Bonhoeffer’s Ethics 1

for my own note-taking and posterity

The Love of God and the Decay of the World

I appreciated the straight-line of logic employed by Bonhoeffer. He starts at one point, plots a trajectory and just keeps going. His first move is straight out of Genesis, and in my opinion right on point.

The knowledge of good and evil shows he is no longer at one with his origin

In a world where relativism reigns, the defeat of other ethical systems by supplanting the knowledge of right from wrong, good from bad, with the lack of a choice based on one’s participation in Christ is genius both on the philosophical and pastoral level. To show that Christian ethics is something wholly other than every other ethics is a unique move. The inherent claim there is that Christianity cannot be compared with the other institutions and systems of thought – there is something significantly difference about Christianity. With that intuition I heartily agree.

Bonhoeffer goes on to exemplify this distinction of knowing good and evil as setting oneself in the place of God, as the judge, the arbiter of what is right and wrong. To judge as if one sets right and wrong is hypocritical, since God is the one who sets good and evil. Jesus’ command to “judge not and you shall not be judged” is therefore to deny oneself the place which is rightly God’s. To not imagine that you are the one who is to uphold the law of God, but rather, to only do the will of God. And that will of God is exactly reconciling the fall whereby which we know good and evil.

To undo that knowledge – which Bonhoeffer explains is not that we have gained anything we previously did not know, it is merely a changed perspective that we now can put ourselves in God’s place giving ourselves a choice that is rightly God’s – is the goal of reconciliation. To know, only in the light of Christ who is the will of God, is reconciliation. And reconciliation does not perform the judgment that knowing good and evil does. Whereby one judges according to his own definition of good and evil, he determines to make every man is his own image, not in God’s image. To know, through union, and what Bonhoeffer calls action, is the way to act in the will of God, and not create disunion.

These very actions that create peace and unity is what love is. Though we cannot purely define is that way. Bonhoeffer demands that we understand God is love. Not that we know what love is, therefore we know who God is. This love comes from God, and is God’s, and His alone. Our love, is merely God’s love that we express, whether it be to our neighbor or back to God. That is the only love available. Any other is based on selfishness (which I have written about here before). If Christ is the supreme revelation of God, and God based on his love for us sent his Son to die for us – in order to recreate that unity which was lost – this is how we should understand love. Jesus’ suffering and death was an action that created unity. Though Bonhoeffer warns us that love is not defined by the action, but by the man Jesus.