Sunday, December 11, 2005
(3:50 PM) | Anonymous:
Bonhoeffer and "The Jew" (ii)
First of all, a correction: the statement of Bonhoeffer's that I will discuss here was a response not to the Nuremberg laws (passed in 1935), but to the Deutsche Christen's proposal in 1933 to apply the "Aryan clause", formerly used to expel Jews from the civil service, to German Christian congregations.The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum hosts an informative online exhibition by Victoria Barnett on Bonhoeffer's stance during this period, and his subsequent resistance, imprisonment and murder. That exhibit mentions Bonhoeffer's "supersessionism", his adherence to the doctrine that Christianity superseded Judaism and that the ultimate destiny of the Jews was to be converted. In this post I will look more closely at Bonhoeffer's response to the crisis within the Confessing church: his statement on "The Church and the Jewish Question".
Bonhoeffer's statement opens with two quotations from Luther, each concerned with Jewish-Christian brotherhood:
Luther 1546: "We would still show them the Christian doctrine and ask them to turn and accept the Lord whom they should by rights have honoured before we did"..."Where they repent, leave their usury, and accept Christ, we would gladly regard them as our brothers."
Luther 1523: "If the Apostles, who also were Jews, had dealt with us Gentiles as we Gentiles deal with the Jews, there would have been no Christians among the Gentiles. But seeing that they have acted in such a brotherly way towards us, we in turn should act in a brotherly way towards the Jews in case we might convert some. For we ourselves are still not yet fully their equals, much less their superiors...but now we use force against them...what good will we do them with that? Similarly, how will we benefit them by forbidding them to live and work and have other human fellowship with us, thus driving them to practice usury?"
The imperative of brotherliness towards the Jews is owing to the brotherliness of the Jewish Apostles: it is a question of reciprocation, of the repayment of a debt, "[f]or we ourselves are still not yet fully their equals". At the same time, this imperative is itself conditional on Jewish repentance and acceptance of the Christ "whom they should by rights have honoured before we did". There is a default on both sides, a failure to give the honour that is owing "by rights". The priority of the Jews, their pre-eminence in relationship to God, places the Christian church in the position of a weaker and less-favoured younger sibling reminding the first-born of his duties. It is a family affair, of an old-fashioned variety.
The place of "usury" in each these two quotations reveals a further asymmetry: it is the practice of "usury" that the elder sibling must renounce, in order to be re-admitted into a brotherly relationship with the younger; but "usury" is the practice of those against whom force has been used, who have been excluded from "human fellowship". The origin of the tort indicated by this "usury" is in the younger sibling's use of force, his violent rejection and exclusion of the elder whom he should have honoured and treated in a brotherly way.
What "usury" further announces is that there is something rotten in the state of the debt: an exorbitance, a false reckoning of what is owing. The "usurous" practice of lending "at interest" has a relationship to the social that is both extra-legal and vitally/lethally mediating: without the interest demanded by the usurer, the flow of credit would be restricted and the prosperity nourished by speculation would wither. The Nazi spectre of the "Jewish financier", who engineers the disaster of whole economies for sinister gain, arises in part from the ambiguous status of finance itself.
These quotations from Luther would no doubt have been scandalous enough in their contradiction of Nazi doctrine. They establish the terms of the Confessing Church's "mission" to the Jews, which the Aryan clauses would have obstructed. Their appearance at the start of his statement also indicates Bonhoeffer's fidelity to that Church and to its Lutheran inheritance. It is this fidelity which dictates the course taken by Bonhoeffer in his treatment of "the Jewish question".
From the start, Bonhoeffer's critique of the course taken by the Deutches Christen takes the form of an ecclesiological analysis, which proceeds on two fronts:
The fact, unique in history, that the Jew has been made subject to special laws by the state solely because of the race to which he belongs and quite apart from his religious beliefs, raises two new problems for the theologican, which must be examined separately. What is the church's attitude to this action by the state? And what should the church do as a result of it? That is one question. The other is, what attitude should the church take to its members who are baptised Jews? Both questions can only be answered in the light of a true concept of the church.
On the first front, Bonhoeffer seeks to establish the correct relationship between the church and the state. He rules out, immediately, any suggestion that the role of the church might be to criticise specific actions of the state, or to raise humanitarian objections to the manner in which it enforces its decisions. Both of these are tasks for individuals and "humanitarian associations", acting out of conscience and moral principle.
The task reserved to the church is to know, and to attest to, the true nature and role of the state: "[h]istory is not made by the church, but by the state; but of course only the church, which bears witness to the coming of God in history, knows what history, and therefore what the state is". The church is the guardian of the state qua state, in its function of "creating law and order by means of force". Because the use of force will always entail moral concerns, the church does not (although individual Christians may) moralise about this or that action of the state; but "it can and should, precisely because it does not moralise in individual instances, continually ask the state whether its action can be justified as legitimate action of the state, i.e. as action which leads to law and order, and not to lawlessness and disorder".
This understanding of the role of the church in relation to the state is already marked by an opposition between "Gospel" and "Law": there is a radical gulf between "the standpoint of the Gospel" and "the standpoint of the Law", that forever removes the church from the field of moralising intervention in the history made by the legitimate state. The distinction Bonhoeffer makes between the obligation of "bandaging the victims under the wheel" of the state's use of force, and that of "putting a spoke in the wheel itself", does not therefore depend on the degree of force used, or the severity of the victims' injuries. It is neither a moral nor a humanitarian consideration that produces the compulsion to intervene. Rather, it is when the state endangers itself qua state through its own use of force that the church must act against the state, precisely and paradoxically in order to restore it.
The motif of anti-legalism that runs through this rejection of any intervention by the church in the normal life of the state receives a confirming flourish when Bonhoeffer notes that "the necessity of direct political action by the church is...to be decided at any time by an 'Evangelical Council', and cannot therefore ever by casuistically decided beforehand." The path to the exceptional situation, in which exceptional action must be taken, can never be indicated by the Law or by moral casuistry: it involves a decision, the need for which may arise "at any time", and which will always be a reflection on the necessity, rather than the legality, of that action.
In my third post on this subject, I will turn to Bonhoeffer's treatment of the distinction between Jewish and Gentile Christians, and the perhaps surprising character of his argument against the exclusion of Jews "by race" from the Christian congregation. I will try to show how and where anti-legalism becomes anti-Judaism, and how this anti-Judaism paradoxically informs Bonhoeffer's Christian defence of Jewish-Christian brotherhood.
