Saturday, January 07, 2006
(12:00 AM) | Anonymous:
Bonhoeffer and "The Jew" (iii)
To recap: part i concerned the limits of Bonhoeffer's philo-semitism, as expressed by his saying that "[T]he Jew keeps open the question of Christ". Part ii introduced Bonhoeffer's statement on the issue of the application of the "Aryan clause" to the Confessing church, and discussed the anti-legalism implicit in his discussion of the proper relationship between church and state. I promised, rather rashly, 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". The more I think about this, the more it seems like a great thesis that someone else should have a go at defending. But we bloggers must honour our commitments, so here goes.I said that Bonhoeffer's objections to the Deutsche Christen's proposal to expel Jews from German Christian congregations were ecclesiological in character, and proceeded on two fronts - the first being Bonhoeffer's analysis of the church's role in securing the "appointed function" of the state as the instrument of law and order. The law, as a "penultimate" thing (according to Bonhoeffer's division in the Ethics between last and penultimate things), takes the form of state institutions, through which the state acts as "preserver of the world" and maker of history through the use of force. (Not to be distracted by it here, but a supplementary question suggests itself: are the preservation of the world and the making of history the same function? Is the violence employed by the state the same violence, in either case?). It is the church, however, that because it "bears witness to the coming of God in history...knows what history is".
The history of the law, the history that is made through law-making, is the history into which God has come; it is also the history of Jewish suffering. Bonhoeffer calls this history accursed, according to the anti-semitic tradition that assigns to "the Jews" collectively and exclusively the responsibility for the killing of Christ:
The Church of Christ has never lost sight of the thought that the 'chosen people', who nailed the redeemer of the world to the cross, must bear the curse for its action through a long history of suffering. "Jews are the poorest people among all nations upon earth, they are tossed to and fro, they are scattered here and there in all lands, they have no certain place where they could remain safely and must always be afraid that they will be driven out..." (Luther, Table Talk).
This is a "thought" that it might well be better to forget, or think against; when I say that Bonhoeffer remains faithful to the Confessing church and to its Lutheran inheritance, I do not mean this as a statement of praise or blame. The "curse" of the Jews shows itself in the scattering that places them in question wherever they are, in question precisely in relation to the state that preserves the world by upholding the law. Bonhoeffer does not deny that there is a "Jewish question": on the contrary, he affirms it - on the best Lutheran authority - as the destiny of the Jews to suffer throughout history. But this suffering shows the limits of state history, inasmuch as "the Jew" is both excluded from the protection of the state (or at best temporarily and ambiguously sheltered within it) and destined to an historic "home-coming" that is a return, not to the bosom of the state, but to God:
But the history of the suffering of this people, loved and punished by God, stands under the sign of the final home-coming of the people of Israel to its God. And this home-coming happens in the conversion of Israel to Christ...The conversion of Israel, that is to be the end of the people's period of suffering. From here the Christian church sees the history of the people of Israel with trembling as God's own, free, fearful way with his people. It knows that no nation of the world can be finished with this mysterious people, because God is not yet finished with it. Each new attempt to 'solve the Jewish problem' comes to nothing on the saving-historical significance of this people; nevertheless, such attempts must continually be made.
I do not know what German term "saving-historical" translates, but would suggest that "saving-history" is history as the church sees it, as distinct from history as the state makes it. The history that the church sees "with trembling" is the history of the "mysterium tremendum", the mystery with which no nation of the world can be finished. The Jews, qua "people", are the sign in the present of what exceeds the present. So:
as [the church] looks at the rejected people, it humbly recognises itself as a church continually unfaithful to its Lord and looks full of hope to those of the people of Israel who have come home, to those who have come to believe in the one true God in Christ, and knows itself to be bound to them in brotherhood. Thus we have reached the second question.
(Here, again, I wish I had access to the German text: it would be good to know whether the word translated here as "rejected" is the "verworfen" of "Der Stein, den die Bauleute verworfen haben, der ist zum Eckstein geworden" - and note, incidentally, the word-music of the Luther Bible's juxtaposition of "verworfen" and "geworden"). This fatal embrace of worldly suffering and eschatological privilege was not then a new theme in Christian meditations on "the Jew"; neither is it wholly defunct in the present day. But note that it is by way of this meditation that Bonhoeffer approaches "the second question".
The second question, also ecclesiological in character, is the question of the racial composition of the Christian church. Bonhoeffer's argument here turns on the distinction between the Jewish Christian and the Gentile Christian. Things are complicated from the outset:
From the point of view of the church of Christ, Judaism is never a racial concept but a religious one. What is meant is not the biologically questionable entity of the Jewish race, but the "people of Israel". Now, the "people" of Israel is constituted by the law of God; a man can thus become a Jew by taking the Law upon himself. But no-one can become a Jew by race. In the time of the great Jewish mission to the Gentile world there were different stages of membership of Judaism....In the same way, the concept of Jewish Christianity has religious, not biological content. The Jewish-Christian mission also stretched to Gentile territory (Paul's opponents in the Epistle to the Galatians). There were Gentile Jewish-Christians and Jewish Gentile-Christians.
What, then, is the basis for the distinction between the Jewish-Christian and the Gentile-Christian? It is that the Jewish Christian "lets membership of the people of God, of the church of Christ, be determined by the observance of a divine law", while the Gentile Christian "knows no presupposition for membership of the people of God...but the call of God by his Word in Christ". Now, here is where Bonhoeffer makes an unusual move. He argues that the Aryan clause's requirement that German institutions must be racially "purified" of Jews would, if applied to the church, be an instance of a "presupposition for membership" of the Jewish-Christian type:
There would be an analogous situation today where a church group within the Reformation Church allowed membership of the church to be determined by the observance of a divine law, for example the racial unity of the members of the community. The Jewish-Christian type materialises where this demand is put irrespectively of whether its proponents belong to the Jewish race or not...The exclusion of Jews by race from our German church would bring this latter into the Jewish Christian category. Such an exclusion thus remains impossible for the church. [italics mine]
Bonhoeffer restates this argument almost immediately afterwards in a more banal form: a "forced ejection" of the Jews from the church would represent "a real split in the church, simply because it would raise the racial unity of the church to the status of a law which would have to be fulfilled as a presupposition for church membership. In doing this the church community which did the excluding would constitute itself a Jewish-Christian community".
These two forms of the argument are not identical, however, and neither makes complete sense. Bonhoeffer has already said, correctly, that Judaism is "not a racial concept" and that a person may become a Jew "by taking the Law upon himself". It does not follow, then, that a demand for "the racial unity of the members of the community" would be an instance of a divine law that must be observed as a presupposition for church membership. The divine law - that is, the Law - is emphatically not racial; it may be chosen by anyone; thus, anyone can become a Jewish-Christian. In the case of the second form of the argument, the establishment of "a law which would have to be fulfilled as a presupposition for church membership" would be the imposition of a law of the state, not the divine Law, and would therefore not have the effect of constituting the church community as a Jewish-Christian community.
Bonhoeffer wishes to argue that the church cannot expel Jews from its membership and remain the church that it is - that is, the Gentile-Christian church "where Jew and German stand together under the Word of God" (are there not, then, German Jews?). If anyone "feels unable to tolerate church fellowship with Christians of Jewish race...it must then be made clear to him with the utmost seriousness that he is then loosing himself from the place on which the church of Christ stands and that he is thus bringing to reality the Jewish-Christian idea of a religion based on law, i.e. is falling into modern Jewish Christianity". But, as Bonhoeffer himself has noted that there were Gentile Jewish-Christians, does this not mean that a "modern Jewish Christianity" might equally mean a church where Jew and Gentile stand together?
The rhetorical ingenuity of the attack is undeniable: exclude the Jews, and you become Jews - or, at least, the "Jewish-Christian type materialises". And Bonhoeffer is surely not mistaken in his assertion that no church that excludes Jews by race from membership can be a true church of Christ. But is he not mistaken in his claim that the error of such a church would be the error of "falling into modern Jewish Christianity", and that a Jewish-Christian church could not be a true church of Christ? Does he not, in short, confuse the law of the state - whose protection the "people of Israel", as scattered and suffering wanderers, are not in any case guaranteed - with the divine Law? It is this confusion that connects the anti-legalism of Bonhoeffer's argument concerning the relationship between church and state to the anti-Judaism of his dismissal of "the Jewish-Christian type".
I hope that I have not abused anyone's patience with this very long post, and that its connections to other topics of interest to Weblog readers, while largely implicit, are not wholly obscure. Others who do not share my admiration for Bonhoeffer may not feel the necessity of reading him critically as strongly as I do; nevertheless, I hope that this exercise has had some chance of being thought-provoking for them also.
