The Foundation of All Human Reality

What Christ does is precisely to give effect to reality. He affirms reality. And indeed He is Himself the real man and consequently the foundation of all human reality. And so formation in conformity with Christ has this double implication. The form of Christ remains one and the same, not as a general idea but in its own unique character as the Incarnate, crucified and risen God. And precisely for the sake of Christ’s form the form of the real man is preserved, and in this way the real man receives the form of Christ.

This leads us away from any kind of abstract ethic and towards an ethic which is entirely concrete. What can and must be is said is not what is good once and for all, but the way in which Christ takes form among us here and now. The attempt to define what is good once and for all has, in the nature of the case, always ended in failure.

Either the proposition was asserted in such general and formal terms that it retained no significance as regards the contents, or else one tried to include in it and elaborate the whole immense range of conceivable contents, and thus to say in advance what would be good in every single conceivable case; this led to a casuistic system so unmanageable that it could satisfy the demand neither of general validity nor of concreteness.

The concretely Christian ethic is beyond formalism and casuistry. Formalism and casuistry set out from the conflict between the good and the real, but the Christian ethic can take for its point of departure the reconciliation, already accomplished, of the world with God and the man Jesus Christ and the acceptance of the real man by God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

Reflection – OK, a bit of heavy going here theologically, and if you read this a certain way, it sounds like Bonhoeffer is advocating a sort of moral relativism. I don’t think he is, and in fact I think he is quite in line with traditional Catholic moral teaching here. So let's have a little refresher course on all that.

It has always been understood in our tradition that, we can identify specific actions as intrinsically immoral, as failing in their very structure as actions to conform to the truth of humanity which is (as B. says here) only fully revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. But we cannot identify a specific action in itself to be an intrinsically good action. Certain courses of action may suggest themselves to be generally good, but there is no species of action that is always and at all times and universally ‘the good thing to do.’

For example, almsgiving is a good thing. But almsgiving done for a bad motivation (vainglory, or in service of some other evil end) or done in wrong circumstances (when it will beggar my family and cause real suffering to them, say) is not a good action. Preaching the Gospel of Christ may seem like a supremely good action, but again bad intentions (self-aggrandizement) or bad circumstances (preaching in the wrong place, to the wrong people, with the wrong words, and the wrong manner) makes it not good.

Good consequences may yet flow from these wrong acts—the alms are given, the Gospel is preached, after all—but we know that it is not the consequences that make an act good or evil, but the combination of goodness of object (the act itself), intention, and circumstances.

Formalism here refers to trying to set out the good in some theoretical fashion. ‘Do the greatest good for the greatest number,’ for example. As B. points out, this is vague to the point of being utterly useless in terms of actual practical decision making. Casuistry is, as he describes, the effort to game out every possible scenario in advance to lay out what the proper course of action would be. I would give casuistry a bit more value than he does. It is limited, but the benefit of properly done casuistry is not to provide answers in advance for every possible moral dilemma, but to demonstrate the process of moral reasoning in difficult and questionable circumstances.

But Bonhoeffer’s point is well taken. Granted that there are courses of action that are intrinsically against the moral law and cannot be considered, the consideration of what concrete course of action one should, in fact, take, is never at the level of some theory of ethics. It is the contemplation of the face of Christ, the crucified and risen one, who reveals God to man, and reveals man to man as well. We cannot know what is the good action apart from this contemplation.

Ultimately, (and this is going beyond B.’s intentions here) we cannot know in full what is the good and righteous action outside of the work of the Holy Spirit and the gifts operative in us through baptism. The moral law teaches us to avoid sin, but the concrete pursuit of virtue comes not from the law but from the Spirit at work in our hearts, conforming us to Christ, and establishing and confirming us in a living communion with Him, without which ‘[we] can do nothing’ (John 15:5).

Ecce Homo

Ecce homo—behold the man! In Him the world was reconciled with God. It is not by its overthrowing but by its reconciliation that the world is subdued. It is not by ideals and programs or by conscience, duty, responsibility and virtue that reality can be confronted and overcome, but simply and solely by the perfect love of God.

Here again it is not by a general idea of love that this is achieved, but by the really lived love of God in Jesus Christ. This love of God does not withdraw from reality into noble souls secluded from the world. It experiences and suffers the reality of the world in all its hardness. The world exhausts its fury against the body of Christ. But, tormented, He forgives the world its sin. This is how the reconciliation is accomplished. Ecce homo!

The figure of the Reconciler, of the God-Man Jesus Christ, comes between God and the world and fills the center of all history. In this figure the secret of the world is laid bare, and in this figure is revealed the secret of God. No abyss of evil can remain hidden from Him through whom the world is reconciled with God. But the abyss of the love of God encompasses even the most abysmal godlessness of the world…

God himself sets out on the path of humiliation and atonement, and thereby absolves the world. God is wiling to be guilty of our guilt. He takes upon Himself the punishment and suffering which this guilt has brought upon us. God Himself answers for godlessness, love for hatred, the saint for the sinner. Now there is no more godlessness, no more hatred, no more sin which God has not taken upon Himself, suffered for and expiated. Now there is no more reality, no more world, but it is reconciled with God and at peace. God did this in His dear Son Jesus Christ. 

Ecce Homo!

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

Reflection – Last week was Orthodoxy week here at TTP, so it seems fitting that this week should be Protestant week. I’m a little late with all these ecumenical postings for the Church Unity Prayer Octave, but as usual I march to the beat of my own drummer on this blog. So this week I will feature some of my favorite writers coming out of the various Reformed traditions emerging from the 16^th century.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one of the great Lutheran theologians of the 20^th century, who had the dreadful challenge of forging his theology and living his Lutheran faith in the shadow of the Third Reich. Ethics is an unfinished work, as his activities in the Resistance led to his arrest and eventual execution before he could complete it.

His work would stand on its own without that context of confrontation with evil and heroic resistance to it, but the facts of his life give a resonance and depth to his words here. When he says that there is no godlessness, no hatred, no abyss of evil which has not been embraced by the love of God in Jesus Christ, we know that this is a man who has seen and experienced at close quarters profundities of hatred, godlessness and evil that many of us are spared.

We see here what I consider one of the great vigorous strengths of Lutheranism, which is the total and all-encompassing focus on Jesus Christ embracing the world’s sin and doing away with it in that embrace. There is a fierce passion that runs through all of the Luther and all the Lutheran writers I have read that transcends the unfortunate polemics of the Reformation—a deep sense of the crash and clash between the absolute goodness and charity of Christ and the absolute evil and sin of the world, and the overcoming of this evil by the Lord in this very collision.

What emerges from this is precisely this sense of ecce homo – behold the man, behold Jesus, and see just what His life and death have wrought for us. An absolute fixation, rapt and reverent, on the person of Jesus Christ and his fantastic charity, utter generosity, total gift, his abasement and in that, his (and our) total glorification.

We badly need this sensibility, it seems to me, today. I do not believe the world is evil—truly, it is not—but there is great evil in the world, and it cannot be reduced to one or two contentious ‘issues’ (pick your favorites!), nor to ‘this group of politicians’ or ‘that group of evil-doers’ and their depredations, nor to ‘those people over there’ – the fabled Others who serve as effective distractions from our own moral failures.

We badly and deeply need this passionate fiery awareness of Jesus Christ embracing all of us, every one of us, even the ones who may not show signs of wanting His embrace or welcoming it – the love of God poured out for the whole world and all in it. Because as members of His Body the Church, we are called to that same love and that same embrace, to throw our lot in with Jesus, and that means living the mercy of God for all people without exception.

Nine Years and Counting

God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Reflection – This showed up in my Facebook news feed yesterday, and seemed like a timely reminder. We do live in a world that is fraught with difficulties of all kinds. The looming threat of war in Syria and what that portends for the Middle East and the whole world is a heavy weight on the minds and hearts of anyone paying serious attention to the world.

And we all can make of list of ‘what’s wrong with the world’ otherwise. My list will be different from yours; we all have different ideas on the subject. But it is so crucial to take to heart these words of Bonhoeffer, who after all lived in Germany in the Nazi era and knew a little bit about life in the ‘real world’, in a world filled with corruption, violence, hatred and madness. He was no ivory tower intellectual, but was right down in the fray trying to bring some presence of Christ and of love into an unimaginably difficult situation.

Well, God loves that situation. Not the evil and disorder of it, of course, but He loves us. Loves us as we are, where we are, in the exact precise situation we are in right now. His love is active for our good, of course, and He is constantly at work in every human life to bring us a little further along the path of goodness and love, a little bit out of whatever insanity possesses us today, a little bit more into the light and out of the dark.

But I think it is so crucial to focus on the depths of His love for us in the midst of it all. We are in a bit of a mess, we human beings. We have botched things up somewhat. I won’t go into my own thoughts on how we’ve botched it up; I don’t have much stomach for controversy and argument today, somehow, and anyhow my ideas on the subject are not that important.

What is important is that God loves the world. And whatever we find repulsive, whatever makes us want to draw back, reject, get mad—this is precisely where the compassion and love of God is drawn out, reaches out, extends, embraces. This is so utterly crucial to get, to really get, if we claim to be Christians and genuinely choose to follow Christ.

It is too easy to go the other route: get mad, lash out, scorn, and wrap ourselves in some pathetic mantle of self-righteousness and self-protection, or withdraw into our secure little enclave. But that is not what Jesus did, and if we are his disciples it is not what we are to do, either.

We are to love, in the real world, in the world as we find it today, and this love will require from us everything we have, and call forth from us compassion and generosity that, in fact, we do not have of ourselves. So, in addition to love (or rather, undergirding and encompassing all our efforts to love) is prayer, a constant recourse and turning towards God.

And we cannot, will not do that, unless we genuinely believe that He loves, not just the world in its mess, but us—you and me—in our mess. Whatever that mess may be, and in whatever way you and I are resisting God today, that is where God is loving us today.

Unfathomable, eh? That is precisely what it is—we cannot plumb the depths of God’s love for ourselves and for the whole of humanity, for Bashir Assad and Vladimir Putin, for the innocent victims of war and violence, and for their victimizers. We cannot plumb those depths, cannot fathom this mystery, but we are called to plunge into them nonetheless, to be drowned in God’s love, and so have nothing to offer anyone but some small share, some faint (but, please God ever brighter) reflection of that love.

As it happens, today is my anniversary of priestly ordination, in 2004. This meditation is my poor effort to articulate exactly what I understand my vocation as Catholic priest to be. Can’t say that I do it too well on any given day, but that’s how I see it. So, could I ask for a small ordination anniversary gift today? Could you all say a prayer for me, please, that I can be what a priest is supposed to be, and reflect the love and mercy of God for every human being on the face of the earth. Thank you, and amen.