Dahill, Lisa E. Readings from the Underside of
Selfhood: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Spiritual Formation.
Spiritus: A journal Of Christian Spirituality 1:2(2001), 186-203.
©The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reproduced with
permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.
[1] Shirley is a bright, charming woman in her early sixties. She
is a member of the congregation I attend in San Francisco and is
faithful and active in the life of the church. As chair of
adult education, she seeks out opportunities for her own ongoing
learning to nourish her leadership and teaching, and so she
enrolled two years ago in a week-long summer course on Dietrich
Bonhoeffer at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
[2] She told me of her experience in that class the day the
professor lectured on Bonhoeffer's view of how one is to relate to
the neighbor, the other, the enemy. The lecture moved through
Bonhoeffer's early writings on the necessity of giving up one's
self in favor of the claims of the other, and loving the other
instead of the self, and culminated in a reflection on the utterly
central Christian stance of loving the enemy, letting the enemy
"grasp" a person in a radical claim on one's time and priorities
and even one's life.
[3] Shirley had an unsettling, painful reaction to this lecture,
and she was assertive enough to go up to the professor afterward
and tell him, "If I had been hearing this theology thirty years
ago, I would be dead right now." She went on to recount how
her alcoholic and abusive husband had come home one night extremely
drunk, and had gone on a rampage, finally pinning her against the
wall with his hands around her throat, strangling her. She
recalled how she had struggled and realized he was truly trying to
kill her. In the brief moments of clarity between this
terrifying realization and her imminent loss of consciousness, she
had a decision to make. Raised in a conservative Christian
home and taught to obey the male authorities in her life, she was
lucky, she said, that her pastor at that time was not preaching
Bonhoeffer's theology, that these words were not filling her head
that night. For in that moment, with his hands around her
neck, Shirley chose not to let the enemy "grasp" her, and surrender
her own claims to his absolute demands. She summoned all her
strength and was somehow able to claw him off her, and run for her
life.
[4] Shirley's story continues to move me deeply, and it
crystallizes in dramatic form some of the uneasiness I too have
experienced in trying to come to terms with certain aspects of
Bonhoeffer's legacy. I have been reading Bonhoeffer for
seventeen years, since my introduction to him in Tübingen,
Germany, in 1983-1984. During seminary and my years in
Lutheran parish ministry, I continued to draw nourishment from his
compelling vision of a deeply nourishing and thoroughly
this-worldly spirituality. In the doctoral program in
Christian Spirituality at the Graduate Theological Union, I have
studied and taught on Bonhoeffer, and have also had the privilege
of serving as translator for volume 16 of the new critical edition
of his works.[1] In all my
work on Bonhoeffer, he never fails to move me with the clarity and
subtlety of his insight, the human texture of his faithfulness and
courage. In recent years, however, I have increasingly found
his insistence on selflessness, his lifelong assertion that
holiness, redemption, and the very presence of God are found in
turning decisively away from oneself and toward the claims of
others, particularly problematic. Like Shirley, I have
experienced aspects of Bonhoeffer's conception of the self and its
appropriate spiritual formation to be at odds with the directions
my own prayer and Christian discernment were leading me.
[5] This is not, of course, the first time women have noticed a
disjunction between their experience and the teachings of respected
theologians. Since 1960, an impressive line of feminist
critiques has challenged normative Christian understandings of sin
and self, as these understandings have developed in highly
androcentric ways. To date, however, this sort of critical
application of gender analysis, within a larger social location
critique, has not taken place for Bonhoeffer's writings.
Interpreters continue to follow Bonhoeffer himself in speaking of
"the" person, or of "human" sin, as if these could be understood
monolithically. Because most interpreters share Bonhoeffer's
general social location as educated white Western males, it is not
surprising that they find his analysis intuitively compelling and
take for granted its similar applicability to others.
[6] Yet Shirley's story reminds us that, far from being somehow
universally relevant, as is often assumed even to this day,
Bonhoeffer's theology of selfhood and spiritual formation depend
for their life-giving power on an accurate grasp of the ways in
which his own social location shaped his experience and writings,
and how these may be appropriated by people in social and
psychological contexts different from his. Such critical
contextualization is consistent with Bonhoeffer's own lifelong
insistence that truth is never abstract, absolute, or fixed, but
requires prayerful, concrete discernment in every new context
within the flow of highly complex social-historical
circumstances. A reading of Bonhoeffer, therefore, which
wittingly or unwittingly universalizes his experience and
conception of the self, that is, which fails to take account of the
enormous contextual factors shaping these realities, risks missing
the heart of his own Christian vision and can have devastating
consequences. Far from empowering resistance to entrenched
evil, as his writings themselves intend, such uncritical, universal
application of Bonhoeffer's thought to contexts beyond his own can
actually condone and reinforce the patterns of (so-called)
Christian submission that play right into the hands of evil in
abuse. Nor are these merely academic questions; as Shirley's
story demonstrates, "lives are at stake."[2]
[7] In this essay I examine Bonhoeffer's writings on questions
of selfhood and spiritual formation from the perspective of women
in abusive relationships, like Shirley. I have chosen this
particular audience partly because its perspectives have so long
been completely invisible to mainstream theology, with disastrous
results, and partly because these women (who are present at every
level of church and society) represent a pole of human experience
profoundly different from Bonhoeffer's own. Furthermore, it
is specifically around questions of selfhood and its gendered
formation that the experience of abused women differs most strongly
from Bonhoeffer's and thus offers the greatest possibility of
critique. For all his astute and far-sighted sensitivity to
issues of race, culture, class, nationality, and privilege as they
shape the Christian spiritual life, Bonhoeffer was apparently quite
blind to gender oppression as a systemic reality.[3] That is, the
experience of those whose bodies and spirits bear the devastating
brunt of violently enforced systems of male domination was outside
Bonhoeffer's theological awareness.[4] Thus the
experience of these women provides an excellent test case for the
wider applicability of Bonhoeffer's thinking, and a critical and
appreciative reading of him from this perspective can provide a
glimpse of strategies by which Bonhoeffer's spirituality might be
retrievable also for other marginalized groups.[5]
[8] I situate this analysis of Bonhoeffer's work within the
discipline of Christian spirituality. Sandra Schneiders has defined
spirituality broadly as "the experience of conscious involvement in
the project of life-integration through self-transcendence toward
the ultimate value one perceives."[6] Within a
Christian context, this "horizon of ultimate value is the triune
God revealed in Jesus Christ, and the project involves the living
of his paschal mystery in the context of the Church community
through the gift of the Holy Spirit."[7] In this
essay, therefore, I explore how Bonhoeffer's experience of this
Christian mystery and community took shape within the contours of
his own concrete particularity, and how his legacy may continue to
be revelatory of Jesus Christ for Christians of very different
social locations from Bonhoeffer's own, namely for those who
struggle with sins of submission. My method is self-consciously
interdisciplinary. In addition to engaging in an analysis of
Bonhoeffer's writings, and both biographical and historical
materials, I draw on feminist psychology to gain access to the
complexity of the experience under examination: both Bonhoeffer's
own and that of the women through whose eyes I am attempting to
read him.[8]
[9] I will look first at Bonhoeffer's articulation of the shape
of human selfhood, as that derives from his own experience in
powerful and formative ways. Next, I will briefly examine an
alternative version and experience of human selfhood, namely that
of women suffering in abusive relationships, drawing on the
feminist psychological work of Jessica Benjamin and Judith
Herman. Finally, I will place into mutual conversation these
two very different conceptions of the human self and its
appropriate movement toward greater maturity or wholeness, seeking
especially to point to resources Bonhoeffer provides for the
spiritual formation of submissive selves. My ultimate goal is
greater appreciation of Bonhoeffer's insights on spiritual
formation for the fuller range of humanity spanning the poles of
dominance and submission, based on an awareness of his own
concreteness and particularity rather than on the assertion of his
universal applicability.[9]
Bonhoeffer and Selfhood
[10] Born into a culture and family that prized male autonomy
and intellectual achievement, Bonhoeffer excelled. Clifford
Green, a prominent Bonhoeffer scholar, has persuasively
demonstrated the ways in which the highly cultured Bonhoeffer
family fostered critical thinking and ego strength among its
members, as well as illumining those aspects of family life that
especially spurred Dietrich toward the driving intellectual
ambition that marked his early years.[10]
[11] As a gifted-indeed, brilliant-young thinker groomed
throughout his upbringing for a life of public leadership,
Bonhoeffer garnered himself early on a great deal of attention and
praise for his ground-breaking theological work. He used the
considerable power of his gifts, especially his mind, in an attempt
to master reality itself, and to prove the supremacy of his
insights in academic debate with others.[11] Yet his
experience of this drive of ambition and ego was an extremely
alienating one. Precisely in this masterful ego, in its
relentless attempt to establish itself as the center of the world,
Bonhoeffer perceived himself as cut off from God and others in
their genuine alterity; instead, he came to realize that the
dominating self distorts all of reality into a mere projection of
itself.
The individual has torn
himself out of the community with God, and thus also with other
people, and now he stands alone, which is in untruth. Because he is
alone the world is "his" world, the neighbor has sunk into the
world of things . . ., and God has become a religious object; but
he himself has become his own creator, his own master and property.
. . . [But] in the cold silence of his eternal solitude, he becomes
anxious about himself and begins to dread. . . the cry of
conscience only disguises the mute loneliness of a bleak isolation
and sounds without echo in the self-dominated and self-interpreted
world.[12]
[11] Earlier, Bonhoeffer describes the "self-confinement and
isolation of the very loneliest solitude with its tormenting
desolation and sterility."[13] Green
locates numerous passages throughout Bonhoeffer's early writings
that echo this description of the painfully isolated ego whose
confinement to a self-projected and distorted world is hell
itself. These passages use almost identical language and
metaphors to describe this alienated reality: "cold" solitude, the
dead "echo" of an utterly isolated cry, the objectification of God
and neighbor into projections of the ego, the self at the "center"
of this empty world. Green asserts that the striking
convergence of these passages is not accidental: "it is. . . to a
large degree a self-portrait of the theologian himself, whose
urgent existential concern is expressed in this
theology."[14]
[12] Indeed, Bonhoeffer's direct and indirect descriptions of
his own inner experience are replete with the violence inflicted on
reality by an isolated ego intent on maintaining dominance.
He employs several variants of the German Gewalt, or "force,"
showing the heightening intensification of such violence: the
Bewältigung (overpowering)[15]
of another person or of reality itself with sheer
Gewalt[16], issuing
ultimately in the Vergewaltigung (rape, violation)[17] of that other. No
translator or scholar I have seen has commented on the significance
of this latter word choice (Vergewaltigung). It and its
verbal and adjectival cognates are universally translated in
English with terms of "violation" or "doing violence
to." Of course, these are not inaccurate translations, and
they convey an element of the brutal force denoted here.
Nevertheless, the word Vergewaltigung simply is the German word for
"rape" as well, investing the word with a shocking horror beyond
the less graphic "doing violence to." Any reader of the
German would hear this double meaning: Bonhoeffer chooses language
that not only connotes but also actually denotes the violent rape
of others, of God, and of reality itself on the part of the sinful
"man's" ego.[18] And the
fact that (as Green has gone to such lengths to demonstrate) such
passages are not merely theoretical for Bonhoeffer, but highly
revelatory of his own inner life, suggests that Bonhoeffer chose
the term Vergewaltigung because it accurately described the
ravaging violence within his own self.
[13] Not surprisingly, then, the liberation he discerns
corresponds to the shape of this inner bondage experienced as
domination, violence, and painful isolation from others.
Already in his dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, he describes the
process by which a person is truly formed: namely, by ethical
encounter with an other, a You whose very alterity, reflecting
God's own otherness, is what creates the individual as an ethical
Person.[19] The barrier
(Schranke) or boundary (Grenze) of another person's concrete and
separate being confronts the individual with a reality alien to his
or her own, thus drawing the person into what Bonhoeffer calls the
state of "responsibility," or of ethical demand for some
response.[20] The
You meets the I in this encounter as "demand" on the I. That
is, the I as a "whole person, who is totally claimless, is claimed
by this absolute demand."[21] For
Bonhoeffer, the only way out of the sterile and lonely wasteland
his "dominating ego"[22]
had created was to experience himself as "totally claimless" in the
face of the "absolute demand" of the other. The language of
surrender (Hingabe) to this concrete other expresses the longing of
the aggressive self to enter a place of actual intimacy, which he
finds to be transformative, indeed person-forming. He himself
experienced this surrender and the intimacy it opened for him to be
utterly life-changing; his conversion to Jesus Christ in prayer and
Scripture in the early 1930s was a gradual but powerful
breakthrough of love that drew him into increasingly trustful,
risky, and disclosive human friendships as well to the end of his
life. Emerging from the incessant struggle for domination,
Bonhoeffer frames this development as a move into submission, of
surrendering at last to reality in the form of the concrete divine
or human other. Throughout his life, then, he writes for
those whose formation in selfhood is similarly one of alienated
isolation and dominance; this is what he clearly means when he
speaks of the self, and it has everything to do with his gendered
social location.
[14] To claim that Bonhoeffer is writing a highly
self-implicating spirituality from a perspective of patriarchal
dominance is in no way to disparage him as a human being or a
Christian. Indeed, by all accounts he was a warm, sensitive,
and conscientious human being.[23] On the
whole, he appears not to have acted out the tendencies toward
violent egotism with which he struggled but to have worked hard in
cultivating virtues of humility, receptivity, and patience.
His very sensitivity to the dynamics inherent in his strict
patriarchal upbringing may have helped to make him such a
perceptive lifelong observer and reporter of their destructive
inner reality. Yet this more precise naming of Bonhoeffer's
social location within patriarchy opens up space for a feminist
reading that will both mark those aspects of his spirituality
inappropriate for the abused, and also retrieve the liberating
elements he explores. I suggest that this is preferable to
the usual uncritical reading that attempts to force all of human
experience into his, with potentially disastrous results. To
proclaim Bonhoeffer's theology of selfhood as if it were true of
everyone simply does not correspond with reality.
Women in Abuse: Feminist Psychological
Perspectives
[15] The work of Jessica Benjamin, a contemporary psychoanalytic
theorist, is particularly helpful in understanding the
extraordinarily complex dynamics that shape people into patterns of
domination and submission.[24]
Benjamin develops a feminist intersubjective theory that helps make
sense of how traditionally socialized boys come to take on elements
of a dominating personality. Many of her descriptions of this
personality and the experience it engenders (empty isolation,
bubble of the self, mastery of reality) read like citations from
Bonhoeffer.[25] Given
Bonhoeffer's own articulations of this experience, and Green's
comprehensive mapping of them in term of the "dominating ego," it
is no stretch to place Bonhoeffer squarely within the realm of
those whom Benjamin studies as dominators, that is a particular and
not at all universal dimension of human experience.
[16] Shirley's experience and that of millions of other women is
very different. Socialized from birth in patriarchal families
and cultures, according to extremely pervasive explicit and
implicit gender codes and roles, girls have by and large grown up
with a different sense of who they are, who they are allowed to be,
and what their tasks and goals in life are to be, than their
brothers have done. Thankfully, this is changing for both
boys and girls, as shifts in parenting patterns and women's work
create new options for them. But the fact that brutal and
subtle forms of abuse still fill homes, just as violence fills the
news and popular media, means that patterns of domination and
submission are still well entrenched, still need naming and
challenging. Of course, women can be abusers, and boys and
men victims of trauma and abuse. But Benjamin is tracing the
continuities between gender socialization and the psychological
problems of domination and submission, which in the overwhelming
majority of cases still means male abusers and female
victims.[26] For this
reason, I will risk speaking broadly of the experience of women who
suffer abuse.
[17] For those girls and women who live with abuse, then,
Benjamin's description of the submissive self reads as accurately
as the dominating self described by Bonhoeffer. These human
beings live in a world in which their own presence and subjectivity
is as thoroughly effaced as Bonhoeffer's was overblown. The
victim of abuse realizes that she "is to lose all subjectivity, all
possibility of using her body for action; she is to be merely a
thing. Second, she is to be continually violated, even when
she is not actually being used. The main transgression of her
boundaries consists of her having to be always available
andopen."[27] Far from
bringing her pleasure, as Freud suggested in his studies of
masochism, Benjamin notes that "intense pain causes the rupture of
the self, a profound experience of fragmentation and
chaos."[28] And indeed
this is found to be true in innumerable studies of survivors of
abuse.[29]
[18] Judith Herman, a psychiatrist who has worked extensively
with survivors of trauma and abuse, writes:
People subjected to
prolonged, repeated trauma develop an insidious, progressive form
of post-traumatic stress disorder that invades and erodes the
personality. While the victim of a single acute trauma may feel
after the event that she is "not herself," the victim of chronic
[abuse] may feel herself to be changed irrevocably, or she may lose
the sense that she has any self at all.[30]
[19] Persons subjected to chronic torture and abuse in the home
manifest symptoms of deep psychological damage, compounded greatly
of course in cases where abuse had begun in childhood. Those
whose homes are places of coercive torment and violation develop
exhausting forms of hypervigilance, constantly scanning the
environment and the abuser for signals of imminent outburst, and
expending enormous amounts of energy warding off these explosions,
placating the abuser, walking on eggshells, anticipating his every
whim. His demands and moods shape every waking moment, and
his rages make sleep impossible, due to endless tirades or coercive
sexual demands and because of the nightmares filled with terror
that shatter sleep.
[20] The abuser's voice comes to fill the victim's whole
reality, crowding out any needs or feelings or perceptions of her
own; these get beaten out of her if she ever dares to defy
him. His rages, insults, surveillance, lies, and threats to
herself and/or her children undermine her sense of reality, isolate
her, and are backed up with violence should she cross him, even in
tiny ways, or threaten to leave. Her autonomy and human
capacity for initiative and freedom are relentlessly and
pervasively degraded, from the chaos of living for years or even
decades in a hell of unpredictable tyranny. The more degraded
her sense of self becomes, the more incapable she feels of survival
on her own. This is a cycle which leads to death: death of
the psyche, death of the self or soul, and very often also physical
death: thousands of women are murdered every year at the hands of
an intimate other.[31]
[21] This is manifestly not a path to holiness, freedom, and
fullness of life in Jesus Christ. Yet it is a real-life form
of Bonhoeffer's insistence that the self "who is totally claimless,
[be] claimed by [the] absolute demand" of the other.
Interpreters of Bonhoeffer need to be extremely careful in
interpreting these words to any audience, since patterns of abuse
and submission are so pervasive, often so hidden to the observer,
and so extraordinarily deeply entrenched. Such words mean one
thing, indeed life itself, to Bonhoeffer; they mean something
completely different to a victim of abuse, for this is the very
shape and voice of evil itself in her life. Bonhoeffer's
destructive illusion is that the self is omnipotent; for the victim
of abuse, it is that the self is "nullipotent," effaced, while the
abuser is omnipotent. Thus Bonhoeffer's form of escape will
be extremely different from one who suffers abuse, at times nearly
its opposite.
Mutual
Interrogation
[22] In contrast to Bonhoeffer, who needed to turn down the
volume of the self in order to hear the other, the person living
with abuse needs to turn down the volume of the other
(specifically, the abuser) in order to attend to herself.
Bonhoeffer needed to submit his overbearing self to others'
differing reality; the abuse victim needs to defy the abuser's
consuming reality in order to claim space for her
self.[32] There is a
whole universe within her, the uniquely created humanity God
brought to life, which has been relentlessly attacked, often since
childhood, and never had space to develop. To a greater or
lesser extent, her very self has been suffocated.[33] Such
selflessness is not holy and not to be naively praised. It is
a mark of chronic terror and suffering, and cries out for
appropriate and courageous naming, remedy, and healing, for the
abundance of life intended for every person, every self.
Authentic Christian spiritual formation demands nothing less than
this. I find three particular areas of significance for the
spiritual formation of abused women-self-awareness, self-defense,
and self-investment-in which Bonhoeffer can be
helpful.[34]
[23] Self-Awareness: The victim of abuse is often so overwhelmed
by others' demands as to have very little if any awareness of her
own different needs, feelings, or perceptions of reality. A
primary and indispensable need for the entire process of healing,
and any Christian spiritual formation, is the gift of holy ground
in which such self-awareness can begin to grow, perhaps for the
first time in her life. Such holy ground is made possible in
the space that opens up in a safe and trusting relationship.
Benjamin (following Winnicott) speaks of the safe psychoanalysis
relationship as just such a "holding space," the transitional space
of trust and care that allows a vulnerable self to
develop.[35] In
addition, spiritual direction, worship, and prayer are arenas in
which the Christian experiences holy ground, a space of embrace in
which the unconditional love of God is tangibly and personally
felt, allowing the pray-er to experience her own self and its
movements and desires as well. This provides the sheer
novelty of a nonattacking other, a gaze that is profoundly loving
rather than accusatory or punishing, a space for nascent
self-awareness that evokes neither retaliation nor dismissal by the
other.
[24] I find three significant expressions in Bonhoeffer's work
of such holy or holding space. The first is the experience of
friendship, which for him was transforming and world-opening,
particularly in the practice of mutual confession, a revelation of
embracing self-disclosure.[36]
This is a place of safe noncondemning acceptance that makes
possible the life-changing self-awareness abuse victims so need. A
second expression comes through the sensory imagery (visual, aural,
and tactile metaphors) pervading Bonhoeffer's descriptions of the
believer's relationship with Jesus Christ, particularly through
meditation on the Gospels. In Discipleship, for instance, he
consistently uses the metaphor of gaze: living within the gaze of
Jesus, keeping one's eyes focused on Jesus, with no sidelong
glances at other realities.[37]
The image of Jesus Christ,
which is always before the disciples' eyes, and before which all
other images fade away, enters, permeates, and transforms them. . .
. Those who behold Christ are being drawn into Christ's image,
changed into the likeness of Christ's form. . . . This is the
indwelling of Jesus Christ in our hearts.[38]
[25] He makes similar use of "voice" and "touch/attachment"
metaphors; the primary image by which voice metaphors are expressed
for Bonhoeffer is that of the call (Ruf) of Jesus, the powerful and
personal Word by which disciples are drawn to the
Lord.[39] The
metaphor of touch comes through Bonhoeffer's repeated use of the
language of Bindung, variously translated as "attachment,"
"allegiance," "commitment," or "bond," and referring to an
exclusive devotion that is the only content of discipleship, a life
of being "in touch" with Jesus.[40] This
sort of sensory imagery in spiritual direction and prayer can be
very important for victims of abuse, who are violently conditioned
to watch the abuser's face for cues of imminent outbursts, to let
the abuser's voice fill her soul and body. In contrast, the
gaze, voice, and touch of Jesus provide a healing and utterly
trustworthy alternative, drawing the survivor out of the world
controlled by the abuser's voice and hateful glare, and into a
world in which Jesus' gaze allows her to see herself and reality
anew. Through prayer with the Gospels, Bonhoeffer invites
survivors into a holding space, an open space with no other agenda
than liberation, healing, and love.
[26] Third, Bonhoeffer's Eucharistic piety and his insistence on
Jesus as the servant, the one "for others," can provide resources
to help break the gender dynamics sustaining abusive patterns and
nourish those who experience physical violation.[41] Here I am
developing a sacramental reading of Bonhoeffer's work that runs
against the grain of his own sense of the relative locations of
self and other. Bonhoeffer insists that Jesus, as "the one for
others," models our own "being there for others," which is our
encounter with redemptive transcendence.[42] But for
those who are already "other," whose lives are already poured out
for many, Jesus as the one for "others" provides tangible access to
a God who is thus "for me."[43]
To state this in slightly different terms, those like Bonhoeffer,
whose powerful selves tend to obscure others' reality, learn from
Jesus to attend to the other, to be a "person for others" like
Jesus. For those, however, who perceive themselves as
no-selves, or for the submerged aspects of any human being, this
same Jesus appears as the "one for me"; from him these persons
learn to experience themselves as worthy of care and
love.
[27] This has important gender dimensions as well, particularly
in the arena of bodily life. The perception of women as
selfless giver and embodied food source is deeply rooted in psyche
and culture.[44] Yet Jesus, the
One who is present for all who are "other," as Bonhoeffer reminds
us, subverts this equation by inviting women to be receivers of
divine life through his flesh, nourishing their own flesh rather
than being givers only, consumed by the demands of family, society,
or self?hatred. This redeemer breaks conventionally gendered
notions of who is self and who is other. Counter to traditions the
world over, in which the female cooks and serves and does not eat
(is in fact the "eaten") while the male reclines and consumes (is
the "eater")-here a male breaks this pattern to give himself as
food for women to bless, break, receive, and eat. And this
physical participation in Jesus' bodily life not only draws into
healing contact abuse victims' own wounds and crucifixion with his,
but reveals as holy even their wounded flesh, allowing a person
gradually to perceive her own body as a locus for Jesus'
self-revelation. Paying attention to one's body becomes a
form of prayer, a means of attending to the One whose body and
blood fully saturate the very cells of the disciple's physical
being. Experiencing and meeting one's physical needs for
food, play, sleep, or love becomes a way of coming face to face
with the One for others, the One whose flesh feeds all selves, all
"others."
[28] This Eucharistic reflection is an extrapolation from
Bonhoeffer, who does not develop these themes explicitly. But it is
a development much in line with his emphases on the physical
communion of Jesus Christ and disciples, and on Jesus' unending
devotion to those most in need. It is an example of ways in
which Bonhoeffer's spirituality can nourish those who have been
violated-here, by locating them among those "others" for whom
Christ is really present. Thus in these various ways-in human
friendship and searching self-disclosure, and in prayerfully
attending to Jesus Christ in Word, sacrament, and one's own
body-Bonhoeffer's writings provide significant invitations to
growth in transformative self-awareness, a key building block of
his spirituality.[45] In his Ethics, he
later makes explicit the necessity of such self-awareness for
mature Christian life, grounding the discernment at the heart of
his spirituality.
Self-defense: The ability to defend oneself is a primary
capacity of a healthy body and spirit, yet in abuse victims this
capacity has been relentlessly attacked. Physical problems,
often quite serious and exacerbated by the incapacity to care for
oneself, mirror the ways in which verbal and emotional abuse
destroys the person's capacity for self-defense. Herman
writes:
Many survivors have such
profound deficiencies in self-protection that. . . the idea of
saying no to the emotional demands of a parent, spouse, lover, or
authority figure may be practically inconceivable. . . .[They]
continue to permit major intrusions without boundaries or
limits.[46]
[29] There are many forms of self-defense needed, from this
capacity to say no at any level to various demands, to asserting
the power of anger in making needed change, to ending relationships
destructive of one's humanity. All these forms of
self-defense depend on healthy psychological boundaries; in abusive
relationships, however, these boundaries are overpermeable,
enmeshed. This is where Bonhoeffer's emphasis on the centrality of
clear boundaries for Christian communities is so helpful.
Most explicitly in Life Together, but discernible throughout his
published writings, his insistence on the necessity of boundaries
in all relationships, especially Christian ones, is a gift of
protection for those whose attackers know no bounds.[47] Jesus
Christ is the boundary for Bonhoeffer between persons, so that I
cannot relate to another except through Christ. Thus I cannot
exploit or attack another except by coming face to face with the
One who protects the selfhood of every other, and who protects my
selfhood from all would-be attackers as well. Furthermore,
this Jesus Christ who protects the vulnerable has the power to call
a person out of an abusive situation. His voice draws people
from the nets that entangle them and into a costly, joyful life of
astonishing freedom in following him.
[30] Bonhoeffer's presentation in Discipleship of a God who invites
persons into a radical break with the old life may seem impossible
or overblown to those whose lives are filled with contentment, but
it is good news indeed for those who need to get out of
abuse.[48] This is a
far cry from traditional Christian pastoral care of the abused,
which counsels that suffering under another's attack is "just your
cross to bear." In Bonhoeffer's world, both the abused and
abuser are called out of that old life for good and set into a
world in which boundaries are clear, in which each person's life,
at every turn, runs up against the reality of Jesus Christ who
alone leads persons into life-giving relationships with
others. And finally, Bonhoeffer's participation in the
conspiracy against Hitler shows his courageous capacity to say no
to evil: whether the tyrant is Adolf Hitler or the domestic abuser,
Bonhoeffer's witness provides resources for real resistance,
including even an ethics of tyrannicide should life itself be at
stake.[49]
[31] Self-investment: Finally, the victim or survivor of abuse has
great problems with self-investment, understood both as investment
in the self in self-care, and investment of the self in the world
in free and creative ways. Bonhoeffer too had theological
problems with self-investment in the first sense, that is,
self-care and -attention. For him, as for much of the
dominant Christian tradition, the self is something to be
repudiated, not invested in. Yet for those who live on the
underside of selfhood, real investment in the self may be the most
radical and audacious aspect of all in following Jesus. Those
of the "wrong" gender, race, class, or sexual orientation who have
been taught all their lives that their selves are defective, ugly,
and inferior do not need to become more selfless but more defiant
in claiming the selves they are given. Even those like
Bonhoeffer who are socialized into dominance find as they progress
in the spiritual life that their own sense of self begins to shift
from a false self of mastery, which they have attempted to flee,
into a truer and more authentic self able to love and be loved, to
act, and to rest.[50] It is no
coincidence that Bonhoeffer hesitantly gropes toward a way to
include the self in love only toward the end of his life. At
the height of his resistance activity, with its unimaginable
pressures and looming threat to his and his friends' very lives,
that is, he begins to speak positively of self-love for the first
time. In a 1941 letter to his close friend Eberhard Bethge,
who he feared was in danger of collapse under all the strain, he
quotes approvingly a term he had recently read, namely "selfless
self-love."[51] Reflected
within the context of an abiding friendship, his genuine care for
Eberhard, he was learning to see the dangers of the uncompromising
selflessness he had been endorsing for so long. Also, he and
Eberhard as conspiracy members were now no longer located among the
privileged but among the threatened and marginalized-a shift in
perspective that may well have allowed him to recognize the
subversive importance of claiming self-care more explicitly.
This move to the underside, what he names in 1942 the
"incomparable. . . view from below," is one he comes to cherish,
and it transforms his thinking in crucial ways.
[32] The term "self-investment" includes attention to both self
and other, in a way that traditional language about "self-offering"
or "pouring out the self" doesn't. Investing in oneself and
investing of oneself are inseparable, but for victims of abuse it
is the first that is the creative growing edge, the risky new
venture of faith. Can Bonhoeffer's witness and spirituality
help abuse victims recognize, name, and resist the intimate enemy
who terrorizes them-can they help them see self-investment as, in
and of itself, a form of radical discipleship? I hope so.
These brief reflections suggest glimpses of a concretely liberating
reading of Bonhoeffer for many who are violently oppressed; perhaps
they reflect directions he himself might have developed, had he
survived his own journey through the underside of history.
Conclusion
[33] Clearly, Bonhoeffer was a commanding personality all his
life. Despite ceaseless attempts in his writings and prayer
to foster utter self-surrender to others, he never remotely modeled
the passive acquiescence this might seem to endorse. From his
university days, when he pulled out of voluntary military training
exercises because he couldn't stand to submit to someone else's
orders, to the end of his life, when under intense Nazi
interrogation he first experienced forced submission, his nature
was consistently that of the authority. Had he taken
completely to heart his own writings on the necessity of absolute
surrender to the other, it seems doubtful he would ever have been
able to mobilize organized public ecclesial resistance to the Nazis
in the face of tremendous antagonism; help found the Confessing
Church; serve as a leader in broader international circles
galvanizing ecumenical support; push through a structured, monastic
rule of life for a Protestant seminary; or muster the creative
energy necessary to audaciously re-think fundamental categories of
theology, spirituality, and ethics in a time of desperate
struggle.
[34] We see, therefore, that Bonhoeffer's professed theology of
radical personal surrender to the claims of the other is in fact
set within a life whose actual contours look very different.
His experience of Jesus Christ liberated him from the sterile
isolation of his commanding ego as its own god and allowed him to
taste the sweetness of divine and human intimacy for the first time
in his life-indeed, even to humble himself emotionally and
spiritually in the deep honesty required in a life of confession,
prayer, and discernment. This, not the force of his
personality, was the only way to life for him. Yet it is
clear that the depth of his spiritual vision and the power of his
witness derive also from just this capacity for authoritative
self-presentation in the world. To preach his theology of the
transcendence of the Other to those whose posture is already one of
self-abnegation does a grave disservice to his spiritual vision as
a whole.
[35] Bonhoeffer's writings disclose a spirituality profoundly
and concretely Christian: rich in prayer, friendship, and
gratitude, and courageously, incarnationally engaged in the
struggles and needs of the world. As a Christian who resisted evil
in a time of tremendous ambiguity and complexity, Bonhoeffer
reminds all who suffer abuse of the need for a well-discerned
perception of reality, of the importance of courage in taking risky
action according to the call of God, and of the necessity of
rooting this-worldly faith in prayer and community. This
examination of his work from the perspective of abused women also
serve to caution us all against the tendency to oversimplify the
relative place of self and other in the Christian spiritual life,
especially regarding the careless use of undifferentiated language
of "selflessness," "self-renunciation," or
"self-transcendence." Shirley's story invites us to consider
carefully the concrete social location/s of our likely audiences as
well. Ultimately our consideration of these issues draws us
into the mysteries of human relationality, social configurations,
and the very structure of the psyche itself, whose extraordinarily
complex dynamics of domination and submission, resistance and
surrender, make these questions unendingly provocative. We
are reminded again of the gift of listening carefully to
long-silenced voices in ourselves and others, and of the
transformations that can result when they are well heard,
transformations of dominant notions of self, other, sin, power, and
the actual redeeming work of Jesus Christ in real human lives.
© August 2003
Journal of Lutheran Ethics (JLE)
Volume 3, Issue 8
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke
(hereafter DBW), ed. Eberhard Bethge et al. (Munich: Christian
Kaiser Verlag, 1986-98). In English, they are in the process of
being translated, appearing as Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (hereafter
DBWE), gen. ed. Wayne Whitson Floyd, Jr. (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 1996- ). The volume I am translating is Konspiration und
Haft: 1940-1945 (DBW 16), ed. Jørgen Glenthøj, Ulrich
Kabitz, and Wolf Krötke (1996).
[2] Christie Cozad Neuger, "Narratives
of Harm: Setting the Developmental Context for Intimate Violence,"
in In Her Own Time: Women and Developmental Issues in Pastoral
Care, ed. Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
2000), 86.
[3] Several short studies trace
Bonhoeffer's attitudes toward women. See Leonore
Siegele-Wenschkewitz, "'Die Ehre der Frau, dem Manne zu dienen':
Zum Frauenbild Dietrich Bonhoeffers," in Wie Theologen Frauen
sehen, ed. Renate Jost and Ursula Kubera (Freiburg im Breisgau:
Herder Verlag, 1993), 98-126; Renate Bethge, "Bonhoeffer and the
Role of Women," Church and Society 85 (July/August 1995): 34-52;
René van Eyden, "Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Understanding of Male
and Female," in Bonhoeffer's Ethics: Old Europe and New Frontiers,
ed. Guy Carter et al. (Kampen, The Netherlands: Kok Pharos
Publishing House, 1991), 200-207.
[4] Throughout his life, he explicitly
defends patriarchy (which he terms "patriarchalism") as belonging
to the very creation itself, prior to the fall. He distinguishes
"patriarchalism understood as punishment" (after the fall) from the
"good and necessary" patriarchalism of the primal creation
(Sanctorum Communio, ed. Clifford Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss and
Nancy Lukens, DBWE 1 (1998), 97; see also 205, 207, 263). Thus for
him it is not women's subordination itself that is the mark of
human sin but precisely women's chafing at this God-ordained
hierarchy, that is, their seeing it as a punishment!
[5] The significance of this reading,
therefore, is not limited simply to its applicability to abuse
victims and survivors. Rather, those who suffer abuse represent an
extreme instance of patterns of submissive selfhood found in
various configurations throughout traditional Western female
socialization, as well as in the subjugation of nondominant males.
Thus many women who never endure physical assault, or men who do,
may find elements of this analysis pertinent to their own
experience as well, to the extent that their socialization or
subsequent relationships have participated in the same dynamics of
silencing and submission.
[6] Sandra Schneiders, "The Study of
Christian Spirituality: Contours and Dynamics of a Discipline,"
Christian Spirituality Bulletin 6 (Spring 1998): 1, 3.
[7] Schneiders, "The Study of Christian
Spirituality, 3.
[8] Regarding the study of
spirituality, Schneiders notes, "Spirituality as an academic
discipline is intrinsically and irreducibly interdisciplinary
because the object it studies, transformative Christian experience
as such, is multi-faceted." Schneiders, "The Study of Christian
Spirituality," 3.
[9] This emphasis on the particular in
Christian experience is of primary importance for the discipline of
Christian spirituality. See, for example, Schneiders, "A
Hermeneutical Approach to the Study of Christian Spirituality,"
Christian Spirituality Bulletin 2 (Spring 1994): 10f.; and Michael
Downey, Understanding Christian Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist
Press, 1997), 119ff.
It is also one of the key contributions of Bonhoeffer himself,
whose entire life work reflects a highly incarnational and closely
reasoned preference for the actual over the ideal, correspondence
with concrete reality just as it is, and rejection of systems of
abstraction or universalization. He develops this idea most fully
in his Ethic (DBW 6: 260-69). Thus this essay's Christian
spirituality approach is uniquely "Bonhoefferean" also, in its
attempts in both critique and constructive retrieval to try to do
justice to the complexity of concrete human experience around these
questions of selfhood, gender, and spiritual formation.
[10] Clifford J. Green, Bonhoeffer: A
Theology of Sociality, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co., 1999).
[11] See, for example, Green,
Bonhoeffer, 78. Here Green writes, "The man with the 'autonomous
self-understanding' who considers himself capable, by his own
knowing, of finding the truth about human existence and placing
himself in that truth...subjects everything to his own authority
and power, dominating and violating reality; he 'masters' other
people, nature, and even God."
[12] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Act and
Being (hereafter AB), trans. H. Martin Rumscheidt, ed. Wayne
Whitson Floyd., Jr., DBWE 2 (1996), 137-41. I am deliberately
citing this text in the version used by Green, who alters the newly
published, inclusive-language translation of Act and Being in order
to revert to the masculine-language pronouns of the German
original. He does this to emphasize his thesis that Bonhoeffer's
writing here is self-referential; that is, that the experience
referred to is that of Bonhoeffer himself (Green, Bonhoeffer, 92;
see also note 36 on page 78).]
[13] AB 42.
[14] Green, Bonhoeffer, 79. In
reference to Act and Being, from which these passages are taken,
Bonhoeffer's closest friend Eberhard Bethge writes in his
biography, "This highly abstract discourse, which the uninitiated
are hardly able to follow, concealed a passionate personal
involvement. Bonhoeffer's deepest feelings were involved" (Eberhard
Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography [hereafter DB], trans.
Eric Mosbacher et al., rev. and ed. Victoria J. Barnett
[Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000], 134).
[15] Akt und Sein, ed. Hans-Richard
Reuter, DBW 2 (1988), 36, 58, 61.
[16] Akt und Sein, 144f, 149.
[17] Akt und Sein, 89f, 136, 152.
[18] Note that in his Ethik,
Bonhoeffer himself uses the term in both senses: that is, both in
reference to bodily rape (179, 212f., 296) and in its metaphorical
sense of extreme violation (among others, see 107, 134, 168, 178,
217, 258, 268, 342); p. 168 refers also to the Vergewaltiger, the
rapist/violator. Ethik 168, 178, and especially 134, including also
note 37, are examples in which the literal and metaphorical
meanings are very nearly indistinguishable. All page citations from
Ethik, ed. Ilse Tödt et al., DBW 6 (1992).
[19] Sanctorum Communio, 45ff., 49ff.,
54-57.
[20] Sanctorum Communio, 45, 47, and
passim.
[21] Sanctorum Communio, 54.
[22] Green, Bonhoeffer, 111 and
passim.
[23] In the Portrait that opens his
biography, Bethge writes, "Dietrich's smile was very friendly and
warm. . . .In conversation, he was an attentive listener, asking
questions in a manner that gave his partner confidence and led him
(sic) to say more than he thought he could. Bonhoeffer was
incapable of treating anyone in a cursory fashion. He preferred
small gatherings to large parties, because he devoted himself
entirely to the person he was with. . . .[His ability to work with
great focus] was accompanied by a willingness to be interrupted,
and even a craving for company when playing music....He liked
talking to children and took them seriously" (DB xvii-xviii). Many
of the anecdotes related in I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed.
Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann and Ronald Gregor Smith, trans. Käthe
Gregor Smith (London: Collins, 1966), confirm these statements in
reminiscences about Bonhoeffer's gifts for friendship and
warmth.
[24] Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of
Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1988).
[25] This sort of language occurs
throughout Benjamin's book in reference to the dominating or
aggressive form of selfhood traditionally formed in boys. Cf.
Benjamin, 64ff., 67f., 70f., 83f., 163, 190f. Here are
characteristic phrases and images with clear resonance to
Bonhoeffer's descriptions of the human person: the experience of
"the self encapsulated in a closed system-the omnipotent mind"
(67), "unable to make 'live' contact with outside reality" (68)
from within "the bubble of the self" (195). The "omnipotent self
[is] imprisoned in his mind, reflecting on the world from behind a
wall of glass" (190). The deepest wish of such a person is "to get
outside the self into a shared reality" (73), "to break the
encasement of the isolated self" (83). This sort of dominating self
is marked by "grandiosity and self-absorption...flying off into
space [with]...no limits, no otherness. The world now seems empty
of all human life, there is no one to connect with, 'the world is
all me'" (70f.). Later in the book, she notes that the
"damage...[inflicted] on the male psyche...[is] disguised as
mastery and invulnerability" (161).
[26] Statistics repeatedly indicate
that "95 to 98 percent of battered spouses are women." Pamela
Cooper-White, The Cry of Tamar: Violence Against Women and the
Church's Response (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 108.
[27] Benjamin, The Bonds of Love,
56f.
[28] Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 61.
For Freud, see "The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924)," The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works 19 (London:
Hogarth Press, 1953- ), 155-72. Benjamin cites also Leo Bersani,
Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1977) at this point.
[29] The characteristic effects of
domestic violence as described in the following paragraphs are
drawn from various sources, especially Judith Herman, Trauma and
Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence-from Domestic Abuse to
Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 74-95. For
additional psychological research, see for example, Jana L.
Jasinski and Linda Williams, eds., Partner Violence (Wellesley, MA:
Stone Center: 1998). For theological and pastoral considerations on
the subject of domestic violence, see among others Neuger (cited in
note 2); Cooper-White, "Battering" (100-125); and Carol Adams and
Marie M. Fortune, eds., Violence Against Women and Children: A
Christian Theological Sourcebook (New York: Continuum, 1995).
[30] Herman, Trauma and Recovery,
86.
[31] Cooper-White, The Cry of Tamar,
102.
[32] To use the language of Sanctorum
Communio, the abuser needs to grow in the direction of the
"openness" of the self toward others, while the abuse victim needs
to learn to recognize and protect her own "closedness." Cf.
Sanctorum Communio 65-80.
[33] Bernice Martin, "Whose Soul Is It
Anyway? Domestic Tyranny and the Suffocated Soul," in On Losing the
Soul: Essays in the Social Psychology of Religion, ed. Richard K.
Fenn and Donald Capps (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), 69-96.
Another theorist uses the image of "silencing" of the self to
describe the effacing which occurs in depression: Dana Crowley
Jack, Silencing the Self: Women and Depression (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1991). Finally, Janet Jacobs explores the
"endangered" self with particular attention to women suffering
violence: "The Endangered Female Self and the Search for Identity,"
in The Endangered Self, ed. Richard K. Fenn and Donald Capps
(Princeton, NJ: Center for Religion, Self, and Society, 1992),
37-46.
[34] For material concerning spiritual
formation of victims of violence, see in addition to those texts
already cited Mary Jo Barrett, "Healing from Trauma: The Quest for
Spirituality," in Spiritual Resources in Family Therapy, ed. Froma
Walsh (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 193-208; and Mary John
Mananzan et al., eds., Women Resisting Violence: Spirituality for
Life (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996).
[35] Benjamin, The Bonds of Love,
41ff., 46 (footnote), 126ff. This language of the safe "holding
space" was developed by D. W. Winnicott; see for instance "The
Capacity to Be Alone," in The Maturational Process and the
Facilitating Environment (New York: International Universities
Press, 1965).
[36] See Theologie und Freundschaft:
Wechselwirkungen: Eberhard Bethge und Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed.
Christian Gremmels and Wolfgang Huber (Gütersloh:
Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1994). For Bonhoeffer's understanding
of the transformative power of confession, which for him took place
within the context of this friendship, see Life Together/Prayerbook
of the Bible, trans. Daniel W. Bloesch and James H. Burtness, ed.
Geffrey B. Kelly, DBWE 5 (1996), 108-18.
[37] See Theologie und Freundschaft:
Wechselwirkungen: Eberhard Bethge und Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed.
Christian Gremmels and Wolfgang Huber (Gütersloh:
Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1994). For Bonhoeffer's understanding
of the transformative power of confession, which for him took place
within the context of this friendship, see Life Together/Prayerbook
of the Bible, trans. Daniel W. Bloesch and James H. Burtness, ed.
Geffrey B. Kelly, DBWE 5 (1996), 108-18.
[38] Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 281,
286.
[39] Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 57-76,
199ff., and passim.
[40] Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 59, 62,
74, 85-87, 89, 116, 118, 125, 127, 133f., 150, 153, 170.
[41] Bonhoeffer does not develop a
sacramental spirituality as explicitly as his focus on the living
Word, but he does cherish the Lord's Supper and in particular its
physicality in uniting Christians' flesh with Jesus' own and that
of one another. See, for example, Life Together, 29, 117f. On his
sense of Jesus as the one "for others," see DBW 8:558.
[42] This is Bonhoeffer's view, and
his interpreters develop it as well. See, for example, Tiemo
Peters, "Der andere ist unendlich wichtig," in Die Präsenz des
verdrängten Gottes: Glaube, Religionslosigkeit und
Weltverantwortung nach Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. Christian Gremmels
and Ilse Tödt (Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1987),
166-84.
[43] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second
Sex (New York: Knopf, 1952), was the first to posit woman as the
primordial "other."
[44] Caroline Walker Bynum has written
of the Middle Ages' fertile interweavings of these themes with
Christian imagery. See her Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious
Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987). The association continues in contemporary
American culture as well, as victims of eating disorders, for
instance, testify in wrenching and complex ways.
[45] DBW 6: 267, 294f., 323-29.
[46] Herman, Trauma and Recovery,
112.
[47] Life Together 41, 43ff.
[48] Bonhoeffer, Discipleship 58,
61ff., 78ff., 92-99.
[49] DBW 6:272ff. Bonhoeffer's
reflections on tyrannicide are never, in any way, intended to
justify the terrible sin of murder but rather to provide ethical
tools to help those embroiled in inescapable guilt to discern the
leading of God in responsibility for the coming generation. See
Green's analysis of this material in his section entitled
"Christian Ethics, Coup d'Etat, and Tyrannicide," Bonhoeffer,
304ff.
[50] The terminology of true and false
self emerged first in the work of psychologist Karen Horney. D.W.
Winnicott developed it further, as did Thomas Merton in the area of
spiritual formation. See Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of
Our Time (New York: Norton, 1937), 119-20, and Neurosis and Human
Growth (New York: Norton, 1950), 168; D.W. Winnicott, "Ego
Distortion in Terms of True and False Self," in The Maturational
Process and the Facilitating Environment (New York: International
Universities Press, 1965); on Merton, see Anne Carr, A Search for
Wisdom and Spirit: Thomas Merton's Theology of the Self (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).
[51] DBW 16:65, also 71; Bonhoeffer is
citing Josef Pieper, Zucht und Maß: Über die vierte
Kardinalstugend (Leipzig, 1939), 16f. See also DBW 8:417f., letter
of May 6, 1944.
1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke (hereafter DBW), ed. Eberhard
Bethge et al. (Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1986-98). In
English, they are in the process of being translated, appearing as
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (hereafter DBWE), gen. ed. Wayne Whitson
Floyd, Jr. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996- ). The volume I am
translating is Konspiration und Haft: 1940-1945 (DBW 16), ed.
Jørgen Glenthøj, Ulrich Kabitz, and Wolf Krötke
(1996).
2 Christie Cozad Neuger, "Narratives of Harm: Setting the
Developmental Context for Intimate Violence," in In Her Own Time:
Women and Developmental Issues in Pastoral Care, ed. Jeanne
Stevenson-Moessner (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 86.
3 Several short studies trace Bonhoeffer's attitudes
toward women. See Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, "'Die Ehre der
Frau, dem Manne zu dienen': Zum Frauenbild Dietrich Bonhoeffers,"
in Wie Theologen Frauen sehen, ed. Renate Jost and Ursula Kubera
(Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder Verlag, 1993), 98-126; Renate Bethge,
"Bonhoeffer and the Role of Women," Church and Society 85
(July/August 1995): 34-52; René van Eyden, "Dietrich
Bonhoeffer's Understanding of Male and Female," in Bonhoeffer's
Ethics: Old Europe and New Frontiers, ed. Guy Carter et al.
(Kampen, The Netherlands: Kok Pharos Publishing House, 1991),
200-207.
4 Throughout his life, he explicitly defends patriarchy
(which he terms "patriarchalism") as belonging to the very creation
itself, prior to the fall. He distinguishes "patriarchalism
understood as punishment" (after the fall) from the "good and
necessary" patriarchalism of the primal creation (Sanctorum
Communio, ed. Clifford Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy
Lukens, DBWE 1 (1998), 97; see also 205, 207, 263). Thus for him it
is not women's subordination itself that is the mark of human sin
but precisely women's chafing at this God-ordained hierarchy, that
is, their seeing it as a punishment!
5 The significance of this reading, therefore, is not
limited simply to its applicability to abuse victims and survivors.
Rather, those who suffer abuse represent an extreme instance of
patterns of submissive selfhood found in various configurations
throughout traditional Western female socialization, as well as in
the subjugation of nondominant males. Thus many women who never
endure physical assault, or men who do, may find elements of this
analysis pertinent to their own experience as well, to the extent
that their socialization or subsequent relationships have
participated in the same dynamics of silencing and submission.
6 Sandra Schneiders, "The Study of Christian Spirituality:
Contours and Dynamics of a Discipline," Christian Spirituality
Bulletin 6 (Spring 1998): 1, 3.
7 Schneiders, "The Study of Christian Spirituality, 3.
8 Regarding the study of spirituality, Schneiders notes,
"Spirituality as an academic discipline is intrinsically and
irreducibly interdisciplinary because the object it studies,
transformative Christian experience as such, is multi-faceted."
Schneiders, "The Study of Christian Spirituality," 3.
9 This emphasis on the particular in Christian experience
is of primary importance for the discipline of Christian
spirituality. See, for example, Schneiders, "A Hermeneutical
Approach to the Study of Christian Spirituality," Christian
Spirituality Bulletin 2 (Spring 1994): 10f.; and Michael Downey,
Understanding Christian Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press,
1997), 119ff.
It is also one of the key contributions of Bonhoeffer himself,
whose entire life work reflects a highly incarnational and closely
reasoned preference for the actual over the ideal, correspondence
with concrete reality just as it is, and rejection of systems of
abstraction or universalization. He develops this idea most fully
in his Ethic (DBW 6: 260-69). Thus this essay's Christian
spirituality approach is uniquely "Bonhoefferean" also, in its
attempts in both critique and constructive retrieval to try to do
justice to the complexity of concrete human experience around these
questions of selfhood, gender, and spiritual formation.
10 Clifford J. Green, Bonhoeffer: A Theology of Sociality,
rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,
1999).
11 See, for example, Green, Bonhoeffer, 78. Here Green
writes, "The man with the 'autonomous self-understanding' who
considers himself capable, by his own knowing, of finding the truth
about human existence and placing himself in that truth...subjects
everything to his own authority and power, dominating and violating
reality; he 'masters' other people, nature, and even God."
12 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Act and Being (hereafter AB),
trans. H. Martin Rumscheidt, ed. Wayne Whitson Floyd., Jr., DBWE 2
(1996), 137-41. I am deliberately citing this text in the version
used by Green, who alters the newly published, inclusive-language
translation of Act and Being in order to revert to the
masculine-language pronouns of the German original. He does this to
emphasize his thesis that Bonhoeffer's writing here is
self-referential; that is, that the experience referred to is that
of Bonhoeffer himself (Green, Bonhoeffer, 92; see also note 36 on
page 78).]
13 AB 42.
14 Green, Bonhoeffer, 79. In reference to Act and Being,
from which these passages are taken, Bonhoeffer's closest friend
Eberhard Bethge writes in his biography, "This highly abstract
discourse, which the uninitiated are hardly able to follow,
concealed a passionate personal involvement. Bonhoeffer's deepest
feelings were involved" (Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A
Biography [hereafter DB], trans. Eric Mosbacher et al., rev. and
ed. Victoria J. Barnett [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000],
134).
15 Akt und Sein, ed. Hans-Richard Reuter, DBW 2 (1988),
36, 58, 61.
16 Akt und Sein, 144f, 149.
17 Akt und Sein, 89f, 136, 152.
18 Note that in his Ethik, Bonhoeffer himself uses the
term in both senses: that is, both in reference to bodily rape
(179, 212f., 296) and in its metaphorical sense of extreme
violation (among others, see 107, 134, 168, 178, 217, 258, 268,
342); p. 168 refers also to the Vergewaltiger, the rapist/violator.
Ethik 168, 178, and especially 134, including also note 37, are
examples in which the literal and metaphorical meanings are very
nearly indistinguishable. All page citations from Ethik, ed. Ilse
Tödt et al., DBW 6 (1992).
19 Sanctorum Communio, 45ff., 49ff., 54-57.
20 Sanctorum Communio, 45, 47, and passim.
21 Sanctorum Communio, 54.
22 Green, Bonhoeffer, 111 and passim.
23 In the Portrait that opens his biography, Bethge
writes, "Dietrich's smile was very friendly and warm. . . .In
conversation, he was an attentive listener, asking questions in a
manner that gave his partner confidence and led him (sic) to say
more than he thought he could. Bonhoeffer was incapable of treating
anyone in a cursory fashion. He preferred small gatherings to large
parties, because he devoted himself entirely to the person he was
with. . . .[His ability to work with great focus] was accompanied
by a willingness to be interrupted, and even a craving for company
when playing music....He liked talking to children and took them
seriously" (DB xvii-xviii). Many of the anecdotes related in I Knew
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann and Ronald Gregor
Smith, trans. Käthe Gregor Smith (London: Collins, 1966),
confirm these statements in reminiscences about Bonhoeffer's gifts
for friendship and warmth.
24 Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis,
Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books,
1988).
25 This sort of language occurs throughout Benjamin's book
in reference to the dominating or aggressive form of selfhood
traditionally formed in boys. Cf. Benjamin, 64ff., 67f., 70f.,
83f., 163, 190f. Here are characteristic phrases and images with
clear resonance to Bonhoeffer's descriptions of the human person:
the experience of "the self encapsulated in a closed system-the
omnipotent mind" (67), "unable to make 'live' contact with outside
reality" (68) from within "the bubble of the self" (195). The
"omnipotent self [is] imprisoned in his mind, reflecting on the
world from behind a wall of glass" (190). The deepest wish of such
a person is "to get outside the self into a shared reality" (73),
"to break the encasement of the isolated self" (83). This sort of
dominating self is marked by "grandiosity and
self-absorption...flying off into space [with]...no limits, no
otherness. The world now seems empty of all human life, there is no
one to connect with, 'the world is all me'" (70f.). Later in the
book, she notes that the "damage...[inflicted] on the male
psyche...[is] disguised as mastery and invulnerability" (161).
26 Statistics repeatedly indicate that "95 to 98 percent
of battered spouses are women." Pamela Cooper-White, The Cry of
Tamar: Violence Against Women and the Church's Response
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 108.
27 Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 56f.
28 Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 61. For Freud, see "The
Economic Problem of Masochism (1924)," The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works 19 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953- ),
155-72. Benjamin cites also Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) at this point.
29 The characteristic effects of domestic violence as
described in the following paragraphs are drawn from various
sources, especially Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The
Aftermath of Violence-from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New
York: Basic Books, 1997), 74-95. For additional psychological
research, see for example, Jana L. Jasinski and Linda Williams,
eds., Partner Violence (Wellesley, MA: Stone Center: 1998). For
theological and pastoral considerations on the subject of domestic
violence, see among others Neuger (cited in note 2); Cooper-White,
"Battering" (100-125); and Carol Adams and Marie M. Fortune, eds.,
Violence Against Women and Children: A Christian Theological
Sourcebook (New York: Continuum, 1995).
30 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 86.
31 Cooper-White, The Cry of Tamar, 102.
32 To use the language of Sanctorum Communio, the abuser
needs to grow in the direction of the "openness" of the self toward
others, while the abuse victim needs to learn to recognize and
protect her own "closedness." Cf. Sanctorum Communio 65-80.
33 Bernice Martin, "Whose Soul Is It Anyway? Domestic
Tyranny and the Suffocated Soul," in On Losing the Soul: Essays in
the Social Psychology of Religion, ed. Richard K. Fenn and Donald
Capps (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), 69-96. Another theorist uses
the image of "silencing" of the self to describe the effacing which
occurs in depression: Dana Crowley Jack, Silencing the Self: Women
and Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Finally, Janet Jacobs explores the "endangered" self with
particular attention to women suffering violence: "The Endangered
Female Self and the Search for Identity," in The Endangered Self,
ed. Richard K. Fenn and Donald Capps (Princeton, NJ: Center for
Religion, Self, and Society, 1992), 37-46.
34 For material concerning spiritual formation of victims
of violence, see in addition to those texts already cited Mary Jo
Barrett, "Healing from Trauma: The Quest for Spirituality," in
Spiritual Resources in Family Therapy, ed. Froma Walsh (New York:
Guilford Press, 1999), 193-208; and Mary John Mananzan et al.,
eds., Women Resisting Violence: Spirituality for Life (Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis Books, 1996).
35 Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 41ff., 46 (footnote),
126ff. This language of the safe "holding space" was developed by
D. W. Winnicott; see for instance "The Capacity to Be Alone," in
The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment (New
York: International Universities Press, 1965).
36 See Theologie und Freundschaft: Wechselwirkungen:
Eberhard Bethge und Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. Christian Gremmels and
Wolfgang Huber (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus,
1994). For Bonhoeffer's understanding of the transformative power
of confession, which for him took place within the context of this
friendship, see Life Together/Prayerbook of the Bible, trans.
Daniel W. Bloesch and James H. Burtness, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly, DBWE
5 (1996), 108-18.
37 See Theologie und Freundschaft: Wechselwirkungen:
Eberhard Bethge und Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. Christian Gremmels and
Wolfgang Huber (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus,
1994). For Bonhoeffer's understanding of the transformative power
of confession, which for him took place within the context of this
friendship, see Life Together/Prayerbook of the Bible, trans.
Daniel W. Bloesch and James H. Burtness, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly, DBWE
5 (1996), 108-18.
38 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 281, 286.
39 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 57-76, 199ff., and
passim.
40 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 59, 62, 74, 85-87, 89, 116,
118, 125, 127, 133f., 150, 153, 170.
41 Bonhoeffer does not develop a sacramental spirituality
as explicitly as his focus on the living Word, but he does cherish
the Lord's Supper and in particular its physicality in uniting
Christians' flesh with Jesus' own and that of one another. See, for
example, Life Together, 29, 117f. On his sense of Jesus as the one
"for others," see DBW 8:558.
42 This is Bonhoeffer's view, and his interpreters develop
it as well. See, for example, Tiemo Peters, "Der andere ist
unendlich wichtig," in Die Präsenz des verdrängten
Gottes: Glaube, Religionslosigkeit und Weltverantwortung nach
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. Christian Gremmels and Ilse Tödt
(Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1987), 166-84.
43 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Knopf,
1952), was the first to posit woman as the primordial "other."
44 Caroline Walker Bynum has written of the Middle Ages'
fertile interweavings of these themes with Christian imagery. See
her Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to
Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
The association continues in contemporary American culture as well,
as victims of eating disorders, for instance, testify in wrenching
and complex ways.
45 DBW 6: 267, 294f., 323-29.
46 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 112.
47 Life Together 41, 43ff.
48 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship 58, 61ff., 78ff., 92-99.
49 DBW 6:272ff. Bonhoeffer's reflections on tyrannicide
are never, in any way, intended to justify the terrible sin of
murder but rather to provide ethical tools to help those embroiled
in inescapable guilt to discern the leading of God in
responsibility for the coming generation. See Green's analysis of
this material in his section entitled "Christian Ethics, Coup
d'Etat, and Tyrannicide," Bonhoeffer, 304ff.
50 The terminology of true and false self emerged first in
the work of psychologist Karen Horney. D.W. Winnicott developed it
further, as did Thomas Merton in the area of spiritual formation.
See Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York:
Norton, 1937), 119-20, and Neurosis and Human Growth (New York:
Norton, 1950), 168; D.W. Winnicott, "Ego Distortion in Terms of
True and False Self," in The Maturational Process and the
Facilitating Environment (New York: International Universities
Press, 1965); on Merton, see Anne Carr, A Search for Wisdom and
Spirit: Thomas Merton's Theology of the Self (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).
51 DBW 16:65, also 71; Bonhoeffer is citing Josef Pieper,
Zucht und Maß: Über die vierte Kardinalstugend (Leipzig,
1939), 16f. See also DBW 8:417f., letter of May 6, 1944.