VOLS.

6/7 2011-12

La Revue

THÈME SPÉCIAL / SPECIAL THEME:

L’AUMONERIE / CHAPLAINCY

PUBLISHED BY / PUBLIÉE PAR

FACULTÉ DE THÉOLOGIE RÉFORMÉE

FAREL
MONTRÉAL, QUÉBEC

ISSN: 1712-9168

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2145346

 DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, THE TWO KINGDOMS, AND
PROTESTANT SOCIAL THOUGHT TODAY
Jordan J. BALLOR

In his noteworthy book published at the close of the 1970s,

Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics: Prospects for Rapprochement,
the Protestant ethicist James M. Gustafson strikingly observed that “the
situation of Protestant churches with regard to moral teachings is only a
little short of chaos.”1 Writing as he was in the midst of what has been
called the period of “Barthian hegemony” in Protestant theology (ca.
1934-1990), it should not be surprising that what unity Gustafson
observed amounted to “consensus on the rejection of the natural law
tradition and particularly on the metaphysics of that tradition.”2 Over
the last two decades, however, this consensus has been increasingly
questioned and critically undermined by scholars working from biblical,
historical, and constructive perspectives.3
Especially significant among the works attempting to
rehabilitate natural-law thinking among Protestants, especially among
Reformed and Presbyterians, is the recent work of David VanDrunen of
Westminster Seminary California.4 VanDrunen has argued effectively

1
James M. Gustafson, Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics: Prospects for
Rapprochement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 130.
2
Gustafson, Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics, 62. On the period of
Barthian hegemony, see Stephen J. Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law in
Reformed Theological Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 21-53.
3
See, for instance, James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1993); Michael Cromartie, ed., A Preserving Grace: Protestants,
Catholics, and Natural Law (Grand Rapids: Ethics and Public Policy
Center/Eerdmans, 1997); David VanDrunen, A Biblical Case for Natural Law
(Grand Rapids: Acton Institute, 2006); Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law;
Craig A. Boyd, A Shared Morality: A Narrative Defense of Natural Law Ethics
(Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2007); J. Daryl Charles, Retrieving the Natural Law: A
Return to Moral First Things (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008); Owen
Anderson, The Natural Moral Law: The Good After Modernity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Jesse Covington, Bryan McGraw, and
Micah Watson, eds., Natural Law and Evangelical Political Thought (Lanham,
MD: Lexington, 2012). I survey a number of works and contemporary
developments concerning Protestants and natural law in Jordan J. Ballor,
“Natural Law and Protestantism—A Review Essay,” Christian Scholar’s
Review 41.2 (Winter 2012): 193-209.
4
Most important is David VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A
Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2010).

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2145346

 BALLOR 63
for both the historical precedent among the Reformed for natural-law
thinking, but also, given the reality of an objective moral order rooted
in created nature, its ongoing relevance for today. He has pursued this
latter aspect of his natural-law work especially by connecting natural
law with a doctrine of the two kingdoms.5 For VanDrunen, this effort is
in part fueled by concern over the errors of a transformationalist ethic
associated with important streams of Dutch neo-Calvinism, which can,
at least in its excesses, downplay the importance of the institutional
church. Cornelius Plantinga Jr., for instance, has written against a
perceived dualism between body and spirit, arguing that “the things of
the mind and spirit are no better, and are sometimes much worse, than
the things of the body.” A corollary, says Plantinga, is that “it is not
more Christian to play chess than to play hockey. It is not more
Christian to become a minister than to become a muck farmer.”6 The
vision encapsulated in this latter claim is representative of what worries
VanDrunen, for as he notes, a “common characteristic of neo-
Calvinism, amidst its diversity, is its dedication to putting the church in
its place.” With good intentions “to elevate other institutions and
activities rather than to lower the church’s status,” neo-Calvinism has
nevertheless “to an alarming degree lost the importance and uniqueness
of the church along the way as well.”7
The attempts to recover traditional approaches to ethics by
Protestants have occurred as the larger society has experienced
significant decline in the vitality of normative moral institutions. The
sociologist Philip Rieff noted the beginnings of these trends almost a
half-century ago, as he contended that “the death of a culture begins
when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that
remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites
themselves. Many spokesmen for our established normative institutions
are aware of their failure and yet remain powerless to generate in
themselves the necessary unwitting part of their culture that merits the
name of faith.” He also judged that “the misery of this culture is acutely

5
See, for instance, David VanDrunen, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms: A
Biblical Vision for Christianity and Culture (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010).
6
Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith,
Learning, and Living (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 37.
7
David VanDrunen, “Calvin, Kuyper, and ‘Christian Culture,’” in Always
Reformed: Essays in Honor of W. Robert Godfrey, ed. R. Scott Clark and Joel E.
Kim (Escondido: Westminster Seminary California, 2010), 146-48. Important
critiques of transformationalist excess have come from within communities
influenced by Dutch neo-Calvinism as well. See, for instance, Calvin P. Van
Reken, “Christians in this World: Pilgrims or Settlers?” Calvin Theological
Journal 43.2 (November 2008): 234-256.
64 La Revue FAREL
stated by the special misery of its normative institutions. Our more
general misery is that, having broken with those institutionalized
credibilities from which its moral energy derived, new credibilities are
not yet operationally effective and, perhaps, cannot become so in a
8
culture constantly probing its own unwitting part.” Efforts to
rehabilitate and apply traditional Protestant teachings like the natural
law and the two kingdoms can be seen as responses to this failing of
“normative institutions,” including the church and family. “What
binding address now describes our successor culture?” wondered Rieff,
“In what does the self now try to find salvation, if not in the breaking of
corporate identities and in an acute suspicion of all normative
9
institutions?”
There are many reasons that such efforts at reforming moral
institutions have not enjoyed widespread success, either within our
without the church. Outside of the church there is the problem of
declining, or at least increasingly ambiguous, influence of religious
discourse and ecclesiastical institutions. 10 But where VanDrunen’s
concerns about the importance of the institutional church and its
proclamation of the gospel come into sharpest relief is in the disarray of
Christian social thought that has only worsened since Gustafson’s
observation that “pious Protestants can be virulent racists or civil rights
activists. They can be militarists or pacifists, socialists or defenders of
the free-market system, regardless of what church agencies teach about
these matters.”11 Protestant ethics, which Gustafson notes have “never
been developed in a setting in which there is a supreme court of appeals
to adjudicate what is morally right and wrong” analogous to the
Magisterium of Roman Catholicism, does not have a coherent or
authoritative theological articulation of social life that reaches beyond
narrow confessional, denominational, or traditional confines. Apart
from the cogency of the cases made by individual moral theologians,
ecclesiastical bodies at the denominational or ecumenical level seem to
be the only potentially feasible analog.12 But given the array of such

8
Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper & Row,
1966), 18-19.
9
Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 19. See also more generally Robert
Nisbet, The Twilight of Authority (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000 [1975]).
10
On the challenge of secularism understood as the divorce of religion and
public life (rather than the institutional separation of church and state), see
Hunter Baker, The End of Secularism (Wheaton: Crossway Academic, 2009).
11
Gustafson, Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics, 130.
12
On the difficulties facing social thought at the ecumenical level, and the
usefulness of Bonhoeffer’s early engagement with the ecumenical movement,
 BALLOR 65
bodies and the fragmentation of Protestant ecclesiology, progress
toward a unified body of Reformed social thought (to say nothing of
Protestantism more broadly) has been halting, to say the least.
From this perspective the “prospects for rapprochement,” to
borrow Gustafson’s phrase, between ethical perspectives of diverse
branches of Christianity appear rather dim. The critical reception of the
work of VanDrunen by other Reformed and neo-Calvinist theologians
does not portend well for unity amongst traditions with even less basic
agreement, e.g. Reformed and Lutheran, or Reformed and Roman
Catholic.13
It may seem odd, therefore, to argue that a Lutheran
theologian and pastor like Dietrich Bonhoeffer has something important
to contribute to the contemporary Reformed debates about natural law,
two kingdoms, and the development of Protestant social thought. And
yet this is precisely what I argue in the remainder of this article. I am
optimistic about finding assistance in untangling some (certainly not all)
of these complex issues from such a counter-intuitive source for a
number of reasons. First, Bonhoeffer represents in many ways a figure
rooted in a theological tradition radically different than that which has
nourished either Dutch neo-Calvinism or American Presbyterianism.
This is a strength in this context because any similarities or
correspondences that might be found in his ethical thought portend well
for the possibility that diverse moral traditions might achieve some
level of reconciliation. There is also an intriguing struggle with natural
law in Lutheran circles that provides a compelling comparative
example for the renewal of natural-law teaching among the Reformed.14
Second, and more particularly, as a Lutheran, Bonhoeffer offers an
intriguing, if not rather eccentric, understanding of Luther’s doctrine of
two kingdoms, which mutatis mutandis might be applied to Reformed

see Jordan J. Ballor, Ecumenical Babel: Confusing Economic Ideology and the
Church’s Social Witness (Grand Rapids: Christian’s Library Press, 2010).
13
For a particularly critical reaction, see John Frame, The Escondido Theology:
A Reformed Response to Two Kingdom Theology (Lakeland, FL: Whitefield
Media, 2011). Frame’s book elicited a response from the president of
Westminster Seminary California, W. Robert Godfrey, in which Godfrey
affirmed that the school “has been and remains a confessional school. As a
whole our faculty supports and promotes the consensus views of the Reformed
community as summarized in the Reformed confessions. These confessions
express most precisely our theology.” See Godfrey, “Westminster Seminary
California Faculty Response to John Frame,” Valiant for Truth (February 7,
2012), available at: http://wscal.edu/blog/entry/westminster-seminary-
california-faculty-response-to-john-frame.
14
See, for instance, Robert C. Baker and Roland Cap Ehlke, eds., Natural Law:
A Lutheran Reappraisal (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2011).
66 La Revue FAREL
understandings of the doctrine as well. And finally, despite the almost
univocal depiction of Bonhoeffer as standing in a Barthian tradition of
rejecting natural law, and his interpretation of Luther’s two-kingdoms
doctrine, he is better understood as advocating a kind of Christological
natural-law approach, an ethic of normative moral orders.15
The combination of these elements show that Bonhoeffer is an
important representative of an alternative Protestant tradition who,
while disagreeing with the doctrine of two kingdoms understood as a
structural ethical distinction, still espouses ethical teachings that have
the potential to contribute toward the rehabilitation of normative moral
institutions. Thus Bonhoeffer writes that the ethical “inherently
involves a certain order of human community and entails certain
sociological relationships of authority. Only in their context does the
ethical manifest itself and receive the concrete authorization that is
essential to it.”16 Gustafson has wondered, “Why don’t Protestants use
the cosmic christologies of Colossians, Ephesians, and the gospel
according to John for a biblical foundation for natural law?” 17
Bonhoeffer in fact does something quite like this in his christological
articulation of the divine mandates, which he explicitly says is intended
“to contribute to renewing and reclaiming the old concepts of order,
estate, and office.”18 Once we understand, as Armin Wenz puts it, that
“the notion of the orders of creation is the Lutheran equivalent to the
classical notion of ‘natural law,’” Bonhoeffer’s significance for the
modern development of Protestant natural-law ethics becomes even
more striking.19

Bonhoeffer and the Two Kingdoms

Bonhoeffer’s understanding of Luther’s doctrine of the two
kingdoms is contained in the larger context of his teaching on the
divine mandates in his Ethics, particularly with respect to church and
government. But his understanding of the “polemical unity” of the two
kingdoms is at work in other writings, notably Discipleship, which
15
At one point Bonhoeffer terms this a kind of “Christonomy.” See Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W.
Scott, ed. Clifford J. Green (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 402, n. 3. For
Bonhoeffer’s Christological teaching in the context of neoorthodox debates
concerning natural theology and natural law, see Jordan J. Ballor, “Christ in
Creation: Bonhoeffer’s Orders of Preservation and the Question of Natural
Theology,” Journal of Religion 86.1 (January 2006): 1-22.
16
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 373.
17
Gustafson, Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics, 71.
18
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 390.
19
See Wenz, “Natural Law and the Orders of Creation,” in Natural Law: A
Lutheran Reappraisal, 84-85.
 BALLOR 67
militates against any absolute structural secularism between social
institutions.20 In this way Bonhoeffer’s primary concern with the two-
kingdoms doctrine as it was being used in his own time was that it
allowed for a kind of radical independence of the world from the
church, the former understood as secular and the latter as sacred. As
Bonhoeffer writes, “This division of the whole of reality into sacred
and profane, or Christian and worldly, sectors creates the possibility of
existence in only one of these sectors: for instance, a spiritual existence
that takes no part in worldly existence, and a worldly existence that can
make good its claim to autonomy over against the sacred sector.”21
Bonhoeffer finds this division to be deeply antithetical to the biblical
faith and the central insights of the Reformation: “There are not two
realities, but only one reality, and that is God’s reality revealed in
Christ in the reality of the world.”22 In this way Bonhoeffer describes
Luther’s two-kingdoms teaching as requiring a “polemical unity,” since
“in the name of a better Christianity Luther used the world to protest
against a type of Christianity that was making itself independent by
separating itself from the reality of Christ. Similarly, Christianity must
be used polemically today against the worldly in the name of a better
worldliness; this polemical use of Christianity must not end up again in
a static and self-serving sacred realm.”23 Bonhoeffer is so concerned
about the secularistic application of two kingdoms thinking in his own
day that he even contends that “we must get beyond this two-realms
image.”24
“Only in this sense of a polemical unity,” contends Bonhoeffer,
“may Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms [Zwei Reiche] be used.”25
This unity is polemical because it demolishes any autonomous claims
of existence apart from Jesus Christ himself: “The world is not divided
between Christ and the devil; it is completely the world of Christ,
whether it recognizes this or not. As this reality in Christ it is to be
addressed, and thus the false reality that it imagines itself to have, in
itself or in the devil, is to be destroyed.”26 At the same time, however,
20
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, trans. Martin Kuske and Ilse Tödt, ed.
Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001).
21
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 57.
22
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 58.
23
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 60. For Luther’s doctrine in its historical context, see
William J. Wright, Martin Luther’s Understanding of God’s Two Kingdoms: A
Response to the Challenge of Skepticism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic,
2010).
24
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 66.
25
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 60.
26
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 65. These kinds of claims about the universal lordship of
Christ in Bonhoeffer are similar to those made in the famous quote from the
68 La Revue FAREL
Bonhoeffer shares with VanDrunen (and with Kuyper, as VanDrunen
recognizes) the concern that the church as a visible community
maintain its uniqueness.27 Bonhoeffer writes that “the church occupies
a certain space in the world that is determined by its worship, its order,
and its congregational life, and this very fact is the point of departure
for thinking in terms of realms in general. It would be very dangerous
to overlook this, to deny the visibility of the church, and thus to devalue
it into a purely spiritual entity.”28 Bonhoeffer’s worry here is exactly
the same as that of VanDrunen about the legacy of neo-Calvinism:
“The church, unfortunately for neo-Calvinism, is not the sort of
institution designed by Christ to be one among equals for Christians.
Neo-Calvinism has not only made little progress in transforming
Western civilization (or even Holland, or South Holland), but it has to
an alarming degree lost the importance and uniqueness of the church
along the way as well.”29
Robin W. Lovin argues that Bonhoeffer’s views as expressed
in Discipleship “are best understood as attempts to test formulations of
Protestant church-state relations against the political demands of his
own time.”30 In this way we can understand that there is an element to
Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the doctrine of the two kingdoms that is
deeply informed by his concern over the obeisance of the leadership of
the Christian church to the Third Reich. But even if we see the
“polemical unity” of the two kingdoms advocated by Bonhoeffer as
highly contextual, we can also see how he shares concerns with both
Kuyper and VanDrunen, respectively, that there be no radical or
ultimate sacred/secular distinction between the church and the world,
and that the church as a visible community maintain its unique
independence and responsibility: “When one therefore wants to speak
of the space of the church, one must be aware that this space has
already been broken through, abolished, and overcome in every

neo-Calvinist Abraham Kuyper: “There is not a square inch in the whole

domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all,
does not cry: ‘Mine!’” See Abraham Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” in James
D. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1988), 488.
27
See VanDrunen, “Calvin, Kuyper, and ‘Christian Culture,’” 137: “Calvin and
Kuyper, in their own ways, must be accounted men of the church. They loved
her, served her, reformed her, and wrote about her at length.”
28
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 62-63.
29
VanDrunen, “Calvin, Kuyper, and ‘Christian Culture,’” 147-148.
30
Robin W. Lovin, “The Christian and the Authority of the State: Bonhoeffer’s
Reluctant Revisons,” in Ethical Responsibility: Bonhoeffer’s Legacy to the
Churches, ed. John D. Godsey and Geffrey B. Kelly (New York: Edwin Mellen
Press, 1981), 104.
 BALLOR 69
moment by the witness of the church to Jesus Christ. Thus all false
thinking in terms of realms is ruled out as endangering the
understanding of the church.”31

Bonhoeffer’s Social Ethics

Bonhoeffer’s articulation of the two-kingdoms doctrine as
valid only as construed within the “polemical unity” of the cosmic
lordship of Jesus Christ is best understood within the broader context of
his thought of the divine mandates. Bonhoeffer’s ethical thought comes
to mature expression in his doctrine of the mandates, or the structures
of the divine commandment, which represent his attempt at a mediating
position between the modern natural law/divine command options for
the grounding of ethics. This is an attempt to retain the best of both: the
permanence and objective normativity of natural law, and the
situational sensitivity of divine command. This lively normativity finds
its expression in the living person of Jesus Christ, the Lord of the moral
law. Understood properly, Bonhoeffer’s doctrine of the mandates is
best represented as grounded in a form of Christological natural law
(e.g. “Christonomy”), or as describing what might be called a
Christotelic order, with Christ as the creational and ontological
grounding of and ultimate end and norm for the mandates.
Christ’s lordship is exercised in the world through four distinct
“mandates,” namely, marriage (or family), work (or culture), church,
and government. These are the expressions of God’s “commandment,”
which is “the sole authorization for ethical discourse.” 32 As noted
above, however, the commandment is linked directly to Christ, so that
“the commandment of God revealed in Jesus Christ is addressed to us
in the church, in the family, in work, and in government.” 33 The
lordship of Christ over all creation, recalling Bonhoeffer’s critique of
the two kingdoms, therefore cannot allow Christ to be “a partial reality
alongside others.”34 Thus Bonhoeffer writes, “The world belongs to
Christ, and only in Christ is the world what it is. It needs, therefore,
nothing less than Christ himself. Everything would be spoiled if we
were to reserve Christ for the church while granting the world only
some law, Christian though it may be. Christ has died for the world,
and Christ is Christ only in the midst of the world.”35 The key point
here is that Bonhoeffer is not willing to cede some portion of existence
to having a purely secular character.

31
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 64.
32
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 378.
33
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 380.
34
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 57.
35
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 67.
70 La Revue FAREL
Although Bonhoeffer’s use of terminology shifted throughout
his career, there is a strong continuity between Bonhoeffer’s doctrine of
the orders of preservation, as articulated in his commentary on Genesis
in 1933, for instance, the “laws of life” also used in his middle period,
and his use of the divine mandates in his later Ethics.36 He identifies
these orders in this way: “All orders of our fallen world are God’s
orders of preservation that uphold and preserve us for Christ. They are
not orders of creation but orders of preservation.”37 The key here is the
connection of the orders which preserve us “for Christ” and the
mandates which have Christ as their “origin, essence, and goal.”38
Before concluding with some final thoughts about the
relevance of Bonhoeffer, as well as some of the limitations of
appropriating his thought in attempts to articulate Protestant social
thought today, we can explore here briefly Bonhoeffer’s teaching on
the mandate of marriage as an example of his doctrine at work on a
concrete subject. In the institution, mandate, or estate of marriage, we
find the clear expression of what Bonhoeffer means by orders of
preservation (as opposed to creation), characteristic of his attempt “to
contribute to renewing and reclaiming the old concepts of order, estate,
and office.”39 Orders of preservation are marked by the reality of sin
and are intended to restrain sin. In the case of marriage, for instance, we
might look at divorce as a clear indication that marriage as we
experience it today is an order of preservation.
Whereas Bonhoeffer draws the line of distinction between
orders of creation and orders of preservation at the Fall, his older
Reformed contemporary Emil Brunner finds both in effect after the

36
See William F. Connor, “Laws of Life: A Bonhoeffer Theme with
Variations,” Andover Newton Quarterly 18, no. 2 (November 1977): 101-10.
37
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis
1–3, trans. Martin Rüter and Ilse Tödt, ed. John W. de Gruchy (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1997), 140.
38
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 402: “The lordship of Jesus Christ is not a foreign rule,
but the lordship of the Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer. It is the lordship of
the one through whom and toward whom all created being exists, indeed the
one in whom alone all created being finds its origin, essence, and goal.”
Clifford Green notes that Bonhoeffer abandoned the use of “orders” language
for strategic reasons, because such language was “too susceptible of co-option
by sympathizers of National Socialism.” See Clifford J. Green, “Editor’s
Introduction to the English Edition,” in Ethics, 19. It also speaks to his effort to
reconcile the dynamism of divine command and the stability of natural-law
ethics. See Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 68-69: “We speak of divine mandates rather
than divine orders, because thereby their character as divinely imposed tasks
[Auftrag], as opposed to determinate forms of being, becomes clearer.”
39
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 390.
 BALLOR 71
40
Fall. There are, nevertheless, major points of agreement. Both find
that God’s primary action after the Fall to be that of preserver. Brunner
writes, “The manner in which God is present to his fallen creature is in
his preserving grace. Preserving grace does not abolish sin but
abolishes the worst consequences of sin.”41 But Brunner’s emphasis on
the importance of distinguishing creation and preservation orders is in
marked contrast to Bonhoeffer. For Brunner, “The distinction between
this ‘ordinance of creation’ from a mere ‘ordinance of preservation’
relative to sin…is necessary for a Christian theologia naturalis, i.e. for
Christian theological thinking which tries to account for the phenomena
of natural life.” 42 He then contends sharply, “It is the task of our
theological generation to find the way back to a true theologia
naturalis.”43 For example, Brunner finds that marriage is a creation
ordinance, because it existed before sin entered the world through
Adam and Eve, so that preservation orders are those structures and
institutions which are brought into existence solely because of sin.44 In
this way, “Monogamous marriage, for example, is of higher dignity
than the State because, as an institution, as an ordinance, it is–apart
from special concrete cases–unrelated to sin…. Therefore it has from of
old been called an ‘ordinance of creation.’”45 Bonhoeffer, by contrast,
would find that after the Fall marriage too is a preservation ordinance,
since its inception was unrelated to sin, but it has, like the rest of
creation, been affected and marred by sin, and therefore stands in need
of restraint with respect to sin. Marriage is in this way for Bonhoeffer a
pre-political institution, since “marriage is not made by the government,
but is affirmed by the government.”46 And yet marriage is not, at least

40
An earlier form of this discussion of Bonhoeffer and Brunner on the orders of
creation and preservation appears in Ballor, “Christ in Creation,” 8-10. For
Bonhoeffer and Barth, see “Christ in Creation,” 10-12; and Jordan J. Ballor,
“The Aryan Clause, the Confessing Church, and the Ecumenical Movement:
Barth and Bonhoeffer on Natural Theology, 1933–1935,” Scottish Journal of
Theology 59.3 (August 2006): 263-80.
41
Emil Brunner, “Nature and Grace,” in Natural Theology, trans. Peter
Fraenkel (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946), 28.
42
Brunner, “Nature and Grace,” 29-30.
43
Brunner, “Nature and Grace,” 59.
44
In this way, preservation orders for Brunner as well as Bonhoeffer mirror
Kuyper’s definition of common grace as the post-lapsarian restraint of “sin,
error, and misery in their manifestations.” See Abraham Kuyper, Wisdom &
Wonder: Common Grace in Science & Art, ed. Jordan J. Ballor and Stephen J.
Grabill, trans. Nelson D. Kloosterman (Grand Rapids: Christian’s Library Press,
2011), 96.
45
Brunner, “Nature and Grace,” 29.
46
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 72.
72 La Revue FAREL
as manifested in the fallen world, directly reflective of the creational
and sinless ideal.
This distinction between orders of creation and orders of
preservation is problematic for Bonhoeffer precisely because all of
creation has been affected by sin. Indeed, in Bonhoeffer’s judgment,
the noetic effects of sin seem to negate our ability to properly judge
between that which is strictly of preservation and that which is of
creation. For Bonhoeffer, those who argue on the basis of orders of
creation do not realize “that the world has fallen and that sin now rules
and that the creation and sin are so intertwined that no human eye can
see them as separate, that every human order is the order of the fallen
world and not of creation.”47 It is precisely here that Bonhoeffer is
seeking to do justice to the full implications of the Fall while still
maintaining some basis for the church’s concrete ethical proclamations.
We might fault Bonhoeffer here for not adequately
acknowledging the value of the scriptural witness of marriage as a
creation ordinance. Bonhoeffer argues against marriage as a creation
order in favor of a preservation order in part because “the creation and
sin are now so intertwined that no human eye can see them as
separate.” But does not Genesis attest to the created order of marriage
and separate it out for us? As far as I have found Bonhoeffer does not
explicitly deal with this possibility, but it is likely, however, that
Bonhoeffer would contend that even if we might be tempted to argue
that marriage is a creation order on the basis of Scripture, we would
still have to deal with the effect of sin on marriage, so that after the Fall,
the ordinance of marriage itself has been altered and corrupted. Post-
lapsarian marriage is simply not the same institution that pre-lapsarian
marriage was. The advent of divorce, as in the case of Matt. 19:3–12,
attests to this reality.

Protestant Social Thought Today

Bonhoeffer’s relevance for the rehabilitation of Protestant
social thought today thus lies primarily in his dynamic doctrine of
ethical mandates, an effective and cogent articulation of a uniquely
Protestant natural-law line of thinking. His framework of the four
mandates provides an excellent beginning to the project to, as he put it,
“contribute to renewing and reclaiming the old concepts of order, estate,
and office.”48 This is an especially critical task as Protestant churches
look for resources in the period of post-Barthian “hegemony,” to use

47
Bonhoeffer, “On the Theological Foundation of the Work of the World
Alliance,” in Bonhoeffer, Ecumenical, Academic, and Pastoral Work: 1931-
1932 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 363.
48
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 390.
 BALLOR 73
Grabill’s phrase. As useful and as necessary as it is to return to the
traditional sources (primarily the Bible, but also the great thinkers of
the Christian tradition, particularly those of the Reformation and post-
Reformation eras), it is also helpful to find figures closer to our own
time who exhibit the kind of brilliance and thoughtfulness apparent in
Bonhoeffer’s work. Bonhoeffer’s ethical thought shows us definitively
that natural law must be one of the essential tools in our theological
toolbox, so to speak, when we are addressing the challenges of
following Jesus Christ today. As Bonhoeffer observed, “We must
replace rusty weapons with bright steel,” and the moral steeliness of the
natural law and indeed of Bonhoeffer’s own work are invaluable in this
regard.49
But despite the strengths of Bonhoeffer’s account, there are
some weaknesses that must be acknowledged.
In the first place, Bonhoeffer’s mature ethical work, while
dynamic and substantial, is fragmentary and incomplete. There are
unarguably important historical and contextual concerns that have to be
taken into account when seeking to understand and apply Bonhoeffer’s
ethical ideas to the contemporary situation. Indeed, there is an element
of crisis that can be seen as endemic to Bonhoeffer’s ethical thought.50
His involvement with the Abwehr conspiracy and attempts to
assassinate Hitler, and his imprisonment and eventual execution, cannot
be hermetically sealed off as irrelevant to interpreting his theological
and ethical thought.
Moreover, Bonhoeffer’s biography lends him an air of moral
legitimacy and integrity for many that can upset critical appropriation
of his thought. For many Bonhoeffer functions as a kind of Protestant
“saint,” with the moral capital, so to speak, to lend an element of
credibility to ethical programs that can be attached, whether more or
less convincingly, to his thought.51 This, in part, explains the wide
variety of theological traditions that have found inspiration from, and
claimed some grounding in, the thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
An additional problematic in Bonhoeffer’s thought is the
development that it undergoes throughout his life. Later elements in his
thought, particularly from his period of imprisonment, are often

49
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 209. See also Ballor, “Natural Law and Protestantism,”
209.
50
This is something that Bonhoeffer himself recognized. See Bonhoeffer’s
thoughts on times that are “out of joint,” in Ethics, 347.
51
On the various receptions of Bonhoeffer’s legacy, see Stephen R. Haynes,
The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2004). See also Jordan J. Ballor, “Bonhoeffer in America—A
Review Essay,” Christian Scholar’s Review 37.4 (Summer 2008): 465-82.
74 La Revue FAREL
obscure and sometimes theologically questionable, depending
particularly on how such statements are understood within the larger
context of Bonhoeffer’s theological development. 52 His idea of
“religionless Christianity,” for instance, could be understood as being
in tension with, or even undermining, his previous emphasis on the
importance of the institutional church as a visible order of God’s grace.
In addition to these challenges inherent in Bonhoeffer’s own
thought, there is the challenge of distance, both historically and
spatially, in attempting to bring Bonhoeffer’s ethical framework to bear
on contemporary Protestant social thought, particularly from a North
American perspective.53 Certainly Bonhoeffer’s thought might inform
rehabilitated and renewed formulations of Protestant social thought, but
such endeavors cannot simply be recapitulations of Bonhoeffer’s own
views. Protestant social thought must develop beyond the thought of
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as it must any individual figure in the church’s
theological history.
And yet even so, Bonhoeffer’s ethical work, particularly his
doctrine of divine mandates as introduced briefly in this essay, has the
potential to move forward the conversation about natural law, two
kingdoms, and Protestant, even Reformed, social thought. The basic
question raised in Discipleship, informed by his understanding of
vocation, office, and Christological law and developed more fully in his
Ethics, echoes meaningfully today: “What could the call to follow Jesus
mean today for the worker, the businessman, the farmer, or the
soldier?” 54 Bonhoeffer’s concerns about a particular mistaken
application of the two-kingdoms doctrine, even if this understanding of
the doctrine is quite different than that expressed by VanDrunen and
other two-kingdoms advocates, stands as a valuable warning about
potential consequences following from ill-formed conceptions of such
doctrines. It is as unfair to judge all neo-Calvinist thought by the
excesses and erroneous applications of its tenets by some thinkers as it
is to do likewise for the advocates of two-kingdoms approaches. The
abuse of a doctrine does not negate its proper use. Bonhoeffer helps us
remember this in the context of disputes about natural law and the two

52
On patterns of emphasis on different aspects or periods of Bonhoeffer’s
thought, see Otto Dudzus, “Discipleship and Worldliness in the Thinking of
Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” Religion in Life 35.2 (1966): 230-240.
53
These are concerns that do not necessarily manifest themselves in a
conclusion similar to that of Barth, which sees in Bonhoeffer’s ethics of
mandates “a suggestion of North German patriarchalism.” See Karl Barth,
Church Dogmatics, III/4 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2004), 22.
54
Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 39.
 BALLOR 75
kingdoms, and thereby gives us some help in the hopeful task of a
renewed effort to develop Protestant social thought today.
 CONTRIBUTORS / AUTEURS 83

_________________________________________________________
Contributions
The seminary faculty and others engaged in the practice of ministry
may submit articles, book reviews, and exegetical studies for possible
publication. Deadlines for submissions are 31 May 2013. Late
submissions will be considered on a case by case basis.
Submissions should be in English or French, in Word or Wordperfect
format, and not more than 1,250 words (book reviews and exegetical
studies) or 4,000-8,000 words (articles) in length. Manuscripts must
conform to The SBL Handbook of Style (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson,
1999) or The Chicago Manual of Style (14th or 15th ed.; Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993 and 2005).

Soumissions
Les professeurs du séminaire et les autres personnes engagées dans le
ministère peuvent soumettre des articles à des fins de publication.
L’échéance pour les soumissions sera le 31 mai 2013. Les soumissions
tardives seront considérées une à une en particulier.
Ces soumissions devront être en anglais ou en français, rédigées en
Word ou Wordperfect et ne comportant pas plus de 1250 mots s’il
s’agit de résumés critiques de livre et de 4000-8000 mots s’il s’agit
d’articles. Les soumissions doivent se conformer à The SBL Handbook
of Style (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1999) ou à The Chicago
Manual of Style (14eme ou 15eme ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993 et 2005).
 CONTENTS / CONTENUS
ARTICLES

« PADRE, QUE FAITES-VOUS LÀ À CETTE

HEURE ? » L’ÉVANGILE ET LE RÔLE DE L’AUMÔNERIE
MILITAIRE PROTESTANT (J.G. ZOELLNER).................................3

LES MARINS: ORPHELINS DE LA MONDIALISATION ? (J.

ZUIDEMA)................................................................................13

AUMÔNIER CARCÉRAL : SA VOCATION DANS UNE PERSPECTIVE

PROTESTANTE (S. CYR)...........................................................19

NURSING HOME CHAPLAINCY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

(FREDERICK A. HARMS)..........................................................27

L'APPLICATION DE LA LOI (R.C. JANSSEN)..............................38

LES FEMMES DIACRES (C. ADJÉMIAN).....................................46

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, THE TWO KINGDOMS, AND

PROTESTANT SOCIAL THOUGHT TODAY (J. BALLOR).............62

BOOK REVIEW / RECENSION DE LIVRE : RON GLEASON. HERMAN

BAVINK (RECENSION PAR B. WESTERVELD)............................76

IN MEMORIAM: CHRISTIAN JEAN ADJÉMIAN (1947-

2011).......................................................................................79

FAREL
FACULTÉ DE THÉOLOGIE RÉFORMÉE
REFORMED THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
2085, Rue Bishop, Montréal, Qc. H3G 2E8
Tél. (514) 544-9171 / info@farel.net / www.farel.net