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Michelle J. Bartel
Department of Religion
Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota
November 22, 1997
Christian Theological Research Fellowship
AAR/SBL 1997, San Francisco
Introduction
One of the most fruitful affirmations of the Christian doctrines of creation and the imago dei is the affirmation that human beings as created by God are fundamentally called by God into relationship with God and with others. God calls humans into being, and the call indicates communication, relationship and purpose. Fundamentally, the divine act of creation is a vocational act and indicates the possibility for the fundamental understanding of human beings as called and all human life as fundamentally vocational.
Several affirmations arise from this first affirmation of vocation, theological affirmations which comprise ethical affirmations. In addition to the general context of vocation as applicable to all human life, this affirmation of vocation grounded in the doctrine of creation leads to a particular understanding of discernment as part of human life in the context of vocation and, especially in conjunction with the doctrine of the imago dei, leads ineluctably to the notion of community as the context of discernment.
This offers a new perspective on community in which the individual-community dynamic is understood within the context of vocation and as the context for discernment. Drawing on the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Calvin, and Karl Barth, I will discuss these theological affirmations, the ethical affirmations which they comprise, and the fruitful possibilities for this approach in the current climate of postmodernity.
Communal Individuals and Community: Dietrich Bonhoeffer
According to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, all of creation is called into being by God’s own Word. God’s Word as indicative of what is and God’s imperative command that this shall exist are identical. Thus all that is depends on God’s Word for existence. Bonhoeffer’s doctrine of the imago dei is grounded in his fundamental affirmation that in God’s complete freedom, God elected to create. There is no necessity to God’s creation, only God’s own choice to create.
God desired to see God’s own reflection in the creation, and so created human kind as God’s image. This image is not a capacity or characteristic of what human beings are in and of themselves. Rather, this image is the relationship between God and humanity, a given and set relationship. The reflection is of free relationship to and for the other. In God’s complete freedom, God chose to create humanity as related to God in free relationship for God and for others. God freely chooses to be bound to (not by) humanity, and reflects this self-election in the creation of humanity as bound to one another and to God. Freedom, in fact, consists in relationship: "In the language of the Bible, freedom is not something man has for himself but something he has for others".1
We mirror God in terms of this relatedness. This relatedness is premised on the notion that human beings are individuals, which is seen in the creation of Adam and Eve. These two are one and yet two, Bonhoeffer says, belonging to one another by virtue of their identical source, God. Their unity as companions is in their belonging to one another as individuals, it is not in their sameness as members of the same species. “They were one from their origin and only when they become one do they return to their origin. This becoming one is never the fusion of the two, the abolition of their creatureliness as individuals. It is the utmost possible realization of their belonging to one another, which is based directly upon the fact that they are different from one another.”2
The simultaneity of individuality and belongingness reveals that our freedom in relationship is delimited by the other person as our limit, that is, the other person is the limit of our freedom. We are always individuals to God, always separate people, but never individuals for the sake of individuality, but rather for the sake of the other. Being a community for Bonhoeffer, then, is never a case of everyone being the same. We do not all receive the same call from God in our everyday lies. We do not all live in the same situations. We are, in point of fact, all different.
Thus, freedom in relationship, as the image of God, means the freedom of the individual in relationship. We are really free to be who we are as individual human beings. This freedom, in other words, is not empty nor abstract. For Bonhoeffer this freedom in relationship is hammered out in real and concrete life, but it is always freedom for. And in a provocative turn, Bonhoeffer observes that “since all persons are created unique, even in the community of love the tension between wills is not abolished. This means that conflict as such is not the consequence of the fall, but arises on the basis of the common love for God.”3 The difference is not difference for difference' sake, but difference which is recognized in the fact that the Creator of difference is God Godself. God is our origin, but not the origin of Adam who is then the origin of Eve and all humanity. By creating Eve God declares by fiat that all individuality is due to God and finds its unity in belonging to God. Human beings belong to one another not so much by choice as by difference.4
That we belong to one another because of our common origin and precisely because of our difference means that we are communal individuals. As communal individuals called into existence by God, we are called into individuality and community simultaneously. God, by God’s Word, creates a community of individuals in creating communal individuals who image God’s own freedom for the other.
Epistemic Community: Discernment, Vocation, and the Call to Discipleship
In so far as the other is the limit of our freedom, the other as “Thou” is our “ethical barrier.” The other person confronts us as another subject, not an object in our own existence. This is because all persons are subjects created by God, who belong primarily to God and because of this relationship, belong to one another. Because the other person is our limit and because they confront us as an ethical barrier, the other person calls us to responsibility. The other person is not an object which I can classify, but a person to whom I must respond.
The shape and parameters of this response are of the utmost importance to Bonhoeffer. In the network of relationships and the flux of earthly life the person is pressed to ask “What is the place and what are the limits of my responsibility?”5 According to Bonhoeffer, it is the call of Christ which gives us our place, and therefore our responsibility, in the world. Vocation is the answer to the question posed above. More specifically, the claim of Christ on a person’s life is the call to discipleship. Discipleship is impossible to understand without vocation since it is the call of God which makes discipleship possible. One does not decide to follow Christ nor to become Christ’s disciple. Instead, “divine grace comes upon man and lays claim to him. It is not man who seeks out grace in its own place. . . but it is grace which seeks and finds man in his place. . . and which precisely in this place lays claim to him”.6
The nature of our discipleship is never set in stone. We are disciples of Christ wherever we are when that claim is laid upon us, not because those positions, settings, or facts of life are therefore declared justified, but because we as human beings are justified. Vocation is the call for the whole person with a whole life. “From the standpoint of Christ this life is now my calling; from my own standpoint it is my responsibility.”7
Our response to this call is limited only by Christ’s claim, and not by any law, institution, or custom. What we owe to Christ in this responsibility is not limited by our own immediate spheres. Using the example of a physician, Bonhoeffer observes that our responsibility does not end with our own patients. Instead, our responsibility embraces the whole realm of things and persons in which we find ourselves. I, as a physician, therefore, am committed to another doctor’s patients, to laws regulating health, to the medical establishment, to medical science, and to other doctors themselves. Subsequently, “vocation is responsibility and responsibility is a total response of the whole [person] to the whole of reality; for this very reason there can be no petty and pedantic restricting of one’s interests to one’s professional duties in the narrowest sense. Any such restriction would be irresponsibility.”8 Indeed, all restrictions on our understanding of our vocation (the address of God to us) are restrictions that we place on the claim that Christ makes on us.
The only possible basis for limitations and restrictions on our vocation is “the concrete call of Jesus,” and these limits are concrete and personal.9 Bonhoeffer asserts that Christian responsibility to the neighbor is nothing if it does not understand that the neighbor is also the person who is furthest away from us. Our responsibility is to Christ and therefore to all whom Christ claims.
Vocation, discipleship, and responsibility require discernment if God’s Word is to be understood and obeyed. Because God has bound Godself to human beings by God’s Word, God’s Word is a particular address to particular human beings at particular times. Therefore, “God’s commandment cannot be found and known in detachment from time and place; it can only be heard in a local and temporal context. If God’s commandment is not clear, definite and concrete to the last detail, then it is not God’s commandment.”10 Discernment is not knowing God’s will in a law outside of human history or in nature and discernment is a contextual encounter with the will of God.
God’s Word is an address, always existing between two. But because human beings are earthly creatures, limited vis a vis sin and finitude, human beings must seek to prove the will of God. God’s command is the only warrant for ethical discourse according to Bonhoeffer, and this means that God’s call to the human being at any time must be proven to be God’s will. Discernment is the human process of sorting God’s will out of the myriad experiences, knowledge, and insights of human beings. Discernment is a demanding process, requiring that Christians engage their minds, hearts, experiences, observations, etcetera, in the task of determining what God’s will is. This is necessary because God’s will is not “a system of rules which is established from the outset; it is something new and different in each different situation in life, and for this reason a [person] must ever anew examine what the will of God may be.”11
This discernment cannot even begin without the Word of God. Because this is always a contextual encounter, the human act of discernment is necessarily contextual, and necessarily demanding. Bonhoeffer refutes any possibilities of intuitionism or arbitrary inspiration by pointing out that these insights must be proven, not simply accepted, because it must be proven that they are God’s will. God’s word or God’s call in a situation is thus never a call that can be heard before a situation or separate from a situation. Bonhoeffer affirms a living God, who addresses human beings in the moment. This God is the Creator of all that is, and therefore the unifier of all vocations. In other words, the fact that our responses to God’s call are contextual encounters with the address of God does not necessarily mean that our actions are discrete, cut off from our other actions and the actions of others in discrete moments in time. Actions are unified and God is consistent not by virtue of the unity of ethical actions in theory, but by virtue of the affirmation that it is the same God that calls and thereby unifies ethical action.
Several elements of Bonhoeffer’s understanding of community, discernment, and vocation can be delineated. First, community is created by God in the creation of human beings as communal individuals. Second, community is comprised of related individuals in free relationship with one another. Community is created by difference and individuality for the sake of the other. Communities can never be defined apart from the individuals that comprise them. Communities are constituted of individuals.
Third, as individuals relate to one another, they limit the actions of one another. This is not constraint of freedom, but instead these limits constitute freedom. The encounter with the other requires response, not classification, definition, or control. The response is a response to the other person recognizing their subjectivity, that is, their divine origin. Thus, fourth, our response to the other is therefore a response to the call of God to be individuals in community.
Fifth, this call is the overarching rubric of ethical decisions because all of human life is predicated on the call of God or Word of God to the individual. Vocation, conceived in this way, requires discernment, since human beings must sort through all insight and knowledge to determine that the call or command is indeed God’s. Finally, God’s call is always contextual in nature, an address to particular human beings in particular times and places.
Bonhoeffer’s orientation to ethics is thus primarily an orientation toward praxis. The dynamic between the individual and the community is understood entirely within the context of vocation, and within this context, the individual-community dynamic is the context for discernment. Because of this orientation, Bonhoeffer’s theological ethic is remarkably amenable to current postmodern understandings of community and knowledge.
Epistemic Humility: The Word of God and the Church
Karl Barth echoes Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the individual-community dynamic and supports the notion that postmodernity offers a promise to Christian community when he asserts that the free address of God to all indicates that the freedom of the person in the church is the freedom for the Bible, not for the person. Of course, as conversations with Barth go, objections might be raised about the real freedom of the individual, but these must be dealt with elsewhere. In his introduction to §21 in I.2, Barth says that “obedience to the free Word of God in Holy Scripture is subjectively conditioned by the fact that each individual who confesses his acceptance of the testimony of Scripture must be willing and prepared to undertake the responsibility for its interpretation and application.”12 The Word of God moves freely and addresses freely and thus is not constrained by human guidelines or directions. Thus each individual must take seriously the address of God in Scripture. In addition, recognizing the freedom of the Word is necessary so that we do not turn it into falsehood by systematizing it and presenting this systematization as the “rounded whole of Christian knowledge.”13
The Word is not separate from the church in a deist fashion. Instead, the “Word of God does not effect only the founding of the Church, but also its continual preservation.”14 The Word of God comprises the church in every sense. This includes the responsibility of each individual for the interpretation and application of scripture. Thus, the possibility for reception of the Word rests upon the community in such a way that “the members of the Church are willing and ready, in its [the Word of God] interpretation and application, to listen to each other.”15 Barth does not even hint that the interpretation and application of the Word of God depends upon one theological interpretation or system, for the freedom of the Word is to each individual as they are a member of the body. No one person and no one system can contain it.
It seems that the postmodern understanding of individuals within communities and the praxis orientation towards theology is nothing new. Further back in the theological trajectory that moves through Barth and Bonhoeffer, both Calvin and Luther emphasized the need for all members of the church to study the Bible and the catechism for just this reason, that the truth of the Word of God would be heard as clearly as possible, indeed, so that the Word of God would not be fighting human designs to contain it. That the Word is address implies a praxis orientation to the hearing of God, an orientation in which the Word is heard as God’s Word to human beings in their earthly and human lives.
Barth’s discussion is certainly not a description of the life of the church that allows for any one human interpretation to be definitive of the word of God. Barth describes a process that is in flux, that constantly holds each person to account as the Word of God is studied and obeyed. The Word of God in this discussion is perceived as being truth itself, although Barth is not saying that this truth can be nailed down by any individual or group of human beings. In fact, because the Word of God is for us all and is truth itself we are compelled to understand the Word of God in community. The truth compels us to better understanding, the fact that it is for all of us compels humility.
John Calvin also asserted the need for epistemic humility. God is God, way beyond our words and the attributes we discover. God has chosen, in God’s complete freedom, to be a particular sort of God. Our theology and interpretation can never gain definitive knowledge of God. However, we can count on God’s revelation as being revelation of truth while it is revelation in part. God does not reveal Godself falsely. More to the point for Calvin, God does not reveal Godself as separate from human beings, as an abstract being divided from human beings. For Calvin, all knowledge of God as God is knowledge of God as the Creator of us and all that is, and the source of all good and the God who intends good towards us. In other words the good does not exist whether or not we partake of it. God is good, not in general, but toward us. Piety recognizes this and is subsequently the source of all knowledge of God. But not only the source: piety is the context of all knowledge about God. In other words, Calvin, in my estimation, was essentially a practical theologian.16
Calvin was also essentially a systematic theologian, thereby revealing the dependence of practical theology and systematic theology on one another. I would assert that the practical-mindedness of Calvin and also of Barth opens the way for us to understand the praxis orientation of so much postmodern thought as not only being amenable to Christian truth and life, but supportive of it. This is because the epistemic humility that Calvin and Barth both assert, based on the presuppositions that human beings are creatures of finitude and earthliness and that human beings are sinful, finds support in much of current postmodern thought. Recognizing contextuality and limited perspective, in fact, is nothing that postmodernism has discovered. Christians should only be reminded of their ancient and enduring roots when postmodernism reminds them, even if only by implication, that God moves freely and that there is only one God, known and worshipped by limited, contextual creatures.
Christians, however, within the postmodern climate, emphasize the limited nature of our knowledge and perspective in terms of humility not simply because we are limited. Instead, this humility exists by way of recognizing the greater knowledge of God Godself. Epistemic humility, therefore, requires epistemic community. In community, individuals share and teach of their knowledge about God, recognizing that it can never be attained in toto, precisely because it is attained in situ. That communities are comprised of individuals is revealed to be fundamentally important, for without the difference, we can never gain greater understanding of God that goes beyond our own individual knowledge.
Postmodern Possibilities
It is not just the amenability of postmodern thought to Christian community that is at stake, however. The question is whether the contextual nature of postmodernity is so particular that it splits Christian community into millions of unrelated parts. The current climate of postmodernity poses problems and presents concerns to many if not most Christians. These problems and concerns include the perceived threat of the destruction of the church as a body and/or institution as well as the break up of the local congregation. Also included is perceived threat to identity. If truth is under attack, what can Christians stand for in the world or expect from one another? These are valid concerns. However, I would argue that the church is not falling apart, nor that Christians need to “retool” themselves. Contrary to this, I assert that postmodernity contains the possibilities for Christians to in fact be more Christian.
Postmodernity is referred to by many as the era in which we now find ourselves, an era marked by the rejection of foundationalism and the subsequent break up of foundationalist knowledge and ethics; a reaction to science as definitive of human knowledge; and finally, the condition of pluralism as a direct challenge to previous approaches to human interaction and coexistence that presumed homogeneity either in culture, ethics, or politics. This is not to say that the rejection of foundationalism is definite or that everyone agrees that this is the case. Clearly, this is not the case, and in fact, this disagreement, perhaps better than anything else, describes postmodern ethical and political dilemmas. Nor does the above definition imply that human society has never before had to deal with pluralism.
The church has different sorts of reactions to postmodernism. There is, certainly, a reaction of defensiveness. White males are expressing anger within seminary, church, and Christian college circles because the attention to the hiring of white women and men and women of color is being voiced as a priority as we face the issues of racial and gender diversity in our circles, and this priority can exclude the contributions of white males. In addition, some churches are getting much more conservative in their ethical lives as they resist the notion that there could be responsibility on the part of privileged, churched whites for the existence of injustice in our society in general and the church in particular. This is nothing new: Amos is only one example of a prophet who laid down the law of God in regards to the relationship of the privileged to those they were oppressing.17
Moral accountability has also been discussed at large as a casualty of postmodern movements and philosophies. If everything is contextual and nothing is foundational, then Christians in the church have ethics that are up for grabs. We must face the claims we are making about marriage for instance, and our very ready acceptance of divorce. In the name of being pastoral and our unwillingness to call brothers and sisters to account have we made divorce a norm? If so, what exactly are the problems we have with that, if any? Postmodernism threatens the Christian community by making it possible to understand that much about our ethical lives as Christians is optional and up to our best judgment without that judgment being held accountable to the body at large. Thus, we do not hold each other accountable for our economic practices, parenting practices, or ethics at work. Doctrines, rather than practices of grace give us license for this, and current appreciation of the contextual nature of human existence intensifies this by limiting the involvement we have in anyone else’s life.
This accountability can take the form of patronizing and condescending attitudes and practices. Women, for example, have been told directly or indirectly that their work, no matter what it is, is not as important as a man’s. Women have been shut off from discussion. They have been told that they should think a particular way if they want to make it in the academy (or a particular academy within the academy). This is one way of holding one another accountable and being involved in our Christian brother’s or sister’s life, but it includes the subordination of the human beings that they are to our own agendas.
Subsequently, movements in postmodernism have been a boon to women and to many others who think with perspectives different from the traditional main stream. These individuals would be nowhere without the changed climate of circumspection. Epistemic humility leads to circumspection, which is at work in churches and the academy and is now opening up possibilities to see God working in ways that we do not control. So women and people of color and white males have been hired, not simply as tokens, but because they were and are in fact qualified. As Christians, we understand the possibility that all people bring to our discussions in the church and the academy a perspective of truth because the word of God is addressed to those who differ from the tradition as it is addressed to all people.
At the beginning of the paper I stated that the understanding of community in which the individual-community dynamic is understood within the context of vocation and as the context of discernment opens the way for fruitful possibilities in the current climate of postmodernity. Out of all the possibilities that emerge from conversations between postmodernism and the theological and ethical affirmations presented in this paper, I wish to highlight two.
First, postmodernism enhances the Christian call for epistemic humility. Current approaches to rationality and epistemology dovetail beautifully with the Christian call to recognizing our limited nature as human beings. Our knowledge is in fact limited, but not necessarily false because of that. Christians seek truth and can do so without the driving need for total and definitive truth.
Second, because Christian community is predicated on the creation and call of God for individual human beings in relationship, postmodern rejections of abstract and formal definition and identity are not threatening. In fact the emphasis on the individuals who comprise community is an emphasis on relationships, since human beings are communal individuals. God creates community by creating individuals, and thus individuality is not a threat to community.
That is, it is not a threat by definition. However, if God’s call to the human being is not the context of ethics and discernment, then postmodernism is a very definite threat. Postmodernism threatens to break reality into infinite individual and separate parts with its emphasis on contextuality and particularity. It is my conviction, however, that because God has always and will always work to call human beings and creation into being and into action, there does exist a unity to community comprised of communal individuals. This is not a unity that we force or define or even recognize. It is a unity that is revealed to us now in a glass darkly: epistemic humility leads us to recognize that the knowledge and understanding of God is beyond ourselves, and epistemic community helps us to discern and understand this truth together.
1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall. New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1959, p. 37.
2 Ibid., 60.
3 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Communion of Saints. (Sanctorum Communio). New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1963, p. 41.
4 The resources in Bonhoeffer for dealing with race, gender, and cultural differences are tremendous and are worthy of further work. See Theology and the Practice of Responsibility: Essays on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Edited by Wayne Whitson Floyd, Jr., and Charles Marsh. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994.
5 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1955, p. 254.
6 Ibid., 254-255.
7 Ibid., 255.
8 Ibid., 258.
9 Ibid., 258.
10 Ibid., 278.
11 Ibid., 38.
12 Karl Barth, The Church Dogmatics.. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1975, I.2, p. 661.
13 Ibid., p. 662.
14 Ibid., p. 688.
15 Ibid., p. 696.
16 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960, pp. 35-43, 61-62, 74-81, 93-96, 197-207, inter alia.
17 Amos 2: 6-8, e.g.