The visible form of the Body of Christ and the occupation of space on earth

In the summer of 1935 Bonhoeffer delivered the lecture series ‘The Visible Church-Community’Footnote ² to the students at Finkenwalde. Bonhoeffer begins by claiming that ‘The Body of Christ takes up physical space here on earth’. This follows upon the observation that ‘the incarnation. . .entails the claim to space granted on earth’ for which there is one immediate consequence, namely: ‘anything that takes up space is visible’.Footnote ³ Bonhoeffer must have thought this was not obvious and one might wonder why. His observation was that by 1935 the Reich Church had clearly become an apparatus of the National Socialists and that by joining and supporting the state in its project to exclude Christians of Jewish heritage from leadership within the church and, by extension, affirming the state's anti-Semitic programme, the Reich Church had become invisible, and an invisible following of Jesus was, Bonhoeffer maintained, a contradiction. The Reich Church no longer declared a message that put the local gods on notice and under judgement, nor did it call anyone to a radical form of obedience to discipleship in Christ. It had walked away from its ministry of redemption and settled into a programme of accommodation, even though that included the articulation of faultless doctrine. This was precisely the point that attracted Bonhoeffer's ire; for, in contrast to the claim that the Body of Christ takes up physical space on earth and is visible, he proposed that ‘a truth, a doctrine, or a religion. . .needs no space of its own [since] such entities are bodyless’.Footnote ⁴ Truths, doctrines or even religions ‘need no space’ for they ‘do not go beyond being heard, learned, or understood’Footnote ⁵ and the church is not defined solely by a truth or a doctrine. The essential church is visible and occupies space in the world and it is this church to which we shall point and say, in faith, ‘the new creation has come about in the church-community’.Footnote ⁶

In connection with the visibility of the body, Bonhoeffer commentator André Dumas has noted that

Bonhoeffer then moves to ground the visibility of the church in the visibility of the incarnation. The logic is straightforward and uncomplicated. Jesus was born in a stable and ‘hung on a gibbet’. Jesus’ own body was solid, visible and space occupying, and by extension, ‘The body of the exalted Lord is likewise a visible body, taking the form of the church-community.’Footnote ⁸ Bonhoeffer insists that by occupying space the church has substance; like the city built on the hill, the church following after Jesus can and must be seen, it cannot be hidden. There can be no retreat into any form of docetism.Footnote ⁹

In his essay ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Political Theology’, Stanley Hauerwas maintains that ‘Bonhoeffer's work from beginning to end was the attempt to reclaim the visibility of the church as the necessary condition for the proclamation of the gospel in a world that no longer privileged Christianity.’Footnote ¹⁰ So when Bonhoeffer says ‘The body of Christ takes up physical space here on earth’,Footnote ¹¹ he is deliberately standing over against traditional Lutheran ecclesiology of the sort that was being lived out by the Reich Church, arguing instead that the church ‘precisely in its eschatological newness as the body of Christ, claims for itself a distinct public presence, a structured social space of its own’.Footnote ¹² Spatiality and visibility go together and both are the ‘necessary condition’ for authentic Christian witness.

The background to Bonhoeffer's claims that the Body of Christ takes up physical space on earth, and its corollary, that anything that takes up space is visible, is embedded in a question Bonhoeffer had asked the students and Finkenwalde graduates in the monthly cyclostyled newsletter, as he began his lectures on the New Testament, ahead of the summer course in 1935. ‘The present situation in church and theology’ he wrote, ‘can be summed up in the form of the following question: Does the church take up a space within the world, and if so, what kind of space is it? This is basically the question around which the whole theological confrontation with the state revolves.’Footnote ¹³ In most churches this crucial, and it must be said contemporary, question is on the whole not well formed. However, any answer to this question is beset with potential confusion. Does Bonhoeffer link spatiality and visibility too easily and does his reference to the visibility of the church refer to a theological proposition or to an empirical, structural dimension? Or perhaps it refers to both?

Bruce Hamill argues that the visibility of the church is not self-evident, correctly noting that what we see when we look at the church cannot be known with empiricist eyes alone.

To make his point, Hamill quotes from Discipleship: ‘the incarnation does entail the claim to space granted on earth, and anything that takes up space is visible’,Footnote ¹⁵ an argument which, he suggests is ‘epistemologically naïve as it stands’. He is of course quite correct when he suggests that ‘seeing is an interpretive act. . .[and] that the church is rightly seen (“discerned”) depends on the fact that included within the church's existence are formative processes’.Footnote ¹⁶ The potentially confusing point is this: here in Discipleship Bonhoeffer is weaving a deep and rich interpretative theological thread through the life and being of the church, insisting that, with the eye of faith, the church be seen as the visible creation and gift of God. However, at exactly the same moment he is also insisting that it be taken as visible event and empirical structure.Footnote ¹⁷ I propose that Bonhoeffer is using the words ‘spatiality’ and ‘visibility’ in a structural as well as a theological sense.

It is Bonhoeffer himself who makes it clear that understanding the church as creation and gift of God and as visible event and empirical structure are to be held together, and in Discipleship he is using the notion of visibility as a structural descriptor every bit as much as a theological statement. This is the point he makes when he writes:

Bonhoeffer then poses a critical question; ‘How does this body become visible?’Footnote ¹⁹ His answer reflects traditional Reformation depictions of the church. The visibility of the church becomes apparent as the church gathers to hear the preaching of the word which is the ‘church's witness to the physical event of God's revelation in Jesus Christ’. Here ‘Christ [is] present in the Holy Spirit’,Footnote ²⁰ constantly recreating the community of witness to Jesus. Following Luther's efforts to ‘cultivate the proper reading and use of Scripture as a “means of grace”’, especially in the preaching of the forgiveness of sins, absolution and the consolation of believers,Footnote ²¹ Bonhoeffer attributed sacramental significance to the proclaimed and heard Word – the Sacramentum Verbi.Footnote ²² In this way the church is shaped as a proclamatory space. In the second place, visibility becomes apparent as the church gathers to celebrate the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper, both given ‘solely to the church-community’.Footnote ²³ In the context of the Third Reich, this liturgical space in which the church has its being is exceedingly important for Bonhoeffer since, as David Yeago notes, should the state ever attempt to reach for ‘God's glory’ and seek to wear the authority rightfully due to God alone, then the ‘liturgy of the church. . .by its sheer performance, will by inner necessity become a political declaration of war and an act of political struggle’.Footnote ²⁴ In the third place, visibility becomes apparent in an ordered space as the church-community orders the gifts given to it for service and ‘as [the church] appoints its members for service. . .for the benefit of the church-community’.Footnote ²⁵

Now it might be thought that a depiction of the church might end right here. But at this point Bonhoeffer offers a further dimension of church, which delineates the reality of costly grace and a form of discipleship which asks, indeed requires, everything of the believer/follower. For the visibility of the church also becomes apparent in the space the church-community claims for the daily life of its members, its living-space or habitat (Lebensraum). This space, claimed by the community which ‘finds its place between the word of proclamation and the sacrament of the Lord's Supper’,Footnote ²⁶ is the space where all of life is taken up ‘into Christ’.Footnote ²⁷Lebensraum is the form and shape of the life ‘necessary to witness to the reality of the new age begun in Christ’.Footnote ²⁸

There can be little doubt that this particular Lebensraum in and of itself has the character of a political statement, and it is here that the eschatological community starts to take shape ‘and delineate itself in a first outline in the struggling and suffering church’.Footnote ²⁹ John Phillips suggests that this explicit delineation of Lebensraum is Bonhoeffer's ‘attempt to give life to what could have become a static, institutionalised ecclesiology, to thrust the inner-directed and defensive Confessing Church with her visible boundaries between herself and the world, out into the world’.Footnote ³⁰ This is very likely the case since here in Discipleship this delineation of the church has a radical intent: to lay the groundwork for the changing shape of the church's form to assume that of the suffering servant.

Lebensraum – ‘a structured social space of its own’Footnote ³¹

In the concept of Lebensraum, Bonhoeffer draws attention to the living space, that structured, social space of the church-community into which the believer is drawn by obedience to Jesus Christ. This is the living space in which the new ethic is practised and nurtured in such a way that it gives distinctive shape to this new Christian habitat. Here the ‘Christian experience of salvation’ extends its own sociality, as becomes clear in the following comment from Discipleship.

Here we find as clear an expression of the outworking of Bonhoeffer's foundational concepts of Stellvertretung or vicarious representative action, Miteinander or church members being with-each-other, and Füreinander or church members actively being for-each-other,Footnote ³³ as we might look for anywhere in the Bonhoeffer corpus. This is an unambiguous description of the ‘social acts that constitute the community of love and that disclose in more detail the structure and nature of the Christian church’.Footnote ³⁴ It is now possible to see how the church, committed to life in this Lebensraum, might take the form of its suffering servant Lord.

Lebensraum and German territorial expansion

In using the word Lebensraum, Bonhoeffer takes the same word used by the National Socialists in the Reich's justification for a ruthless military expansion across national boundaries as of right, and infuses it with a new meaning driven by the form of Christ himself, always more closely taking the form of the suffering servant. This was an extremely courageous move. The two living spaces could not be more different.

Adolf Hitler had revived and popularised the idea of Lebensraum Footnote ³⁵ in the first volume of Mein Kampf where ‘he discoursed at length on this problem of Lebensraum – living space – a subject which obsessed him to his dying breath’.Footnote ³⁶ In Mein Kampf, Hitler had written: ‘Without consideration of traditions and prejudices, Germany must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil, and hence also free it from the danger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation.’Footnote ³⁷

Discipleship was published in November 1937. Coincidentally, in the same month, Hitler met with his Commanders-in-Chief in Berlin and explained that

He then communicated his ‘irrevocable decision to go to war’.Footnote ³⁹Lebensraum would be the prize and it would be found by annexing and conquering Czechoslovakia and Austria, then Poland, and Russia. The acquisition of other territories in this way under the National Socialists became one of Germany's most important foreign policy objectives.

If conquered territory and subjugated peoples would be the prize for the German people in their quest for Lebensraum, the Christian Lebensraum, Bonhoeffer writes, would be the obedient believer's prize as she or he was drawn into the church-community where Christians would love and serve one another and the world. The texture of life within this Christian Lebensraum is the texture of costly grace where obedience to Christ's call draws believers into public suffering at the very point where there is a ‘clash between the space the body of Christ claims and occupies in this world for worship, offices, and the civic life of its members, and the world's own claim for space’.Footnote ⁴⁰ When this happens and there are competing claims for space between two completely different understandings of Lebensraum, it is the form of Christ which informs the Christian in his or her search for a faithful following after Jesus Christ.

Now, in the struggle for space in ‘which to feed and clothe themselves from the fruits of their own labour and with a heightened sense of apocalyptic in which the choice for Christians is to escape from the world or to go to prison’, Bonhoeffer declares that ‘when they [the Christians] have been deprived of their last inch of space here on earth, the end will be near’.Footnote ⁴¹ It is hard to know whether this is a historical or an eschatological pronouncement; it could be both of course, for the concept of being deprived of space on earth goes hand in hand with the concept of visibility: remove the last hill on which the city might stand or from which the light might shine, or the space from which the church might have a life, and there is no place left for any witness to the truth.

What might a Christian Lebensraum mean? Was it a gifted or a contested space?

In Discipleship, Bonhoeffer's Lebensraum derives directly from following Jesus in a way which is at the same time both individual and corporate.

There can be no escaping the fact that, when Bonhoeffer spoke of the living space of the visible church-community, he was intending to make a claim for Jesus Christ over against the claim of any other leader or Führer. This was a huge claim. In the obedience of following after Jesus Christ, it was Jesus’ lordship which conquered and took possession of every inch of territory of an individual's life, always as a consequence of the individual being grafted into the Holy Spirit's new creation after the image of God.Footnote ⁴³ This is the ‘perfect community’ since it exists ‘between word and sacrament’ and ‘begins and ends in worship’ while awaiting the final banquet with its Lord in the kingdom of heaven. It is also the community in which the material things and goods of this life as well as the moments of life – getting out of bed in the morning, doing what we do during the day, crafting our place in the families we are part of, attending to trade and commerce and the relationships that these require – ‘are assigned their proper priority’.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is the Lebensgemeinschaft, the ‘visible church-community whose reality extends to all areas of life’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Bonhoeffer then extends his idea:

This is a bold claim on the lives of those who live out of the Lebensgemeinschaft and within the Lebensraum for Christ in every respect. There is no hiding place to avoid the consequences of one's living, for the brother and sister in Christ are closely allied with us in everything we do. It was this exposure of life to our brother or sister in Christ that had Bonhoeffer struggling to implement the disciplines of the community at Finkenwalde. It was especially the act of mutual confession which caused greatest angst amongst the seminarians but Bonhoeffer insisted that, without this mutual trust in confession, there would never be a breaking of what he called the recurring cycle of self-deception. This ‘full life in Christ’ is granted to every Christian through being baptised into the body of Christ:

This is important because not only does this Lebensraum have a huge bearing on the lives of believers, it also has a real impact on the life of the world. ‘It gains space for Christ’, Bonhoeffer says. And here he makes what can only be taken as another political tilt at the Reich.

In living out their lives in the environments within which their church communities are embedded, Christians will experience moments of acute dissonance when their vocation will be called in question. This will happen simply because one belongs to the visible community of Christ and it will happen whenever there is a ‘clash between the space the body of Christ claims and occupies in this world for worship, its offices, and the civic life of its members, and the world's own claim for space’.Footnote ⁴⁹

This will become clear in two ways:

Now Bonhoeffer's articulation changes, for immediately it leads to a most significant development in his ecclesiology. An already familiar motif takes on a startling new clarity: now the church itself takes on the form of the rejected, suffering servant who is the Lord of all. Starting with the Apostle Paul's injunction to ‘be transformed into a new form (μέταμορφουσθε) by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God’ (Rom 12:2), Bonhoeffer points to this form which is solely to be determined by Christ; it is in fact the form of the church:

The church, like its Lord who suffered, will overcome the world, not by ridding it of evil, but by being transformed into the form of the suffering servant Lord.

In the Ethics Bonhoeffer provides a further, most eloquent interpretation of this Lebensraum created and occupied by the church.

This quotation provides us with some of Bonhoeffer's most concise delineations of the church and some significant shifts from his earlier exposition in Discipleship. In a ‘narrow’ space, sometimes without room to move but still with enough space to demonstrate love in its fullness, the church bears witness to the foundation of all reality in Christ. Again, drawing on spatial terminology, Bonhoeffer locates the church in the Raum where ‘the reign of Jesus Christ over the whole world is to be demonstrated and proclaimed’, a dramatic and demanding mandate which leaves little, if any, room for argument about the church's mission and ministry. But unlike the claim in Discipleship, that the church's Lebensraum is contestable space within the world, here in the Ethics, the Raum is only the amount of space the church needs ‘to serve the world with its witness to Jesus Christ and to the world's reconciliation to God through Jesus Christ’, and is only to be defended ‘for the [sake of the] salvation of the world’.Footnote ⁵³ Here the ‘world’ is not cryptically ciphered as ‘enemy territory’, or as a space to be contested, as Discipleship might have suggested, but as the very object of God's judgement and love, to be valued and loved by Christ's body. Above all, Bonhoeffer claims, the space occupied by the church is first of all occupied by Christ, who is revealed as the ultimate foundation of all reality. That is why it is fundamentally wrong simply to explain this occupied space empirically. This is not the conquered space of Lebensraum described by the National Socialists, but the space created and occupied by the living Word of God. Robin W. Loving expresses it like this,

Lebensraum implies substantial and visible spaces that are required out of which the church might proclaim its gospel, worship its Lord, and order and live out its life. Without such visible spaces the church runs the risk of spiritualising Christ and ‘devaluing itself into a purely spiritual entity’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Here in this habitat the eschatological community takes shape and, in the words of Peter Brunner, Lutheran theologian and Bonhoeffer contemporary, ‘delineate itself in a first outline in the struggling and suffering church’.Footnote ⁵⁶