Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Paper “The Character and Ethical Consequences of Religious Determinism” and Theodicy

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about divine action in the world, theological determinism, and related topics. It’s honestly been a tough part of my reconstructing faith journey–trying to figure out how it all fits together. Questions about God’s action and evil have been particularly vexing. And the trite answers I received and even argued through my apologetics training just don’t seem to work for me as well as they once did. Dietrich Bonhoeffer has been a major–indeed the major–figure in my theological journey. I was shocked to come yesterday upon a paper I know I’d read before but that hadn’t registered as I read all of his works. That paper was about the very topic I’ve been agonizing over of late. It is entitled “The Character and Ethical Consequences of Religious Determinism.” The paper is found in print in Volume 10 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Works in English, Barcelona, Berlin, New York 1928-1931.

First, I should note that Bonhoeffer is not concerned in this paper with theodicy as a primary or perhaps even secondary concern. Bonhoeffer tends to treat evil as a fact of the world rather than attempting to downplay or explain it away. That said, I think the points he makes in this paper are highly relevant to those who are wondering about divine control and theodicy.

Bonhoeffer argues that there is a threefold way to think about determinism in the world. He doesn’t say this is totally expansive of every option. Rather, this is how he divides the possibilities. First, there is philosophical determinism. This largely relates to causal determinism of events in nature. Because of this, he states that this kind of determinism is irrelevant to the question of ethical consequences. While I don’t fully agree with him here–natural evil is a category that is often discussed–I get the point he is getting at. He says it is irrelevant because his next two categories encompass what would be the case if God is involved in such evils.

Thus, his second category is religious determinism. Here, God determines all. A consequence of this view is that evil is good, actually. Bonhoeffer goes on to note the problems with such a view. If one holds this, then “I always know that evil has already been overcome; it follows from my concept of God, which I always have at my disposal in order to explain ‘rightly’ all misfortune in the world…” This, Bonhoeffer says, makes evil and good a “synthesis of nondifference… evil is merely a paradoxical means of actualizing the good” (DBWE10 441-442) Another problem is that it conflates “Creator” with “world cause.” God is the former, not the latter, so God isn’t causing all the evil. To say God causes such is not “Christian determinism.” Here Bonhoeffer gets at the heart of my difficulty with more traditional views of God, because so many of them either bite the bullet on this or try some other means to make it so that while God determines every event that happens, God is still not the cause or direct actor of evil. Bonhoeffer undercuts those claims by noting that they destroy the differences between good and evil, making good and evil ultimately the same. On such a view, as Bonhoeffer states, evil is just a “paradoxical means” of doing good.

It is important, too, to reflect on Bonhoeffer’s brief point about the conflation of God as “Creator” and God as “world cause.” Bonhoeffer only briefly touches on this topic, but he is quite clear that he believes the two are actually opposed to each other. “God is conceived as the world cause, rather than as Creator. The two are completely distinct so that the one excludes the other, something rarely taken into account even though everything follows from this premise.” God, instead, is Creator–the one who brought the world into existence–rather than the one who is causing every event in the world.

From this, Bonhoeffer gets, finally, to what he calls Christian determinism. Here, he argues that Christian determinism merely holds that justification–salvation, if you prefer the term–is the act of God alone. Human beings aren’t capable of doing this act, so God must do it–as “God’s free and sole act” this makes “huma beings… completely in God’s omnipotence” (DBWE 443). The question of human freedom and lack of freedom, says Bonhoeffer, ultimately relates only to… “the ultimate, to salvation” (ibid). Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran, also comments briefly that he thinks this is the point of Luther’s Bondage of the Will; not that all things are determined by God, but that human beings cannot act on their own related to salvation. Bonhoeffer admits Luther goes beyond this, but attributes it instead to Luther’s propensity to “not always clearly distinguish this idea [that of freedom in salvation] from others of a more speculative of cosmically interpretive nature” (ibid).

The ethical consequences of this view of determinism, Bonhoeffer argues, are that evil is actually evil against God. “Good does not stand behind every evil” in contrast to the notion that God intends for evil to happen. Instead, “God wants the good” (ibid). The good that God brings about in salvation is one that “makes human beings free… for God” (444). He turns again to Luther’s assertion that “God brings about both evil and good,” calling it the “ultimate speculative insight that should not itself be used to interpret other circumstances.” This view leads to an antinomy–back to the paradox of religious determinism. Bonhoeffer says this question may remain open, but it seems clear that his Creator vs. world cause (and the opposition here–the vs.–is intentional in Bonhoeffer’s writing) would allow for some interesting spaces to explore here. Bonhoeffer himself notes that the notion “That God as the Creator hates evil and that nonetheless nothing can occur in the world that God does not want is an insoluble antinomy…” However, he goes on to say it is “no longer antinomy… as soon as one believes oneself able to draw conclusions from it for a Christian devaluation of evil” (ibid). He essentially leaves it at that, later saying that the God of guidance is derived from the God of justification, not the reverse. The point here seems to be that the God of determinism in salvation is only arrived at through a God of guidance–eg, non-omni-determinism.

Ultimately, Bonhoeffer’s view remains largely within Lutheran thinking on the issue. He gives credence to Luther’s views of God as ultimate cause of even evil, while arguing that this is mere speculation. His point seems to be that Luther and others who draw that thinking from Luther’s basic positions on justification are doing the reverse of what they should be doing–drawing the God of world cause from the God as Creator. Does Bonhoeffer ultimately appeal to antinomy or mystery? No, he doesn’t. But his position is left somewhat vague, then. What do his final lines about antinomy being defeated by conclusions “for a Christian devaluation of evil” mean? I am not clear on this. However, I think the distinctions between Creator/world cause and his differences between Christian and religious determinism are on the right track of where I’d like to go. Lutheran theology allows for paradox and mystery at times, and I admit that makes me uncomfortable. But Bonhoeffer’s positions in this paper may make it easier to wade into those waters while living in a kind of happy space between speculation and antinomy.

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