Etsi deus non daretur:

Bonhoeffer’s useful misuse of Grotius’ maxim

and its implications for evangelisation
in the world come of age

Kevin Lenehan
Catholic Theological College, MCD University of Divinity
Melbourne, Australia

“Let us weigh up the gain and the loss involved in calling heads that God exists. Let us assess
the two cases: if you win you win everything, if you lose you lose nothing. Do not hesitate then,
wager that he does exist.”1 So runs the famous “wager” proposed by the scientist and Christian
apologist, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), to those of his contemporaries who were uncertain of God’s
existence, convinced by neither reason nor revelation. Once the urgency of the issue has been
grasped, Pascal insists, no one can stand unmoved in the face of the question of God’s existence.
“You must wager. There is no choice, you are already committed.” Ultimately, it is not the proofs of
reason or the professions of faith that Pascal offers to the unconvinced, but the lived example of
those who persevere in the practices of Christian piety, even though their faith was severely tested.
“Learn from those who were once bound like you and who now wager all they have. These are
people who know the road you wish to follow; follow the way by which they began.”2

A proposal not unlike Pascal’s wager has been put to the secular societies of contemporary
Europe in the public discourses of Pope Benedict XVI. As the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith for over twenty years before his election as Pope, Joseph Ratzinger showed
an intense concern for the cultural integrity and viability of the increasingly visible ‘Europe’. The
Cardinal argued that the project of a united and creative Europe would only succeed if societies
reconsidered the Enlightenment project of determining a foundation for human life and social order
that was valid etsi Deus non daretur (even if God did not exist), and instead reconnected with the
Christian origins of the concepts of person and community understood, at least theoretically, in
relation to God. “We must therefore reverse the axiom of the Enlightenment and say: Even the one
who does not succeed in finding the path to accepting the existence of God ought nevertheless to
try to live and to direct his life veluti si Deus daretur, as if God did indeed exist. This is the advice
Pascal gave to his non-believing friends, and it is the advice that I should like to give our friends
today who do not believe.”3

1
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1966), 151.
2
Pascal, Pensées, 152.
3
Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 2006), 51-52. The title of the 2005 Italian original, L’Europa di Benedetto nella crisi delle culture,
better captures the scope of the work. Some of the same addresses, translated by Adrian J. Walker, appeared
as “Europe in the Crisis of Cultures,” Communio 32 (2005): 345-356.
 During the years of his pontificate, Benedict XVI repeatedly addressed the need for persons
and states to live and act veluti si Deus daretur, and warned of the cultural and anthropological
dangers of avoiding or suppressing the question of God. This was precisely what was happening in
post-Christian Western societies, the Pope argued. “God remains excluded from culture and from
public life, and faith in him becomes more difficult, also because we live in a world that always
appears to be of our own making … God no longer appears directly but seems to have become
superfluous, even out of place.”4 The “death of God” described by thinkers in various disciplines in
the twentieth century is producing a “barren cult of the individual”. Far from the rich understanding
of the person as the “image of God”, the formula etsi deus non daretur gives expression to the
materialistic and individualistic way of living, in which reason “deems itself self-sufficient and closes
itself to contemplation and the quest for a superior Truth.”5 Even where people do not intentionally
deny the tenets of Christian faith or the practices of Christian worship, there is a widespread
“practical” atheism in which “people believe in God in a superficial way, but live etsi Deus non
daretur”, considering religious matters “irrelevant to daily life, detached from life, pointless.”
Eventually, this way of living produces in people an indifference to the question of God and to the
dignity of the person created in imago dei.6 Such people constitute a primary focus of efforts in the
“new evangelisation” promoted by Catholic Church leaders since the turn of the millennium.

Although Benedict has spoken of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) as one of the “great
witnesses” of the Christian quest for truth and a “great example” for him personally,7 and is familiar
with Bonhoeffer’s prison writings,8 he has not explicitly linked his own critique of life and culture
lived etsi Deus non daretur with Bonhoeffer’s well-known use of this formula in a letter to Eberhard
Bethge from Tegel prison dated 16 July 1944. The link has been made, however, by President of the
Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelisation, Archbishop Rino Fisichella. Like the pope,
Fisichella traces the emergence in the West of a society that lives “as if God did not exist”. In a
manner never foreseen by Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), who introduced the formula in modern
thought, Western societies have shifted from a healthy secularisation of the affairs of the state to a
programmatic secularism. Citing the letter of 16 July, the archbishop writes that it is difficult to
identify to what extent Bonhoeffer’s “generic and utopian” thoughts contributed to the “dubious
and extremist versions” of secularisation that dominate the contemporary cultural landscape.9 In

4
Benedict XVI, Address to the Participants of the Fourth National Ecclesial Convention, 19 October 2006,
Verona, Italy. Available at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/october/
documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20061019_convegno-verona_en.html, accessed 3 September 2013.
5
Benedict XVI, Address to the Participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Culture, 8
March 2008, Rome. Available at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2008/
march/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080308_pc-cultura_en.html, accessed 3 September 2013.
6
Benedict XVI, General Audience, 14 November 2012, Rome. Available at http://www.vatican.va/
holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2012/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20121114_en.html, accessed 3
September 2013. The Pope echoes here the language of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Homebush,
NSW: St Pauls/Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994, n. 2128) on practical atheism, agnosticism and indifference. The
concept of “practical atheism” was invoked regularly at the time of the 2012 XXIII Ordinary General Assembly
of the Synod of Bishops, on the theme “The New Evangelization for the Transmission of the Christian Faith.”
7
Joseph Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium. An Interview with Peter Seewald
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 67-68.
8
Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster (London: Search Press, 1969), 68-69.
9
Rino Fisichella, The New Evangelisation: Responding to the Challenge of Indifference (Leominster, UK:
Gracewing, 2012), 26-27.

2
any case, an extreme form of secularism, which consigns religion to a “very restricted place” in the
private sphere, is the context in which the new evangelisation must be undertaken.

Ironically, it was precisely in awareness of the urgent need for a new evangelisation in the
context of post-war Germany that Bonhoeffer made use of Grotius’ maxim, etsi Deus non daretur.
For Bonhoeffer, the inhumane policies of the Nazi regime, and the apparent inability of the
Protestant and Catholic Churches to offer any consistent and convincing resistance to those policies,
was compelling evidence of what he and some others had perceived in the years between the wars:
the Gospel of Christ was not being heard (either in Germany or, as Bonhoeffer’s travel and
ecumenical work had made him aware, internationally) and this was primarily because the churches
no longer lived or communicated that Gospel effectively. If that communication of the Gospel was
ever to become effective again (speaking from the human side of the equation of course), it was
necessary that the church undergo a profound conversion, including new relationships with those
contemporaries who were non-believing and non-denominational. This conversion would require a
fundamental acceptance of the fact that both believers and non-believers in Bonhoeffer’s society
lived in post-Enlightenment and post-Darwinian frames of thought, and that the church must learn
anew how to experience and proclaim the Gospel in this world which operates etsi Deus non
daretur.

In what follows, I will locate Bonhoeffer’s use of the maxim etsi Deus non daretur within the
overall argument of the ‘new theology’ in his later prison writings, which also involves addressing
the question of the relation of these late writings to Bonhoeffer’s theology in general. Secondly, I
will trace Bonhoeffer’s reception of this maxim via the writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, and ask whether
it accurately reflects the purposes for which Grotius originally employed it. Finally, I will consider
how Bonhoeffer’s thought on proclaiming the Word of God in the world “come of age” contributes
to our understanding of the contemporary mission of the church.

BONHOEFFER’S PRISON THEOLOGY

The first thing to note about Bonhoeffer’s use of the maxim etsi Deus non daretur is that it is
of secondary importance to his overall argument. Just as “the wager”, a non-essential and incidental
element of Pascal’s thought in the Pensées, has become the idea most famously associated with his
name,10 so the etsi Deus has become identified with Bonhoeffer’s name, along with those other
motifs of the prison writings: “the world come of age”, “religionless Christianity”, and “the non-
religious interpretation of biblical concepts.” In both cases, interestingly, these ideas are simply
elements of the conceptual framework developed to bear the weight of the central conviction of
Pascal and Bonhoeffer: the centrality of the person of Christ in human existence and history. As
Bonhoeffer states it paradigmatically in the letter to Bethge of 30 April 1944: “What keeps gnawing
at me is the question, what is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today?”11

This brings us to the issue of hermeneutics in Bonhoeffer studies, in particular the decisive
question of the relationship of the theological outlook of the late writings from Tegel prison in 1944

10
See Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 291.
11
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works [DBWE] 8 (Minneapolis:
Fortress, 2009), 362.

3
to that of Bonhoeffer’s earlier and more systematic theological studies. Do those fragmentary and
undetermined concepts such as “religionless Christianity” and “world come of age” stand in
continuity or discontinuity with conceptual rigour of Bonhoeffer’s earlier dissertations on the
community of the church and the concreteness of revelation, or the spiritual meditations of his
middle years like Discipleship and Life Together? Are they “sparks from the anvil as Bonhoeffer was
hammered by the Nazis or ... the results of careful and prolonged thought in the years that had led
up to the Nazi regime?”12 The early reception of Bonhoeffer’s prison writings, first collated and
published in 1951 by his theological colleague, co-conspirator, and close personal friend, Eberhard
Bethge (1909-2000), was characterised by the fact that most people were unaware of Bonhoeffer’s
earlier theological work, with the exception of the Ethics manuscripts, which Bethge had published
in 1949. Working in this limited perspective, commentators tended to align Bonhoeffer’s provocative
motifs with theological positions of the post-WWII years. In Germany, where some had access to
early editions of Bonhoeffer’s other publications, his theological outlook was aligned either with Karl
Barth and the neo-orthodoxy movement, or with Rudolf Bultmann’s hermeneutics of
demythologisation.13

In the English-speaking world, despite the well-balanced collection of articles that appeared
in 1962,14 it was the reference to the motifs in Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison in John A. T.
Robinson’s Honest to God and Paul van Buren’s The Secular Meaning of the Gospel in 196315 that set
the scene for the alignment of Bonhoeffer’s name with the death-of-God and secularization
theologies that flourished over the next decade. Here, Bonhoeffer’s discussion in the prison letters
of the “end of the time of religion” and of “religionless Christianity” was taken up as a kind of
theological legitimization of the 1960s “secularization thesis”, in which modern societies necessarily
become less religious by virtue of an internal and deterministic functional dynamic – an idea that is
foreign to Bonhoeffer, and to the common use of the term “secularisation” in Germany in the 1930s
and 40s.16 Misreadings of Bonhoeffer’s theological oeuvre and ecclesial commitment, stemming
from this alignment of his writings with the radical theologies of the 1960s, persist to the present.
One theologian who mounted an early protest against this co-opting of Bonhoeffer’s thought was

12
Edwin H. Robertson, “Introduction,” in No Rusty Swords (London: Collins, 1965), 7. There is extensive
literature on Bonhoeffer interpretation. For a summary of the issues see my Standing Responsibly Between
Silence and Speech: Religion and Revelation in the Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and René Girard (Leuven:
Peeters, 2012), 5-33; also the Editor’s Introduction in Peter H. A. Neumann (ed), ‘Religionloses Christentum’
und ‘Nicht-religiöse Interpretation’ bei Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1990): 1-42; John W. de Gruchy, “The Reception of Bonhoeffer’s Theology,“ in The Cambridge Companion to
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. John W. de Gruchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 93-109; Ralf K.
Wüstenberg, A Theology of Life: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity, trans. Doug Stott (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1998). The editor’s introductions and notes of the various volumes of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Works are very helpful.
13
See Ernst Feil, “Aspekte der Bonhoefferinterpretation,” Theologische Literaturzeitung 117 (1992): 1-16, 81-
100.
14
Martin E. Marty (ed), The Place of Bonhoeffer (London: SCM Press, 1962).
15
John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1963); Paul van Buren, The Secular
Meaning of the Gospel (New York: Macmillan, 1963). Note that van Buren states (p. 171): “Our method is one
which never occurred to Bonhoeffer, but our interpretation may nevertheless serve to justify his hope.” See
also William Hamilton, “A Secular Theology for a World Come of Age,” Theology Today 18 (1962): 435-459.
16
Jan Bremmer describes the transformation of the term “secularization” from a purely descriptive term to a
paradigm during the 1960s in “Secularization: Notes Toward a Genealogy,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed.
Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008): 432-437.

4
Thomas F. Torrance. Torrance bluntly criticizes those who take catch-phrases from Bonhoeffer’s
prison letters and construct them into thought-systems that are contradictory to his overall
theological vision. Writing in 1968, he declares: “Let us see how grotesque the current cult of
‘Bonhoeffer’ is, when it resurrects him from the dead dressed up in the stolen garments of an
existentialized and secularizing ‘Christianity’ grounded upon the dualist assumptions that he
overthrew.”17 On the Catholic side, the Jesuit Henri de Lubac notes that Bonhoeffer’s thinking had
been misrepresented, even though one only had to read his other works and the other letters in
captivity to realize the mistake. Citing Max Thurian, de Lubac concludes that Bonhoeffer had become
“the involuntary ancestor of a trend which has not always inherited his spiritual depth.”18

It was the magisterial biography of Bonhoeffer by Eberhard Bethge, however, that lay the
foundations of the scholarly interpretation of Bonhoeffer in recent times.19 His strategy of
contextualising his friend’s various publications, sermons, letters and notes within the ever-changing
circumstances of his life and ministry provided a hermeneutic for interpreting the discontinuities in
Bonhoeffer’s thought within a more comprehensive and expansive continuity. Bethge showed that
this continuity existed both in Bonhoeffer’s personal commitments to church and nation, and in his
fundamental theological presuppositions and framework. It is from this perspective of
discontinuities-within-continuity that the terms and concepts of the “new theology” that Bonhoeffer
begins to explore during his imprisonment are most authentically and fruitfully interpreted.20 What
is “new” about Bonhoeffer’s vision of the future church and its theology in 1944 is not the
replacement of his previous understandings with a new set of secularized, non-institutional models
of Christianity, but the working out of his most deeply-held and faithfully tested theological insights
in the new and as yet unknown context of the church in the aftermath of the war and Germany’s
ever-more likely defeat. It is the fruit of theological hope rather than historical determinism.

At the beginning of April 1944 Bonhoeffer learned that the likelihood of his case being heard
at trial was slipping away. “I have been told not to expect any change in my current situation for the
time being.”21 It is from this point that Bethge begins to notice “the change in his reading, his new
manner of working, and the different tone of his letters.”22 Although Bonhoeffer had discussed
issues of theology and church life in letters since the first weeks of his imprisonment, there is a new
focus and a new urgency in the “theological letters” to Bethge of 30 April, 5 May, 29 may, 8 June, 16
July, 18 July, and 21 July, as well as his message for his new-born nephew, “Thoughts on the Baptism
of Dietrich Bethge,” and the “Outline for a Book” that he was working on during August and

17
Torrance is referring here to the “two-spheres” thinking in Lutheranism (this world – other world; church –
world; grace – nature) that Bonhoeffer argues against in his ecumenical speeches and in the Ethics. See T. F.
Torrance, “Cheap and Costly Grace,” The Baptist Quarterly 22/6 (1968): 290-311, here 304.
18
Henri de Lubac, The Christian Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986; first published in 1969), 157, citing
Max Thurian, La Foi en crise (Taize, 1968), 76.
19
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologe, Christ, Zeitgenosse: Eine Biographie (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1967). A revised
English edition based on the sixth German edition (1986) was published in 2000: Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Man for His Times: A Biography [DB], rev. and ed. Victoria J. Barrett
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, Press, 2000).
20
On the context of the “new theology” see Eberhard Bethge, DB, 853-892 and John W. de Gruchy, “Editor’s
Introduction to the English Edition,” DBWE 8, 1-34, esp. 20-30.
21
Letter to Bethge of 11 April 1944, DBWE 8, 352.
22
Bethge, DB, 855.

5
September 1944, all of which constitutes the material of the “new theology”.23 From the context, we
can surmise that during the long days spent in his prison cell, days spent in meditation, study and
conversation with his fellow prisoners, Bonhoeffer’s attention extends beyond his own precarious
prospects to the future of the church, and the concrete Word of God which it bears, after the
evangelical and confessional crisis of the Nazi years.

The basic epistemological shift of Bonhoeffer’s “new theology”, according to Christian

Gremmels, is the abandonment of liberal Protestantism’s doctrine of the “religious a priori”.
Inherited from Ernst Troeltsch, this notion posits a natural “religiosity” in human experience, a
“compelling ability” in all human subject by which they can “come to an unmediated awareness of
pure spirit.”24 As Bonhoeffer saw it, this theory makes divine revelation and God’s grace dependent
on this human religiosity, i.e. on the correct operation of this religious disposition. Bonhoeffer
follows Karl Barth in asserting that this theory reduces God’s sovereign freedom to the conditions of
an object of human experience and cognition; it reduces grace to “religion”. Bonhoeffer goes further
than Barth, however, in contextualising this reduction in the historical-cultural form of post-
Enlightenment, and particularly nineteenth century, Protestant thought. While church leaders and
theologians during this period continued to cling to the religious a priori as the principle
undergirding the whole structure of cultural Protestantism, the majority of the population had made
the post-critical shift to a worldview that no longer operated on the presumption of this religious
capacity. “People as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly
describe themselves as ‘religious’ aren’t really practicing that at all; they presumably mean
something quite different by ‘religious’.”25 According to Bonhoeffer, the “time of religion” was the
historical period of Protestantism’s insulating itself from the challenges of Western modernity, a
strategy founded on the religious a priori, and the history of the twentieth century is demonstrating
that the time of this “religion” is irretrievably passed. Although Bonhoeffer at no time develops a
systematic and comprehensive concept of religion, some of the characteristics he mentions in the
letters are inwardness and individualism, the use of cognitive and metaphysical systems to “explain”
God and God’s revelation, compartmentalising reality into religious and secular spheres and
activities, securing a privileged status for the church in society, assuming the role of guardian of
society’s conscience and righteousness.26 Ultimately, the model of the religious a priori pushes God
into the role of “stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge”,27 and relies on employing the

23
See de Gruchy, “Editor’s Introduction,” 23. He notes: “According to Bethge, Bonhoeffer had probably written
a considerable amount before it became impossible to continue. But all that survived was the “Outline for a
Book” sent to Bethge at the beginning of August 1944.”
24
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology, DBWE
2 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), 57. Under the influence of Barth’s early theology, Bonhoeffer had
taken aim at the religious a priori, and with it his Berlin teachers, in his Habilitationsschrift, published as Act
and Being. See the letter of 30 April 1994 in DBWE 8, 361-367, especially note 11 on p. 362. On this shift, see
Christian Gremmels, “Editor’s Afterword to the German Edition,” DBWE 8, 565-596, here 586.
25
Letter of 30 April 1994, DBWE 8, 362.
26
On this see Wüstenberg, A Theology of Life, 76-84; Ernst Feil, The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 102-107; 167-177; and my Standing Responsibly between Silence and
Speech, 177-186.
27
Letter of 29 May 1944, DBWE 8, 405-406.

6
“working hypothesis: God” to answer every question and difficulty encountered in life.28 This
strategy is no longer viable in the “world come of age” (die mündig gewordene Welt).

It is in this context that Bonhoeffer, in the letter to Bethge of 16 July 1944, makes mention of
Grotius’ maxim, etsi Deus non daretur.29 Informed by the writings of Dilthey, as we shall discuss
below, Bonhoeffer traces this historical shift from the medieval worldview, in which God and
revelation were presumed to complete the structure of reality and knowledge, to the worldview of
Western modernity and its presumption of the autonomy of the universe, of human subjects, and of
historical progression. “As a working hypothesis for morality, politics, and the natural sciences, God
has been overcome and done away with ... also for philosophy and religion.”30 This new paradigm
can be seen at work since the sixteenth century in philosophy (Lord Cherbury), morality (Montaigne
and Bodin), politics (Machiavelli), and in both the deism of Descartes (followed by Kant) and the
pantheism of Spinoza (followed the idealists, Fichte and Hegel). In the same line, Grotius “sets up his
natural law as an international law, which is valid etsi Deus non daretur, ‘as if there were no God’.”31
And this, by and large, is the worldview in which the majority of Bonhoeffer’s contemporaries live,
think, and act. In such a context, a proclamation of the Gospel premised on the religious a priori is
both ineffective and dishonest. “It is a matter of intellectual integrity to drop this working
hypothesis, or eliminate it as much as possible.”32

It is important to note that, while he does refer this paradigm shift as an historical
movement or direction, Bonhoeffer is not a historical determinist, and sees no inner necessity in this
movement of the world come of age. In the letter of 9 March 1944, he rejects the idealist
interpretation of history as a continuum, as conceived in the work of Leopold van Range and Hans
Delbruck. “The concept of history as a continuum comes basically from Hegel, who saw the whole
course of history as culminating in ‘modernity’, that is, in his own philosophical system.”33 Yet
Bonhoeffer does see the “time of religion” as an historical phenomenon, a symptom of the church’s
inability to respond adequately, either intellectually or pastorally, to the epochal shift marked by
Western modernity. In the prison writings, “religion” primarily signifies an “historically conditioned
and transient form of expression” of Christianity, as Bonhoeffer puts in it the letter of 30 April, the
“garb in which Christianity is clothed – and this garb has looked very different in different ages”.34
“Religion” is not simply systematic theological category, but one of Geistesgeschichte.35 Thus

28
Letter of 8 May 1944, DBWE 8, 425-426, and for the background on this “working hypothesis” phrase see
note 11 on p. 426.
29
Letter of 16 July 1944, DBWE 8, 473-480
30
Letter of 16 July 1944, DBWE 8, 478.
31
Letter of 16 July 1944, 476. See the long explanatory note 23. Bonhoeffer had already outlined this historical
paradigm shift in the letter of 8 July 1944, DBWE 8, 424-431.
32
Letter of 16 July 1944, DBWE 8, 478.
33
Letter of 9 March 1944, DBWE 8, 318-324, here 321.
34
Letter of 30 April 1944, DBWE 8, 363.
35
Ernst Feil The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 172. A similar approach is taken by Wüstenberg, A Theology
of Life, 90-99, and “Religionless Christianity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Tegel Theology,” In Bonhoeffer for a New
Day: Theology in a Time of Transition, ed. John W. de Gruchy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997)57-71;
Christoph Schwöbel, “’Religion’ and ‘Religionlessness’ in Letters and Papers from Prison,” in Mysteries in the
Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. Kirsten Busch Nielsen, Ulrich Nissen and Christiane Tietz (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2007), 159-183. Feil develops the thesis that the word “religion“ underwent a
profound change of meaning during the eighteenth century from the ancient meaning of religio in “The
Problem of Defining and Demarcating ‘Religion’,“ On the Concept of Religion, ed. Ernst Feil (Binghamton, NY:

7
Bonhoeffer’s description of the world living etsi Deus non daretur ought not to be read as “the
theological sanctioning of a historical development”. Rather, the maxim names the “precondition for
a theology”36 that takes seriously the church’s task of living and proclaiming the Gospel in this new
historical context.

BONHOEFFER, DILTHEY AND GROTIUS ON THE AUTOMONY OF THE WORLD

How do we account for this development in Bonhoeffer’s prison writings, from the Barthian
theological critique of religion as the antithesis of faith that marks his earlier works, to the broader
perspective of this historical-cultural analysis of faith in the “time of religion”? We have already seen
that Bethge was struck by the change in Bonhoeffer’s reading material and writing focus around
April 1944. In fact, faced with a prolonged stay in prison, Bonhoeffer had undertaken an extensive
and purposeful reading program, around the theme of the cultural history of German
Protestantism.37 Martin Rumscheidt has argued that the significant formative influence of the
historical approach of Bonhoeffer’s early mentor in Berlin, Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930), re-
emerged in Bonhoeffer’s thinking in the years before and after his arrest.38 At any rate, in early 1944
Bonhoeffer writes to his parents and to Bethge that he was reading Harnack’s History of the Royal
Prussian Academy of Science. Two works of Wilhelm Dilthey, Weltanschauung und Analyse des
Menschen seit der Renaissance und Reformation (Worldview and Analysis of Humanity since the
Renaissance and Reformation) and Von deutsche Dichtung und Musik (On German Poetry and Music)
are of key importance at this time, as is C. F. von Weizsächer’s Das Weltbild der Physik (The
Worldview of Physics), which Dietrich read at the prompting of his scientist brother Karl-Friedrich.39 I
would argue that we need also to take into consideration the ongoing influence of Bonhoeffer’s
reading of Karl Jaspers’ Die geistige Situation der Zeit (The Spiritual Situation of the Times) during the
years prior to his arrest, which deeply informed the historical approach to Western modernity that
Bonhoeffer first took in the “Heritage and Decay” manuscript of the Ethics.40

Bonhoeffer had already explored the thought of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) with his
students in Berlin University during his 1931-1932 lectures on twentieth century systematic
theology. Here, Bonhoeffer argues that Christianity in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century
had become little more than a civil religion, wedded to the functioning of the state for its identity
and security. He utilises Dilthey’s account of the historical emergence of the autonomous human

Global Publications, 2000), 1-35; see also his “Religion: Von Beginn der Neuzeit bis zur Frühaufklärung,“ in
Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Band 8 (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 1992): 644-654.
36
Christian Gremmels, “Editor’s Afterword,” DBWE 8, 587.
37
See the schedule of Bonhoeffer’s prison reading in the appendix, “Bonhoeffer’s Readings in Prison,” in
Bethge, DB, 943-946.
38
Martin Rumscheidt, “The Significance of Adolf von Harnack and Reinhold Seeberg for Dietrich Bonhoeffer,”
in Bonhoeffer’s Intellectual Formation, ed. Peter Frick (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008): 201-224, here 215-218.
39
The significance of Bonhoeffer’s relationship with his internationally-renowned physical chemist brother,
Karl-Friedrich (1899-1957), for our understanding of the “new theology” in a world come of age should not be
underestimated. See Eberhard Bethge, “The Nonreligious Scientist and the Confessing Theologian: The
Influence of Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer on His Younger Brother Dietrich,” in Bonhoeffer for a New Day, ed. John
W. de Gruchy, 39-56.
40
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, DBWE 6 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, Press, 2005), 103-133.

8
subject and state to explain how this reduction of Christian life has come about.41 In the prison
writings, Bonhoeffer again calls on the historical analysis of Dilthey to provide a framework for the
paradigm shift towards the world etsi Deus non daretur. Bethge, Ernst Feil and Ralf Wüstenberg have
shown conclusively that Bonhoeffer drew both the terminology and the historical framework of his
discussion on the world “come of age” from Dilthey, especially Weltanschauung und Analyse des
Menschen.42 While Bonhoeffer accepted and employed Dilthey’s historical-cultural analysis as a
useful descriptive heuristic, this does not mean that he concurred with Dilthey’s positive assessment
of this transformation from a God-centred to a human-centred understanding of reality. Rather,
Bonhoeffer interpreted this paradigm shift as a profound challenge to the church and to theology, a
challenge to learn anew how to live and proclaim the Gospel in this world come of age. As Feil puts
it: “Dilthey and Bonhoeffer were sharply divided over one issue: Dilthey belonged to the past
because he affirmed the ‘new gospel of the infinite universe’ and the inwardness that went with it;
Bonhoeffer, on the other hand, was anxious to overcome the division of faith and world precisely in
view of the world come of age, a division that Dilthey had ... regarded as insurmountable.”43

In Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen, Dilthey had written positively of the shift in
the sixteenth century toward the autonomy of the person and the world based on a “system of
natural law, natural morality and natural theology”, a system constructed with the conceptual
apparatus of Stoicism.44 Within this perspective, Dilthey argues, Grotius shows that “‘as if there
were no God’ (auch wenn es keinen Gott gäbe), the statutes of natural law would have their own
independent general validity.”45 Dilthey cites the maxim, not in the fuller Latin expression used by
Grotius (etiamsi daretur ... non esse Deum), but using a contracted German formula. According to
Feil, it is clear that Bonhoeffer took up the contracted formula from Dilthey, though it is not evident
how he produced the Latin version of that formula.46 Wüstenberg concludes that “Bonhoeffer was
familiar with the citation in its longer, original Latin version, and under the influence of the
(shortened) German rendering in Dilthey constructed the Latin form that we now have from him.” 47
It is helpful to recall at this point that a feature of Bonhoeffer’s writing style is his habit of recalling
citations from memory, for example from Luther’s Bible, or from the works of philosophers and
poets, and of providing only partial references in his own texts to sources he considered to be well-
known. Considered in this light, his less-than-exact reference to Grotius’ formula is consistent with
Bonhoeffer’s practice of “approximating” the terms of a source he is using to build up his overall
argument. To complicate matters further, the 1962 edition of Letters and Papers from Prison

41
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ecumenical, Academic, and Pastoral Work: 1931-1932 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress
Press, 2012), 178-244.
42
See Feil, The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 178-185; Wüstenberg, A Theology of Life, 68-76, 104-112, and
“The Influence of Wilhelm Dilthey on Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison,” in Bonhoeffer’s Intellectual
Formation, ed. Peter Frick, 167-173.
43
Feil, The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 186.
44
Wilhelm Dilthey, Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation, vol. 2 of
Gesammelte Schriften, 7th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1964), 91. On this, see Feil, The
Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 181-182.
45
Wilhelm Dilthey, Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen, 280: “‘Auch wenn es keinen Gott gäbe‘,
würden die Sätze des Naturrechts ihre independente Allgemeingültigkeit haben.“
46
Feil, The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 236, note 190.
47
Wüstenberg, “Philosophical Influences on Bonhoeffer’s ‘Religionless Christianity’,” in Bonhoeffer in
Continental Thought: Cruciform Philosophy, ed. Brian Gregor and Jens Zimmermann (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2009), 137-155, here 155, note 51; see also A Theology of Life, 71-72 and 185, note 154.

9
omitted Bonhoeffer’s conjunctival translation of the maxim, which led at least one commentator to
assume that Bonhoeffer intended the indicative sense of the statement: “to which God is not
given.”48

What of the formula in the work of Grotius himself? And did Dilthey interpret correctly the
contribution of Grotius’ thought to the increasing autonomy of the modern world? Grotius’ principal
work, De iure belli ac pacis libri tres (Three Books on the Law of War and Peace), written as the Thirty
Years’ War raged through much of Europe, is his attempt to lay out the philosophical and legal
foundations for the international ordering of relations between states. Recognising the social nature
of human persons, Grotius argues that the rights and principles that pertain to relations between
states proceed from what fosters the good of socially-constituted persons, and to act against these
rights would be to violate a law of human nature itself. In the Prolegomena he writes: “Et haec
quidem quae diximus (And those things we have been saying), locum (aliquem) haberent etiamsi
daremus (have (some) ground even if we were to concede), quod sine summo scelere dari nequit
(what cannot be conceded without the greatest impiety), non esse Deum, aut non curare ab eo
negotia humana (that God does not exist or that he does not care for human affairs).”49 That is to
say, the claim of these rights in natural law has a degree of validity because of the inherent good
indicated by that right, to say nothing of the divine command obliging that the good action be done.
In this way, Grotius grounds the rights and obligations of international relations in the natural order
of created things, rather than understanding them to rest, in a nominalist sense, upon the edict of
the (human or divine) sovereign.50 His strategy to make this clear is to distinguish between the
indicative and obligative senses of the law, which he does by adopting the “impious hypothesis” of a
natural order without God or God’s command. In doing so, he was following standard rhetorical
practice of his time. As John Finnis puts it: “Grotius must be assumed to have known (if only from his
reading of Suarez) that, for the purpose of discussing the roots of obligation, the hypothesis of God’s
non-existence (or indifference) had been a commonplace of theological debate since, at latest, the
mid-fourteenth century.”51

There have been a number of studies seeking to clarify the precedents for Grotius’ use of
“impious hypothesis”.52 Javier Hervada argues that while there are no direct precedents to be found
among the medieval juridical commentators, there is ample reference to the hypothesis in the
philosophical-theological tradition prior to Grotius.53 Some authors affirm the indirect influence of
passages from Marcus Arelius’ De iure naturae et gentium, although this text does not refer to the
48
See William Kuhns, In Pursuit of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (London: Burns and Oates, 1967), 124. On this see Feil,
The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 220, note 71; Martin E. Marty, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers
from Prison: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 235-236.
49
Hugo Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis libri tres, Prolegomena, 11, 31. See DBWE 8, 476, note 23.
50
See Adolphe Gesché, “Le christianisme comme atheisme suspensif: Réflexions sur le ‘Etsi Deus non daretur’,”
Revue théologique de Louvain 22 (2002): 187-210, here 188.
51
John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 43. In the scholasticism of
Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas it was common to distinguish between the indicative (vis directiva) and
prescriptive (vis coercitiva) aspects of the law. See Javier Hervada, “Lo nuevo y lo viejo en la hipótesis ‘etiamsi
daremus’ de Grocio,” Revista de Estudios Histórico-Juridicos 7 (1982): 351-368, here 362.
52
See for example M. B. Crowe, “The ‘Impious Hypothesis’: A Paradox in Hugo Grotius,” Tijdschrift voor
Filosofie 38 (1976): 379-410; James St. Leger, The ‘etiamsi daremus’ of Hugo Grotius: A Study in the Origins of
International Law (Rome: Pontifica Universitas Gregoriana, 1972); Leonard Besselink, “The Impious Hypothesis
Revisited,” Grotiana 9 (1988): 3-63.
53
Hervada, “Lo nuevo y lo viejo,” 358-359.

10
natural law as such. Finnis locates the classical debate in Plato’s Republic: “If the gods don’t exist, or
if they are not at all interested in men ... .”54 Others point to the possible influence of reflections on
the natural law in the writings of Cicero, Augustine, Isidore of Seville, and Gratian.55 While James St.
Leger considers Hugh of St Victor a possible precedent for Grotius’ use of the etiamsi daremus,56
Hervada thinks it unlikely that Grotius would be familiar with the writings of this medieval author.
Instead, Hervada points to Gregory of Rimini (c.1300-1358) as the most likely influence on the
fourteenth and fifteenth century scholastic thinkers, particularly those of a nominalist bent, who
constitute the direct precedent for Grotius’ use of the hypothesis. He notes an explicit reference to
Gregory’s use of the hypothesis in the writings of Gabriel Biel, Antonio de Cordoba, Vitoria, Molina,
Medina and Suarez, among others.57 Some scholars point out that, four centuries before Grotius,
John Duns Scotus seems to anticipate the hypothesis in his theory of possibilities, which may exist
independently of the divine essence.58 Prior to and including Grotius, however, the hypotheses
etiamsi daremus is usually treated under the qualification of the impossible (per impossibile); it may
be possible, and sometimes useful, to think that God does not exist in relation to created things, but
this thought-product does not correspond strictly to the way things actually are.

Interpreters have been divided about the impact of Grotius’ thought, including his use of the
etiamsi daremus hypothesis, on the Western philosophical tradition. One line of interpretation has
seen Grotius as a forerunner of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on autonomous reason within an
anthropocentric worldview. More influenced by Stoicism than Scholasticism, in this interpretation,
Grotius saw the dictates of natural law proceeding from principles of reason grounded in the human
intellect, rather than in metaphysical participation in the divine being or in the extrinsic command of
God59 More recently, scholars have been more attentive both to Grotius’ context in relation to both
the thinkers of the Spanish scholasticism and to the intellectual needs of the socio-political crisis he
was participating in. Brian Tierney argues that, while Grotius himself shared the typical scholastic
metaphysical view of created things, later writers were able to use Grotius’ thought to support more
“secularist” models of law and morality because “the natural rights that *Grotius} transmitted always
had been rooted in human reason, with divine revelation employed as a complementary (and, as it
later proved, detachable) source of argument.”60 According to Hervada, the novelty of Grotius lies
not in his invocation of the “impious hypothesis”, but in his identification of two origins of natural

54
Plato, The Republic, Book 2, 365d, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 46. See
Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 54.
55
Gesché, “Le christianisme comme atheisme suspensif,” 189.
56
St. Leger, The ‘etiamsi daremus’ of Hugo Grotius, 122.
57
Hervada, “Lo nuevo y lo viejo,” 361-365; Crowe, “The ‘Impious Hypothesis’,” 396-406.
58
See Crowe, “The ‘Impious Hypothesis’,” 387, with reference to St Leger, The ‘etiamsi daremus’ of Hugo
Grotius, 55-56. On Scotus’ elaboration of the medieval metaphysical structure (for example, that of Henry of
Ghent) see Cal Ledsham, “Love, Power and Consistency: Scotus’ Doctrines of God’s Power, Contingent
Creation, Induction and Natural Law,” Sophia 49 (2010): 577-575. Scotus “explains the creative possibilities by
distinguishing two aspects of the status of possible things: as dependent on God, and as autonomous with
respect to God. Possible things are intrinsically so (i.e. part of the concept of a thing is that it is possible)” (p.
559).
59
In this line, see Wolfgang Friedmann, “Grotius, Hugo,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 3, ed. Paul
Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 393-393; Anreas H. Aure, “Der säkularisierte und subjektivierte
Naturrechtsbegriff bei Hugo Grotius,” Forum Historiae Juris, 13 February 2008, available at
http://www.forhistiur.de/zitat/0892aure.htm, accessed 6 September 2013.
60
Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law 1150-1625
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 320.

11
law, human nature and divine nature, without establishing a relationship of exemplary causality, i.e.
of analogy and participation, between them.61

What of Dilthey’s interpretation of Grotius’ role in the historical movement towards human
autonomy in the disciplines of knowledge? Dilthey describes the successive periodization of an
historical process away from metaphysics, and an epistemic approach to all reality grounded in this
metaphysical structure, and towards an understanding of nature and society grounded in reason and
the intellect. And he placed Grotius firmly at the heart of this process, a process which Dilthey seeks
to continue in his own quest for a hermeneutics that can provide an objective grounding for the
human sciences.62 It can be said, therefore, that Dilthey follows the first line of interpretation
described above, understanding Grotius’ work as a key factor in the secularization of knowledge and
the sciences, and contributing to the widespread promotion of the autonomy of human reason in
Western thought.

As many recent commentators have noted, Dilthey’s historically concretized “hermeneutics

of life” was an important element in Bonhoeffer’s prison theology, providing the historical
framework and some of the key conceptual features of Bonhoeffer’s analysis of the “world come of
age’ in the theological letters from Tegel. Indeed, Dilthey’s hermeneutical conviction that ideas can
only be rightly understood from within the perspective of the lived context in which those ideas take
shape is a methodological principle that Bonhoeffer applies from his early dissertations, and is
evident in his understandings of revelation, faith, church, and discipleship. Following the thought of
Feil, Wüstenberg and others, we can say that Bonhoeffer accepts and utilises Dilthey’s historical
hermeneutic, including his “secularist” reading of Grotius, and Grotius’ citation of the “impious
hypothesis”. However, as we have seen, Bonhoeffer differs from Dilthey at the level of fundamental
concern. Where Dilthey’s concern is the relation of history to the unfolding of human reason,
Bonhoeffer’s concern is the relation of history to the universal significance of Christ, God made
concrete.63 Where Dilthey’s concern is the historical context of humanity “without God” (i.e.
metaphysical systems, participatory ontologies, etc), Bonhoeffer’s concern is the historical context
of humanity “without God, before God”, i.e. the post-Enlightenment person addressed hic et nunc
by the presence of the living Word of God, incarnate, crucified and exalted.

BEFORE GOD AND WITH GOD, LIVING WITHOUT GOD

This is the context of the “new evangelisation” that Bonhoeffer is convinced is being asked
of the church by God and by people in the concrete “here and now” of his day. “I am more able to
see what needs to be done than how I can actually do it,” he claims in the 16 July letter to Bethge.64
Yet, from Bonhoeffer’s writings we can say that this new encounter with the Gospel has both ad
intra and ad extra implications for the church, the Gemeinde Christi. In terms of the church
61
Hervada, “Lo nuevo y lo viejo,” 366-367.
62
On Dilthey’s hermeneutical project, see for example Stanley E. Porter and Jason C. Robinson, Hermeneutics:
An Introduction to Interpretive Theory (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 33-46. See also Christophe
Boureux, “Etsi non … veluti si … Deus daretur: une relecture après modernité,” Revue d’éthique et de théologie
morale 63 (2009): 43-61, esp. 46-47; Feil, “The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” 178-191.
63
See Boureux, “Etsi non … veluti si … Deus daretur,” 47.
64
Letter of 16 July 1944, DBWE 8, 475.

12
community itself, it means learning anew to live as precisely the community of Christ. Christians are
that portion of humanity with no claim to be anything or have anything in the world, except for
Christ. Bonhoeffer had laid the foundations for this understanding of the church in the early 1930s,
in his lectures and ecumenical addresses on the church and its “place” in the world,65 and even more
radically in Discipleship during the year of the Church Struggle.66 Rejecting both the
“otherworldliness” (Hinterweltlertum) of individualised and disengaged piety, and the “secularism”
(Säkularismus) of the re-christianization strategies of the state church, Bonhoeffer insists that the
church, like Christ himself, is embodied in “the everydayness of the world” (den Alltäglichkeiten der
Welt) and in that place must hear and respond to God’s Word.67 The church is the place of God’s
Word becoming concrete in history, as the person and work of Christ “takes form” in a human
community. It is only by sustained practices of Christian discernment of the event and circumstances
of its context, that the Christian community can obey the call of its Lord to follow in discipleship, and
to be conformed to him in this world.

This requires that the church learns how to wait, to wait with its spiritual eyes wide open. On
28 May 1933, Bonhoeffer preached in Berlin on the text of Exodus 32, contrasting the “church of
Aaron” at the foot of Mount Sinai, impatient for action and answers and seeking strong leadership
and impressive gods to worship, with the “church of Moses”, the community of those who stay on
the mountain, surrounded by the terrors of thunder and darkness, and await the Word of God in
stillness (in der Stille).68 In prison, in the letters of 8 and 16 July, Bonhoeffer reflects further on the
Christian’s task of waiting. He recalls the scene of Jesus and his disciples in Gethsemane on the night
of his arrest: “could you not watch with me one hour?” Bonhoeffer expressed his own response to
this question in a poem he wrote at about the same time, Christians and Heathens: “People go to
God when God’s in need,/find God poor, reviled, without shelter or bread,/see God devoured by sin,
weakness, and death./Christians stand by God in God’s own pain.”69 This waiting-with-Christ, before
God and without God, is the way in which the gradual process of conversion and conformation does
its work within the Christian and the church living in the everydayness of the world. Like Christ, the
Christian must “drink the cup of earthly like to the last drop, and only when they do this is the
Crucified and Risen One with them, and they are crucified and resurrected with Christ.”70 In the
letter of 21 July, written the day after the failed assassination attempt on Hitler with its likely
consequences for himself and his co-conspirators, Bonhoeffer reflected that coming to faith was
constitutively bound up with living unreservedly in the tasks, perplexities, successes and failures of
our world, throwing oneself “completely into the arms of God … then one takes seriously no longer

65
See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Nature of the Church,” DBWE 11, 269-332, esp. 276-289 and “The Kingdom
Come! The Prayer of the Church-Community for God’s Kingdom on Earth,” in Berlin: 1932-1933, DBWE 12
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 264-297.
66
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, DBWE 4 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001).
67
“Thy Kingdom Come!” DBWE 12, 287-290.
68
“Exaudi Sunday, May 28, 1933, Exodus 32,” DBWE 12, 472-476, here 474. Of course the rise of the National
Socialist Party and its popularity among church members provides the immediate context for Bonhoeffer’s
choice of text. Henri Mottu [Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Paris: Cerf, 2002), 77-79] suggests that it is significant that
Bonhoeffer uses a text from the Old Testament, texts which the German Christians wanted to eliminate from
worship and study, to interpret and critique the contemporary situation of the church in Germany.
69
“Christians and Heathens,” DBWE 8, 460-461.
70
Letter of 27 June 1944, DBWE 8 448.

13
one’s own sufferings but rather the sufferings of God in the world. Then one stays awake with Christ
in Gethsemane. And I think this is faith; this is μετάνοια.”71

Learning to wait with Christ, to live before God and without God, requires a new relationship
to transcendence; it requires relinquishing the “idea” or “working hypothesis” of God. During June or
July of 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote a theological reflection on the unutterability of the name of God,
exploring the second commandment of the Decalogue: “’God’ is a name, and this name is the
greatest treasure we possess; for in it we have not something we have thought up on our own but
God’s entire being itself, in God’s revelation.”72 In the “Outline for a Book”, Bonhoeffer continues to
reflect on transcendence of God. He argues that we much give up our recourse to the “strong” God
of metaphysical proofs, of epistemological certainty, of institutional availability, of moral necessity
and of psychological comfort. All these “religious” strategies to produce, explain, or endorse God
end up reducing God to an idea, and we are better off living without this “God”. “God’s ‘beyond’ is
not what is beyond our cognition! … God is the beyond in the midst of our lives.”73 And it is by
remaining faithful to the reality of the world and its people, a world from which the idea of God has
been “pushed out”, that we are led into the mystery of the living God who is present in that same
world, precisely in the form of the “pushed out” Jesus Christ. It is by this immersion in the mystery of
God-in-Christ that Christ is “formed” in the church-community, and we are drawn into a
“participation in the being of Jesus”, i.e. his being-there-for-others (für-andere-da-sein).74

The other dimension of the metanoia required of the church by the task of evangelisation,
according to Bonhoeffer, is a new turning ad extra, to the church’s other. “The church is church only
when it is there for others.”75 This turning toward the other is the consequence of Christ, the man-
for-others, taking form within the church-community. And the challenge to the church is to allow the
interior working of its Lord to create the same relationality between the church and its others as
existed between Jesus and those he encountered. Christ, crucified and risen, is the mediator
(Mittler) within every relation of the Christian with his or her other. What might this mean in terms
of the other characterised by Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the world “come of age”, a person
perhaps very like his brother Karl-Friedrich: well-educated, socially committed, formed in the virtues
of the middle class, internationally successful in his field, and non-believing?

At the most fundamental level, according to Bonhoeffer, it means that the church must
allow the Word of God to lead it into a kind of relationality with the world that is qualitatively
different to that of the “time of religion”. The church must come to terms with the paradigm shift
from the premodern to the modern worldview that marks contemporary people, including the

71
Letter of 21 July, DBWE 8, 542. Throughout his writings, Bonhoeffer holds together the Christian’s belonging
to God and belonging to the world. His statement of this in the Ethics (DBWE 6, 55) is typical: “In Christ we are
invited to participate in the reality of God and the reality of world at the same time, the one not without the
other.”
72
“Exposition on the First Table of the Ten Words of God,” in Conspiracy and Imprisonment: 1940-1945, DWBE
16 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), 633-644, here 640.
73
Letter of 30 April 1944, DBWE 8, 367. Speaking of the paradoxical formula “with God, without God”,
Christophe Boureux states: “La première partie de la formule dit la certitude existentielle de l’être divin
ressenti par l’homme, alors que la seconde dit l’impossibilité de définir Dieu ” Boureux, “Etsi non … veluti si …
Deus daretur,” 58.
74
“Outline for a Book,” DBWE 8, 501.
75
“Outline for a Book,” DBWE 8, 503.

14
members of the Gemeinde Christi. “The fact that the world has come of age is no longer an occasion
for polemics and apologetics, but is now actually better understood … from the gospel and from
Christ?”76 In the letter of 30 June, Bonhoeffer explains that theology has resisted the world’s coming
of age either by taking up arms against in (in vain), for example by railing against Darwin, or by
accommodating itself to the new situation by presenting God as the answer to the ultimate
questions of life and the world. He takes particular issue with a Christian style of communicating
with its others that ignores the fact that people no longer use the hypotheses of deus ex machina to
understand their lives and world. He claims that Christian apologetics based on this dishonest
premise are pointless, ignoble and unchristian. It is pointless, because the horse has bolted; it tries
to provide solutions that people no longer need or can accept, to make them premodern all over
again. It is ignoble, because it proceeds by trying to convince people of how weak, sinful, and
miserable they are in order to preach the gospel of grace to the answer to their needs. It is
unchristian, “because it confuses Christ with a particular stage of human religiousness.”77 Rather, a
new comportment, a different way of relating, is required, one that is formed by the reality of Christ
on the one hand, and the reality of the world on the other.

Indeed, it is Christ who leads his disciples towards the non-believing other, and is present
within the encounter as the offer of relationship; Christ himself is the form of the disciple’s
relationship with the non-believer. The disciples offer to others the same gift of solidarity and
friendship that Jesus offered, and, if necessary, bear the same disinterest or rejection that Jesus
bore.78 And it is life together in the world, its circumstances, challenges and opportunities, which is
arena in which those relationships become concrete. The believer is called by the gospel to work
side by side with the willing non-believer to protect and enhance the human and social good; the
church even receives the critical protest of “promising godlessness” as a call to discernment and
action in the world.79 Believers and non-believers are intrinsically related in preserving and
promoting the “penultimate” (Vorletztes) order of natural things, an order which Christians
understand to be oriented towards the coming of the “ultimate” (Letztes) order of grace.80

Commentators have discussed whether Bonhoeffer was correct in his analysis of the non-
religious worldview that his contemporaries inhabited after the “time of religion”. During the years
in which the “secularisation thesis” was the predominant paradigm for interpreting Western
modernity, it seemed to many that Bonhoeffer had intuited the shape of things to come with great

76
Letter of 8 June 1944, DBWE 8, 431.
77
Letter of 8 June 1944, DBWE 8, 427.
78
See the section, “The Disciples and the Unbelievers,” in Discipleship, DBWE 4, 169-175. This section was
entitled “The Right Way to the Neighbour” in an earlier draft.
79
For Bonhoeffer’s reflection on the “promising godlessness” of the world come of age, as distinct from the
“godless nihilism” of the self-absorbed, individualistic and rationalistic Western spirit, see his Ethics, DBWE 6.
125. This text is of central importance in interpreting Bonhoeffer’s approach to secularisation, understood as
the separation of church and state.
80
See the manuscript, “Ultimate and Penultimate Things,” in Ethics, DBWE 8, 146-148. It is likely that
Bonhoeffer found the language of Letztes and Vorletztes in his reading of Karl Barth. The relation of the orders
of nature and grace has been, and remains, a burning question in Roman Catholic theology over the past
hundred years also. See for example Lawrence Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God According to St.
Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters (Rome: Apollinare Studi, 2001); Steven A. Long, Natura Pura: On the
Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); Serge-Thomas
Bonino, Surnaturel: A Controversy at the Heart of Twentieth-Century Thomistic Thought (Ave Maria, FL:
Sapientia Press, 2009).

15
foresight. But what about at the beginning of the new millennium, when religious practices and
worldviews have gained a new “visibility” with the help of new communications technologies, and
the public space can no longer be univocally described as secular?81 Or when our more global
awareness recognises the Westernised nature of a society operating etsi Deus (or other religious
practice) non daretur?82 Did Bonhoeffer, under the influence by Dilthey’s historicism, get it wrong in
regard of a world come of age, living without the working hypothesis of “God”?83 Interestingly, the
outlook of Bonhoeffer’s prison theology is strongly suggestive of Charles Taylor’s recent articulation
of a “secular age”, the conditions of which are manifested today, at least in Western societies. “The
shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in
God is unchallenged and, indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option
among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.”84 As we noted earlier, however, where
Taylor’s concern is to identify the conditions which produce this secularity, Bonhoeffer’s concern
would be for the church’s evangelical response to this hic et nunc situation. How does the church
become the “place” where the Word of God becomes flesh, is lived and spoken, within this secular
reality? Thus, for Bonhoeffer, the question is both sociological and theological, without reducing
either dimension to the other.

Bonhoeffer’s most fundamental conviction is that the believer’s worldview and the non-
believers worldview both open onto the same reality: the real world in which Christ is present,
incarnate, crucified and exalted. Eberhard Jüngel has spoken of two ways in which the question
“where is God?” can be asked. The first is the biblical way of asking, in which the questioner is
challenging the community about whether it is following the right God, or is expressing the anguish
of an experience of God’s hiddenness in particular circumstances. Implicit in the context is the
relational possessive: “your God”, “my God”. “What is being tested is not the existence of the deity
in general but a specific relationship with God.”85 The second way of asking the question “where is
God?” is formulated within the thought-world of the modern quest for credible knowledge, and
necessarily includes the possibility that God does not exist. In this condition, the questioner feels the
anxiety and responsibility that proceed from one’s role in a world and a society in which the
foundations are not self-evident. I think Bonhoeffer’s insight is that in the “world come of Age”, i.e. a
worldview structured by post-Enlightenment critical consciousness, these two ways of asking after
God are irrevocably intertwined, for both believer and non-believer. The believer must ask after God
with all the anguish and responsibility of the world etsi Deus non daretur (before God, without God).

81
See Peter L. Berger, ed. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics
(Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999; Graham Ward and Michael Hoelzl, eds. The New
Visibility of Religion: Studies in Religion and Cultural Hermeneutics (London: Continuum, 2008).
82
Europe sans religion
83
See Heinz Eduard Tödt, “End, or Comeback of Religion? Forty-Five Years After Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Thesis of
a Religionless Christianity,” in Authentic Faith: Bonhoeffer’s Theological Ethics in Context (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 2007), 30-55; Tom Greggs, “Religionless Christianity in a Complexly Religious and Secular World:
Thinking Through and Beyond Bonhoeffer,” in Religion, Religionlessness and Contemporary Western Culture,
ed. Stephen Plant and Ralf K. Wüstenberg (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008), 111-125.
84
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3. At p. 530 Taylor puts the
question thus: “Why is it so hard to believe in God in (many milieux of) the modern West, while in 1500 it was
virtually impossible not to?”
85
Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), 49-55, 51. Jüngel’s
discussion of Bonhoeffer’s prison theology (pp. 56-63) is instructive.

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Perhaps we hear this question in the spiritual testimony of modern women like St Thérèse of Lisieux,
Dorothy Day, and Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.86

The non-believer will also need to ask after God in the process of interpreting this
historically-conscious and methodologically critical age, if only to understand the overall narrative of
Western modernity that has shaped the global reality we live in. Culturally inclined to presume that
God does not exist, yet fully aware of the phenomenon of religiously thinking and acting people
around the world, the contemporary Western person is likely to ask, with Nietzsche’s crier, “where is
God gone?”, perhaps even turning to her or his Christian friends to help with that question. Maybe
Bonhoeffer had something like this situation in mind when he spoke of the need for the church to
speak “a new language, perhaps quite nonreligious language, but liberating and redeeming like
Jesus’ language”87, as part of its conversion toward the other. Is this the same as asking non-
believers to make Pascal’s wager on the existence of God, as the best way to account for the world
they live in? There are some similarities, inasmuch as it is valid for Christians to invite non-believers
to understand the worldview of those who live veluti si Deus daretur. At the same time, the wager
runs the risk of producing a personal stance towards the question of God that is too thin for the
believer and too thick for the non-believer, equating to a type of utilitarian “civic religion”,88 in which
faith and culture are related artificially and extrinsically. It seems to me that Bonhoeffer suggests,
rather, a way of living and speaking that is at the same time fully confessional and fully post-critical,
determined to witness responsibly to the one reality in which Christians encounter both the mystery
of God and the mystery of the world.

86
See Carol Zaleski, “The Dark Night of Mother Teresa,” First Things 133 (May 2003): 24-27; Serge Larivée,
Carole Sénéchal and Geneviève Chénard, “Les côtés ténébreux de Mère Teresa,” Studies in Religion/Sciences
Religieuses 42 (2012): 319-345, esp. 333-334; Maria Clara Bingemer, “Seeking the Pathos of God in a Secular
Age: Theological Reflections on Mystical Experience in the Twentieth Century,” Modern Theology 29 (2013):
248-278.
87
“Thoughts on the Day of Baptism of Dietrich Bethge,” DBWE 8, 383-390, here 390.
88
This assessment is made by Paul Sullins in a review of Ratzinger’s Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, in
The Journal of Church and State 49 (Spring 2007): 368-370.

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