The Bonhoeffer Reader

6. Act and Being

92 1. [For historical background, biographical information, and a summary of texts from this period (Berlin, 1929–1930), see DBWE 10:13–17, editor’s introduction, and DB-ER, 125–145.] 6. Act and Being DBWE 2:136–161 After finishing his Barcelona vicariate in early 1929, Bonhoeffer returned to Berlin and began working on the postdoctoral dissertation necessary for teaching in the German university system.1 The result was Act and Being, completed in February 1930 and published the following year. Like Sanctorum Communio before it, Act and Being is a wide-ranging and technical academic text. Bonhoeffer attempts in Act and Being to articulate basic theological concepts having to do with God and revelation, human knowledge of God and self in faith, and human existence. Of these, the concept of revelation is most important, since Bonhoeffer thinks all the others depend on it. Other theologians have failed to articulate a satisfactory concept of revelation, argues Bonhoeffer, by depending too much on notions of either act or being. Treating revelation as an act of God has the benefit of communicating the free and transcendent character of revelation but fails to communicate the constancy of God’s relationship to humans in revelation. This also makes it difficult to think theologically about the continuity of the Christian’s life of faith. Treating revelation in terms of being encounters the opposite problem; God’s revelation , as well as the Christian life of faith that depends on it, can be thought about in continuity, but the radical otherness and novelty of revelation and the Christian life of faith is lost. Bonhoeffer builds on Sanctorum Communio to offer his own understanding of revelation as the person of Christ existing in the church-community. This solves the “problem of act and being,” thinks Bonhoeffer, since such a concept of revelation unites the characteristics of act and being—the person of Christ as churchcommunity encounters believers as something new and transcendent but also exists in historical continuity. On the basis of this understanding of revelation, Bonhoeffer develops theology’s other basic concepts to reflect the unity of act and being. 93 Act and Being 2. Luther, Lectures on Romans, LW 25:215. [See also Bonhoeffer’s comment on Luther’s Lectures on Romans in DBWE 9:300. In relation to knowledge of sin, see DBWE 12:229–230.] 136 137 Bonhoeffer divides Act and Being into three main parts. In Part A, he develops the problem of act and being against the background of modern philosophy, with Immanuel Kant and Martin Heidegger playing especially important roles. In Part B, he first shows how other theologies have failed to solve that problem before offering his own alternative. Part B is noteworthy for its engagement with Karl Barth, whom Bonhoeffer presents as an act-theologian. In developing his own person-theology as an alternative, Bonhoeffer in important ways tempers the actualism of his earlier thinking . Part C, excerpted here in full, is the concrete application of the preceding argument to issues of human existence. Especially important in this section is Bonhoeffer’s articulation of sin in terms of person, that is, as something that corrupts both the act and being of human existence. Against the theology and Luther interpretation of his own teacher Karl Holl, Bonhoeffer argues that such an understanding of sin rules out treating the conscience as a privileged locus for revelation. Instead, we encounter God in the person of Christ existing as the church-community. C. The Problem of Act and Being in the Concrete Teaching Concerning Human Beings ‘In Adam’ and ‘In Christ’ 1. Being in Adam a) Definition of ‘Being’ in Adam Sola fide credendum est nos esse peccatores [By faith alone we know that we are sinners ].2 ‘Being in Adam’ is a more pointed ontological, and a more biblically based (1 Cor. 15:22; cf. 15:45; Rom. 5:12–14), designation for esse peccator [being a sinner]. Were it really a human possibility for persons themselves to know that they are sinners apart from revelation, neither ‘being in Adam’ nor ‘being in Christ’ would be existential designations of their being. For it would mean that human beings could place themselves into the truth, that they could somehow withdraw to a deeper being of their own, apart from their being sinners, their ‘not being in the truth.’ Being in Adam would, consequently, have to be regarded as a potentiality of a more profound ‘possibility of being in the truth.’ It would...