‘To speak of Christ is to be silent’:
An interrogation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s 1933
Lectures on Christology by Christopher Morse’s
Methodology

The Methodist theologian Christopher Morse (1935-), Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair in Theology and Ethics at Union Seminary in New York, applies a particular methodological framework in his work of systematic theology Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief. In this text, he explores Christian doctrines through what he calls ‘disbeliefs’. What is meant by this is summed up in the very first line of his text: ‘To believe in God is not to believe everything’. With this he means that by making particular statements about what one believes, there are implicit statements which are rejected as not to be believed. It is this dialectical framework that he uses throughout his text, proposing for each doctrine certain ‘objections’, commonly statements that could be made about Christianity as proposed in some circles which Morse himself refuses to accept. In summary, he lists a number of ‘denials’ or ‘disbeliefs’ – statements or beliefs which are not to be affirmed by Christian doctrine. A useful summary of this approach can be found before his disbeliefs on the topic of Christology, a topic to which we will turn presently: ‘The following … [are] positions and claims that are refused credit and credence by the commonly held affirmations of Christian Faith’. In this instance he precedes to list twenty-three such disbeliefs of Christology and provide an analysis accordingly.

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We turn now to the German Lutheran theologian, anti-fascist resistor, and Bekennende Kirche pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945). We will apply Morse’s method to Bonhoeffer’s 1933 Lecture on Christology, discussing three denials arising from the text. Bonhoeffer become an intriguing interlocutor for Morse, in part due to the mutual association between both theologians and Union Seminary. Bonhoeffer spent a quizzical year at Union Seminary in 1930, and as previously stated, Morse holds the Bonhoeffer Chairship at Union.

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Bonhoeffer’s life came to an end in 1945. He had worked for the Nazi intelligence agency and used his position as a platform to aid the resistance. Ultimately, he was implicated in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, and spent eighteen months in prisons and concentration camps from Buchenwald and eventually to Flossenbürg. In a cruel irony, he was hung only weeks before the liberation of Flossenbürg by allied forces and the end of the war.

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The text to which we will be applying Morse’s method are notes of Bonhoeffer’s lectures on Christology given in Summer of 1933. It was in this year that the Nazi party rose to power in Germany and set about reorganising the German Evangelical Church in line with Nazi ideals, the Deutsche Christen movement. The Confessing Church came to being in opposition to this movement in the following year with the Barmer Theologische Erklärung written to oppose the Nazification of the established church. It is amidst this context that Bonhoeffer delivered his lectures. He has much to say on the matter of Christology – it is for him the centre of all knowledge – so we will concentrate on only a small amount of the much that could be said. The following three ‘denials’ emerge from the text and will be engaged in the following paragraphs. Firstly that ‘Christ’s claim to be the Word of God is a just claim’; secondly that Christ is not truly present in the here and now; and finally, that Christ’s humiliation is in opposition to his exaltation.