Bonhoeffer on the ‘ten words’

In his brief exposition of the ‘first table’ of the Decalogue of 1944, Bonhoeffer takes its revelatory character to be decisive. Working here as elsewhere as a ‘biblical theologian’, Bonhoeffer approaches the text as scripture, intent to discern its witness to the identity of God and God's saving action in the world.Footnote ⁶ The immediate narrative setting of the Ten Commandments guides him to emphasise its character as divine self-revelation: the giving of the law is accompanied by ‘thunderclaps, lightening, thick clouds, mountains shaking, and powerful trumpet blasts’, and Bonhoeffer notes that the Decalogue is distinct from all other words of God in that its commandments are the only ones ever said to have been written by God, being etched into stone tables by God's own hand, as it were, and preserved within the ark of the covenant such that there can be no doubt that here we meet God's own ‘word of revelation’ (15, p. 633).Footnote ⁷ As such they are also sharply distinguished from all other ‘laws of life’ which human wisdom and intelligence might recognise and distil from experience, for while ‘there reason speaks; here God speaks’. And when God speaks he speaks not ‘of life and its successes and failures’ but ‘of God's own self’ (15, p. 634).Footnote ⁸ As Bonhoeffer explains,

If the Ten Commandments are revelation – if they are the ‘living words’ of God (Acts 7:38)Footnote ⁹ in which God himself is met – then, Bonhoeffer argues, they simply cannot be mistaken for abstract ethical principles. Rather, they are properly the medium of a divine–human encounter and as such inseparable from God's own person: the commandments cannot be parsed away from this encounter, as though they were a separate and distinct ‘entity’, perhaps the portable distillate of God's will. Rather, Bonhoeffer insists, ‘the entire, living God is revealed in them as the one who God is. This is the main point’ (15, p. 635).Footnote ¹⁰ As he says at another place, the commandments are that by means of which God himself ‘visits and besets human beings’ (15, p. 505). Not the commandments as such, but the God attested in and by the commandments, is the heart of the matter.Footnote ¹¹

Indeed, Bonhoeffer insists that we take the commandments as a kind of expansive gloss – moral, but also much more than moral – on the sense and significance of the Decalogue's opening word and claim: ‘I am the Lord, your God, you shall have no other gods before me’ (Exod 20:20).Footnote ¹² We should understand that because the first commandment is ‘the most important of all’ and represents the ‘key’ to whole, it rightly controls the meaning of the rest, even as the other commandments elucidate and substantiate its force and significance (15, p. 635).Footnote ¹³ Bonhoeffer expounds this claim by developing two fundamental themes: namely, the commandments as grace, and the commandments as boundary and permission.

First, then, the commandments are an event of divine grace. In the Decalogue, God speaks ‘as truly of God's grace as of God's command’, Bonhoeffer explains (15, p. 635). To be sure, these ‘ten words’ have the gravity of holiness and the bite of the law coming as they do from ‘the Lord, the inaccessibly distant and powerful one’, whose word brings life or death. But this same One is ‘God, the Lord, the one who chose, created, and loved us, who knows us, wishes to be close to us, for us, and with us’ and the commandments themselves signal that God seeks us and draws near (15, p. 636).Footnote ¹⁴ As the God of the commandments is the saviour God of Israel, the God of the Gospel, so to be commanded in this way is itself grace. ‘When [this] God says “I”, this is grace’, Bonhoeffer says (15, p. 635). The divine word of revelation is always a redeeming word; so too is the commanding revelation of the Decalogue which, by its very revelation gathers, saves and sustains those to whom it is addressed, namely ‘to Israel, to his people, to the church. That is his grace’ (14, p. 787).

To illustrate this reality, Bonhoeffer invokes the image of the tablets of the law travelling with the Israelites within the ark of the covenant. ‘In the ark of the covenant, which is the throne of the gracious presence of God,’ he writes, ‘both tablets lie enclosed, encompassed, and enveloped by the grace of God’ such that there can be no proclamation of the commandments which is not simultaneously the announcement of ‘God's free grace’ (15, p. 637). Covenant is not typically a controlling theological motif within Lutheran theology generally or Bonhoeffer's theology in particular; but here it stands as a ready shorthand for the fact that the commandments are utterly comprehended by the movement and purposes of divine grace, for God only commands those he saves (the law is ‘in’ the throne of grace), and the divine commanding itself is a mode of saving action (the throne of grace has the law at its heart).

This image echoes Bonhoeffer's view, expressed elsewhere, that (as he puts it) ‘the gospel is superior to the law and is the true word of God’ even as ‘by virtue of their antithetical character, law and gospel belong together, [and] are one as the word of God and of Christ’ (14, p. 337). So it is that the commandments of the law are ever ‘enclosed, encompassed, and enveloped’ by grace and set in its service. There is a distinction between law and gospel here; and there is also a taxis in which law is fundamentally ordered to gospel. When Bonhoeffer speaks plainly of the commandments as divine grace, as we have noted, he does so acknowledging that the ordering of law to gospel has as its final aim the higher unity of both as the one gracious word of God in Christ.

More briefly, the second theme Bonhoeffer develops in his exposition concerns the commandments as boundary and permission. Picking up on their negative formulation, Bonhoeffer notes that each subsequent commandment should be understood to be a consequence of the material claim of the first, as in: ‘I am the Lord your God, therefore you shall not . . .’ All the commandments are, in other words, effectively suspended from the first, whose force is nothing less than to ‘rescue us from falling prey to nothingness’ and ‘extinction’ in a world without idols (15, p. 638). Here the controlling metaphors are spatial ones: tethered to this centre, the common arc of their several negations constitute and display the ‘boundaries within which we can live in God's community’ (15, p. 637). Put positively, God gives the commands in order to delimit the sphere in which human beings ‘can be and remain close to God, for God, and with God’ (15, p. 636). In this sense they must be received as the ‘law of life’ (14, p. 788), that is, the law within whose compass the people of God can and will live and flourish. That this is so is reflected in Bonhoeffer's judgement that the church's violation of the Ten Commandments is nothing less than ‘apostasy from Christ’, a self-destructive pulling away, turning against and departing from God and this sphere of life (6, p. 140).

Bonhoeffer had deployed this idea of the commandment as a boundary already in his Ethics manuscripts. In terms akin to those used here, he describes there how the commandment ‘sets the boundary and creates the space within which it can be heard and fulfilled’ and goes on to observe that the self-same boundary always ‘originates from the centre and fullness of a life lived with the commandment of God’, that is, a life centred upon the salutary acknowledgement that the Lord is God and all that entails (6, p. 386). The space thus won takes on a distinctive character, Bonhoeffer argues, as the commandments together constitute the very ‘element’ of the Christian life of faith: displacing our paralysing ethical anxiety because they warrant, authorise and allow ‘authentic life and unreflective’ spontaneous action within their scope (6, pp. 381–2). In short, the commandments grant ‘permission to live before God as a human being’ in a properly creaturely freedom that is ‘generated’ and sustained precisely by God's commanding action itself (6, pp. 382–3).

For these reasons, Bonhoeffer can venture the interesting formulation that ‘to the extent that the Christian is in Christ, he is no longer under the law but rather “in the law”. He no longer acts out of the demand of the law but rather out of the reception of the Holy Spirit’ (14, p. 336). What is arresting here is the identification of the law as the ‘site’ or ‘space’ in which the Spirit finds the Christian and is received and obeyed: the concrete direction of the Spirit and so the sanctification of the Christian life has its home ‘in the law’, not as demand – for as fulfilled by Christ the law ‘makes no more demands on those who are in Christ’ (14, p. 336) – but as permission and pathway.Footnote ¹⁵ As he writes elsewhere, ‘It is God the Holy Spirit himself who makes for me the reality of what was true for Jesus Christ alone: my will is your word’ (15, p. 510).

We do well to note that in Bonhoeffer's view the Ten Commandments themselves – precisely as the gracious revelation of God and inseparable from his saving presence – are and become the positive concrete command of Christ which is given, heard, discerned and obeyed within the bounded sphere they demarcate in their solemn, negative form. The church time and again is directly addressed by the Decalogue, judged, sustained and set free by its gift of God's righteous and humanising direction. That Bonhoeffer understands this to be so is made forcefully clear by the litany of confession he composed in the Ethics manuscripts, ‘Guilt, Justification, Renewal’. In this text he rehearses in turn the manifold concrete ways in which the church of his time failed to hear and to heed each of the commandments, being guilty in the end of ‘violating all of the Ten Commandments’ and thus of forfeiting on its own proper life, authentic witness and responsible action (6, pp. 138–41). For our purposes, the salient point is this: Bonhoeffer believes that the Ten Commandments themselves can and do become the concrete claim and command of God addressed to the Christian congregation in and for this time and this place.

Barth: the Decalogue and the ‘grammar’ of the concrete command

Central to Karl Barth's exegesis of the Decalogue is his consideration of the place and nature of the Ten Commandments within the wider biblical witness to God's commanding action.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, it is the decision to consider them as ‘one among many’ examples of God's commanding action attested in both the Old and New Testaments that raises the fundamental interpretive problem Barth confronts. For the manifold instances of God's commanding action share a common characteristic, namely that,

And this is no less true of the commanding actions of Jesus, Barth suggests, noting that all of them share this same ‘essential character’ since they are all ‘no less fortuitous, contingent, unique and involved in space and time than the commands of God in the Pentateuch’ (p. 675). In short, the concreteness of the command is an inviolable feature of it precisely as a command of God.Footnote ¹⁷

It is against this backdrop that the highly distinctive nature of the Decalogue becomes apparent: by contrast with the contingency of divine commanding widely attested in the Bible, it appears to offer ‘commands’ that are ‘addressed to an indeterminate number of [people]’ and therefore ‘appear to be concerned not with specific actions of specific [people], but generally with certain possibilities of action on the part of all kinds of [people]’ (p. 681). Barth is not idiosyncratic in taking note of this; other interpreters regularly remark that the Ten Commandments are indeed ‘one part of the legal material in Old Testament that least resembles law as we are accustomed to understand it’.Footnote ¹⁸ The difference, once noted, is patent, but the question is what is to be made of it. Barth asks ‘whether we have to interpret these special texts in the light of their historical environment, or whether, conversely, we have to interpret the historical environment in the light of a general ethical understanding of these texts’ (p. 680 alt.).

While the traditional majority report follows the latter course and treats the Decalogue as a set of trans-historical ethical imperatives and principles, Barth himself decides against this line and suggests we ought to pursue the former instead. He does this convinced of two things. First, Barth takes it to be undeniable that, across the extensive testimony to God's commanding action, ‘the theme of the Bible is something other than proclamation of ethical principles’ (p. 680). Second, he is convinced of the unity of the biblical witness as scripture – that is, as a canonical collection whose very canonicity signals a unified witness to the one God of Israel – and thus also to its consistency. This allows him to appeal to overarching patterns of witness and to the controlling ‘themes’ of the Bible which should prove determinative in deciding the nature of God's commands. With this in mind, even though the Ten Commandments have the appearance of timeless and universal ethical injunctions or principles, this cannot be so since:

But how then to account for the distinctive form of the Decalogue if not in this way? Barth's answer is that the Ten Commandments represent ‘collections or summaries of divine commands’: as many rays of light are focused by a lens, or many threads gathered together into a single cable, so too here ‘many particular commands are united and expressed in these comprehensive demands addressed to the people in the Old Testament and to the Church in the New’ (p. 681). The metaphors are ones of concentration, repetition and intensification that suggest that the existence of the Decalogue in no way displaces or does away with the reality and primacy of God's contingent concrete commanding activity.Footnote ¹⁹

While the Ten Commandments are not themselves concrete divine commands, their relation to such actual commands, Barth suggests, is not one of universal principle to local application, or eternal law to transient exercise. Rather, they are an announcement of the holiness of all God's commanding actions, a holiness that forms the essential background to every actual interaction between God and his people. They proclaim what lies behind – or perhaps better, what is present within – all the specific commanding acts of God with all the ‘urgency and immediacy which characterises them’ (p. 683). In this way they exposit the ‘underlying character, presuppositions, and intentions’ of God's dealings with humanity (p. 700).

Later in the Church Dogmatics Barth, like Bonhoeffer, reaches for a spatial trope when he explains that in these texts ‘the area is marked out in which concrete divine commandment and prohibition take place. They show its bounds by telling what is impossible in this area.’Footnote ²⁰ What is impossible – what shall not be – is that which contradicts God's holiness and lordship. The commandments delimit the sphere in which God, as the Subject who commands and prohibits personally and concretely in time and space, engages humanity as the recipient and object of this commanding action; that is to say, they delimit ‘the sphere within which the life of the divine community will be fulfilled under the control of the Spirit’ (p. 699).

We capture something of Barth's distinctive emphasis here if we think of the Decalogue as at one and the same time both revelatory and grammatical in nature. As grammatical, the Decalogue functions a posteriori as a descriptive or programmatic summary of the pattern of the history of God's specific commanding activity.Footnote ²¹ In this way, the Ten Commandments, though not concrete commands, may still be thought of as rules, namely grammatical rules – what Barth calls ‘the solemnly proclaimed self-qualifications of God’ (p. 683) – that are ‘read off’ the historical drama of salvation and which articulate the patterned faithfulness of divine commanding – its form or structure – and thereby mark out the space in which God has, does and will contingently command his covenant people. And just as grammar does not displace actual speech, so too the commandments do not displace actual divine commanding. Whereas the object of the divine command is ever the obedience of the specific individual to whom it addressed, the Decalogue has as its object the description of the shape or ratio of that divine commanding. Barth thinks of the Ten Commandments as a kind of second-order discourse, i.e. a discourse which describes and exhibits the decisive features of the first-order discourse of actual divine commanding but precisely in so doing is not be confused with it: as grammar does not express, so the commandments do not command.

Though given in the imperative, Barth argues that the force of the Decalogue is most properly indicative. As he explains,

Precisely by demarcating the space of obedience negatively as they do, the commandments display the fundamental form of God's concrete command and direction, namely the form of permission: the commandments attest in this way that God releases and liberates his human covenant partners for life, obedient service and faithful witness (p. 585).

At the same time as it is grammatical in this way, the Decalogue is also revelatory. Barth contends that the Ten Commandments are a revelation, not of general ethical precepts, but rather, of the identity and person of the God who commands. The first commandment provides the key to whole: in it God ‘speaks of himself and his sovereignty, of his essential nature in contrast to other lords’ and thereby ‘declares himself to be the Subject of all these special summons, the One who has the power and right to confront the individual in these specific addresses with binding commands and prohibitions because he is the Lord of the people’ (p. 682). But what the preface to the Decalogue attests directly, all the commandments also manifest indirectly: the holiness and sovereignty of God is analytic in each commandment as well as in the whole. We might say that, taken as a whole, the Decalogue ‘shows’ what is only ‘said’ in the preface, namely, that ‘I am the Lord your God’. In this way the commandments attest to God's revelation as the holy One, the sovereign Lord of Israel, their serial imperatives repeatedly confronting us with the God whose ‘decision and choice . . . has already been made concerning us’.Footnote ²²

For Barth, then, to acknowledge the commandments as God's self-revelation is to receive them aright as a display of the structure of the ‘law of the Spirit of life’ (Rom 8:2) by which the Christian life is concretely directed, a dense, summary restatement of the pattern of all salutary divine commanding that is the ‘law of grace’ (p. 592).