abstract

'Politics as the art of dying':
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr.

Mark Husbands
Wheaton College

In The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theory, Oliver O'Donovan asserts, "Theology must be political if it is to be evangelical. Rule out the political questions and you cut short the proclamation of God's saving power"(p. 3). The scope of the probl'matique of public theology emerges in the context of a remark made by Bonhoeffer in the conclusion of his 1939 essay, "Protestantism Without Reformation," where he observes that God "has granted American Christianity no Reformation." If we ever hope for a genuinely political and evangelical witness to the Gospel in America, we need to recover a properly dogmatic understanding of political theology. The probl'matique, irony and attendant confusion with respect to much of American public theology follows upon a displacement of Christian dogmatics by religion and ethics. This paper argues that political theology must be willing to learn from the example of Martin Luther King Jr. who stood against the suffering, violence and death allied with racism in America in such poignant fashion. King's grasp of the political force and eschatological freedom of the Gospel is a markedly transparent and dogmatic account of Origen's belief that "genuine politics is about the art of dying."