It is difficult to imagine many theologians of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's milieu writing with the sort of childlike fondness for the Bible which he occasionally exhibits. In a letter from 1936, for example, he writes, ‘I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions’, and that scripture ‘becomes more miraculous to me each day’. This was, after all, the Berlin milieu of people like Adolf von Harnack, for whom Barth's Letter to the Romans was famously derided as reading the Bible in a way more appropriate for confirmation classes than theological analysis.
The situation is all the more surprising given the sheer complexity and technical sophistication of Bonhoeffer's early theological work, published as Sanctorum Communio (1930) and Act and Being (1931). Perhaps a perceived disjuncture between the author of two high-flying dissertations and the letter writer with such an (allegedly) naïve biblical piety led some early commentators to downplay the importance of Bonhoeffer's relationship with the Bible more generally, or at least to separate the overtly ‘theological’ from the ‘devotional’ or ‘homiletic’ works like Discipleship (1936) and Life Together (1940). This not only does a disservice to a relatively consistent biblical grounding for the theology, however, it also misrepresents the complexity of those faith-filled texts which have been dismissed as ‘mere sermons’.
The impulses behind these mischaracterisations are thankfully much less prevalent on the theological scene today, not least because what might be termed the ‘theological interpretation of Scripture’ is an established sphere of inquiry alongside or within systematic theology. The manifold limits of historical criticism are also more widely accepted, of course, and faithful readings of the Bible are no longer assumed by definition to forfeit intellectual integrity by way of devotional fervour. Against this background, Joel Banham's Reading in the Presence of Christ is both welcome and timely. Banham argues that the technical pedigree of Bonhoeffer's approach to scripture takes it far beyond pious sentiment.
Banman proceeds by taking as his modus operandi John Webster's definitions of ‘bibliology’ from The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason. Webster's concept of bibliology is described as ‘a theological account of what Scripture is, and, correspondingly, what God does with Scripture’ (p. 3). That is, establishing holy scripture's ‘ontology and its place in the divine economy’ (p. 5). Bibliology can thus be viewed as sort of prolegomenon for doing theology biblically: establishing the warrants for, and ultimate outcomes of, scripture itself within our attempts to speak of God.
Bonhoeffer's theology was done in media res, and the nearest he gets to anything approaching propaedeutic inquiry is in Act and Being. Fittingly, therefore, Banman's discussion begins by inferring how best to arrive at the implied bibliology of the early dissertations, rightly concluding that there is an overarchingly dialectical orientation to these works, and that Bonhoeffer is therefore from the outset a theologian of God's Word.
From here, he moves to the christology lectures of 1933, presented as the site of certain decisive developments, not least the notion of Jesus as Christus praesens, which challenges the historical-critical paradigm. The book then enters into some of its most insightful discussions, casting light on the most neglected elements of the Bonhoeffer corpus. These include those works unfairly judged as problematic or misplaced attempts at exegesis because earlier commentators had not established the bibliology at play, particularly in the Prayerbook of the Bible (1940), and Bonhoeffer's hugely contentious interpretation of Ezra-Nehemiah.
Banman's task gets somewhat more challenging when it comes to Bonhoeffer's later writings, which he acknowledges in relation to Ethics, before he ends his study of the corpus with Letters and Papers. He argues that ‘nonreligious exegesis’ is a ‘thoroughly Christological exegesis’, and this grows from contentions about the ‘wordliness of Scripture’ which themselves develop from the emergent bibliology of the earlier writings (p. 200). The book's concluding chapter brings Bonhoeffer's bibliology into conversation with more contemporary interlocutors, namely Hans Boersma's ‘sacramental reading’, Robert Jenson's ‘creedal’ approach and Hans Frei's famous narrative way of reading.
In summary, Reading in the Presence of Christ is a valuable addition to Bonhoeffer studies. The book sits within a general tendency to see the christology lectures as the transformative locus of the corpus, as with Michael DeJonge's Bonhoeffer's Theological Formation, and my own Human Subjectivity in Christ in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It is also of particular note that Banman provides a markedly trinitarian reading of Bonhoeffer, which, while the grounding for this is mostly subtextual, further affirms the book's contribution to the field.
There are some things which warrant further discussion, inevitably. These include Bonhoeffer's uncritical reception of a mechanistic view of verbal inspiration from his Berlin teachers, and the largely uninterrogated question of where Bonhoeffer's practice of meditating on scripture sits in relation to the canon of Christian spirituality more broadly. One could also note that, for Bonhoeffer, bibliology itself seems a little off-centre, for the only centre of his theology can be Christ himself. But Banman fully acknowledges this, and urges us to engage with scripture as God's present Word today, not merely an element for discussing Bonhoeffer interpretation.
