certainly is a death of God, the crucifixion of Jesus, but this does not lead to the annihilation of God and the need for autonomous humanity to self-begin, but rather to the annihilation of death, which means the annihilation of all humanly-conceived and constructed projects of human autonomy. Tracing the theme of “beginnings” through Bonhoeffer’s work, DeCort articulates Bonhoeffer’s theological project that roots an ethics after devastation not in human will or autonomy, which are the result of our rejection of God in Gen 3, but in the divine grace of God who, in Christ, reveals Godself to us as the Creator who wills human good. As such, ethics after devastation must be the result of waiting on the will of God, of listening for the Word of God, not of human initiative or reform.
This means that, for Bonhoeffer, followers of Jesus must reject human-initiated projects of establishing new beginnings. Instead, the church must be the community of disciples who live in radical dependence on Christ as the Word of God that leads and guides us in fellowship with God and neighbor. Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on Christology as the ground of being human confronts the modern, Nietzschean projects of self-creation, projects that inevitably descend into the will to power of moral coercion, whether at the personal or national level. Bonhoeffer was witness to these autonomous projects in his time, and called the church to reject reliance on human agency in order to walk in the creating willing of God who is the beginning. Only then will our will be rightly aligned with God’s will, and so only then will the church be the community of the crucified Christ that we are called to be.
DeCort’s book offers a fresh reading of Bonhoeffer, articulating a hermeneutical key that provides insight into important themes for under standing Bonhoeffer in his own context, and also how his theology continues to challenge and encourage the church today. DeCort has an impressive grasp of Bonhoeffer’s theological project and works across his theological writings with skill. This is not an entry-level book, and so those who are unfamiliar with Bonhoeffer may find it challenging, but for those who want to delve deeper into Bonhoeffer’s thought, and who want to understand how his theology engaged the key issues of modernity and how it continues to speak to the challenges we are facing, this is an excellent book.
Joel Lawrence (PhD, Cambridge University) is the President of the Center for Pastor Theologians. He is the author of Bonhoeffer: A Guide for the Perplexed (T&T Clark, 2010) and co-editor of Confronting Racial Injustice: Theory and Praxis for the Church (Cascade, 2022) and Reconstructing Evangelicalism (Cascade, forthcoming, 2024).
