The Bonhoeffer Reader

27. Contemporizing New Testament Texts

415 1. [DB-ER, 567–568.] 2. [DBWE 14:413, n. 5.] 3. [For criticism of historical-critical exegesis, see DBWE 9:285–300 (Reader 4–14). For discussion of Harnack specifically, see DBWE 11:199–206.] 27. Contemporizing New Testament Texts DBWE 14:413–433 In 1936, Bonhoeffer expressed the desire to write a book on hermeneutics, but he abandoned this plan when the project that became Ethics seemed more pressing.1 This decision left the following 1935 lecture as Bonhoeffer’s most sustained treatment of biblical hermeneutics. Its background was the German Christians’ demand for a biblical message that was relevant to contemporary needs, which amounted to a demand that the church conform its message to the National Socialist agenda.2 As Bonhoeffer develops below, this German Christian understanding of contemporizing insists that the biblical message justify itself to the standard of the present. He contrasts this with proper contemporizing, which submits the concerns of the present to the standard of the biblical message. Here contemporizing does not constitute a distinct method, but is rather included in the task of interpretation: exegesis of the Scriptures as a witness to the word of God. This lecture is remarkable for its continuity with Bonhoeffer’s earliest and latest writings. Bonhoeffer argues below that the German Christian understanding of contemporizing entails a style of exegesis that applies German national identity as a standard for separating the time-bound elements of the Bible from those eternally valid elements that merit application in the present. This analysis recalls the young Bonhoeffer’s critiques of his teachers’ historical-critical method, where, for example, Harnack applied his cultured sensibility to distinguish the divine, eternal kernel from the human, temporal husk of the gospel.3 The biblical message admits of no such division , Bonhoeffer argues in the essay below, since the whole Bible is the witness to God’s The Bonhoeffer Reader 416 4. [DBWE 8:430 (Reader 795).] 5. [“Volkstum means a national and cultural tradition; in the context of the Nazi era, this was understood as ethnically defined, i.e., ‘Aryan,’” DBWE 14:414, n. 7.] 413 414 word. This argument anticipates the Letters and Papers from Prison, where Bonhoeffer resists Rudolf Bultmann’s treatment of the New Testament as “a mythological dressing up of a universal truth” in favor of a nonreligious mode of interpreting the entire Bible, myths and all.4 The question of contemporizing the New Testament message is basically capable of a dual exposition. Either one understands it to mean that the biblical message must justify itself to the present and thus demonstrate that it can be contemporized or that the present must justify itself to the biblical message and that thus the message must be made contemporary. Wherever the question of contemporization is posed today with that particular familiar , unnerving urgency, indeed posed as the central question of theology itself, it is always assumed it will serve the first goal mentioned above. The New Testament is to justify itself to the present. It was in this form that the question first became acute during the era of the emancipation of autonomous reason, that is, in the era of rationalism, and it is in this form that the question has shaped theology all the way to the theology of the German Christians. To the extent that rationalism was nothing other than the emergence of the previously latent claim of human beings to shape their own lives autonomously from the forces of the given world, this question does indeed represent a question that has already been raised in the human claim to autonomy itself. That means that autonomous human beings who would also confess to be Christians will demand the justification of the Christian message before the forum of their own autonomy . If this succeeds, then they call themselves Christians; if it does not succeed, they call themselves pagans. It makes not the slightest difference whether the forum before which the biblical message is to justify itself is called “reason” in the eighteenth century, “culture” in the nineteenth century , or “Volkstum”5 in the twentieth century or in the year 1933, along with everything that entails, it is exactly the same question: Can Christianity become contemporary for us as we simply—thank God!—are now? It is exactly the same urgent need felt by all who would claim the Christian name for whatever reason—either reasons commensurate with the faculty of reason itself, cultural reasons, or political reasons—to justify Christianity...