Act and Being: Not a Review

I don’t really have the gumption to review–much less critique–this second dissertation that Bonhoeffer completed when he was just twenty-four years old. Act and Being is Bonhoeffer’s Habilitation, common in German academia, which is a second dissertation written by doctoral students for the purpose of qualifying the student to become a professor in the German academy. The work is more technical and much more difficult to read than Sanctorum Communio, from what I recall (although my memory may have grown fuzzy in the intervening years since I read through his first dissertation). It is worth pointing out that Hans Richard-Reuter accurately described the work in his afterword when he wrote,

What is presented–altogether in the style of the sovereign independent thinker–is a philosophical tour d’horizon, followed by a theological tour de force. It leads us into the rarefied air of conceptual abstraction and through the compact, abbreviated forumlae of the language of philosophical-theological theories and schools. … One may with good reason ask whether the limits of intelligibility of the text are to be blamed solely on the reader’s lack of understanding or on the author’s unwillingness or inability to convey his subject matter in more detailed arguments as well.

Act and Being, 162

All of that to say the work was quite demanding, even for somebody who considers himself reasonably well-read in the broad strokes of Western philosophical history.

In as succinct a manner I believe possible without bastardizing the thesis, it seems to me that Bonhoeffer’s concern is to re-center the philosophical debate between being qua stable ontological ground and act qua contingent nature(? experience?) in terms amenable to Lutheran orthodoxy. Successful or not, the project is ambitious in its own right, as Bonhoeffers is conversant with a great number of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors. The first two-thirds of the work was Bonhoeffer describing and critiquing the philosophical moment, specifically in terms of the question of act and being with reference to Dasein, the revelation of god, and the church as the instantiation of Christ.

In some ways the work is an extension of Bonhoeffer’s earlier dissertation–though certainly not solely an extension (viz. 112). He is still concerned with the existence of the church with regard to its nature as the tangible Christ, but Act and Being is more far-reaching than a mere expansion of his earlier thoughts.

I do not intend to proceed through each of Bonhoeffer’s chains of arguments, nor do I have any desire to provide a synopsis of the thesis as such. From here, I am not at all certain how much more I will have to say, but I suppose when the words stop coming that it will be time to call it a day. I simply want to draw your attention to a few things I found interesting as I made my way through Act and Being.

For one, Bonhoeffer is here highly critical of a concept of faith as a psychic, subjective experience (viz. 128). For Bonhoeffer faith only exists not in reflection upon itself (I am confident in my being-made-right-with-God because I have faith) but in its insistence on keeping only Christ in view (I am confident … because of Christ). He writes,

Whether I do or do not believe is something that no reflection on my religious acts can determine; it is equally impossible for me, in the process of believing, to focus on my faith, so that I would have to believe in my faith. Faith is never directed towards itself but always toward Christ, toward that which comes from outside. Thus, only in faith in Christ do I know that I believe (which is to say that here I do not now it), and in reflection on faith in Christ I know nothing. From the nonobjectivity of God follows necessarily the nonobjectivity of the I which knows God–and this implies that revelation should be the nonobjectivity of faith.

Bonhoeffer, 93-4

This model of faith is, I think, quite right, mimicking in form if not content the cry, “I believe, Lord! Help my unbelief!” Richard Hays makes use of a similar understanding in The Faith of Jesus Christ, in which our confidence hinges not upon the stability of our faith but the stability of its object. In my own teaching, I have frequently made the point that however wavering we feel we are in faith, it matters not that we waver but that we fix our eyes upon Christ our buoy in troubled water.

A second, though brief, idea that Bonhoeffer simply glides by is that god’s “existence” such as it is cannot be the same as ours. He actually puts the point more strongly,

The reason the three possible interpretations of the being of revelation that we have discussed fail to do justice to the Christian idea of revelation is that they understand the revealed God as something existing, whereas all existing things are transcended by act and being.

Bonhoeffer, 105 (italics mine)

Act and being are supraexistential conditions that are beyond all existent things; nothing is that is not bound by the conditions of act and of being. All things that are can be understood only within these concepts; nothing that exists is comprehensible without these concepts.

However, god is not bound by these conditions; god is ontologically prior to act and being as such; god is in a manner incommensurate with existence. To borrow the famous title, god is beyond being. Tillich gets at this idea when he discusses god as the “ground of being,” from which all existence is derived, but Bonhoeffer does not get into such specifics at this point. It is not hard to see how Bonhoeffer would either here or in his later writings be appropriated by the Death of God movement on this point, but I’m certainly not convinced yet that it’s a reasonable appropriation.

Bonhoeffer spends a not inconsiderable amount of time breaking down the differences between believing, preaching, and theological knowings, but I think this section is worth spending a longer period of time wrestling with than I am at present willing to commit. In nuce, theological knowledge is a precondition for preaching knowledge, which is the doxastic proclamation of the realities of the gospel rather than discursive reflections about said realities. Theological knowledge can shape preaching knowledge, but preaching knowledge as a first-order proclamation rather than second-order reflection gives birth to faith, believing knowledge. Circumscribing the task of the academy in this manner certainly foreshadows Bonhoeffer’s not-distant dissatisfaction with and departure therefrom. He writes pointedly to this effect,

Thinking, including theological thinking, will always be ‘systematic’ by nature and can, therefore, never grasp the living person of Christ into itself.

Bonhoeffer, 132

In reflecting on this post, I am more impressed with the insights in Act and Being than I was when I initially finished reading the work. There are fruitful avenues of study here, including plenty that I have not mentioned. I imagine I’ll return to this work as I continue through Bonhoeffer’s corpus over the coming months.

In terms of my overall reading agenda for this year, I am making steady progress in Is There a Meaning, and I have greatly enjoyed my progress in Blood Meridian to date. I finished a very fascinating first volume of three in a biography of Winston Churchill, and I will soon pick up The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt–another first volume of three.