Bonhoeffer, Mediation, Incarnation and Christmas

A few posts back I quoted Deitrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together. In dredging up that quote, I went back to an old paper from Seminary that I wrote on the Chirstology of Bonhoeffer. Re-perusing what I'd written, I was struck by how Bonhoeffer's emphasis on the Mediation of Christ challenges us to reflect on the true true meaning of Christmas"--in a way that no Charlie Brown's Christmas special ever could.

Looking ahead to the celebration of God's Being With Us in the Person of Jesus, I offer a few quotes from that paper here as a little "Christmas fruit cake" for thought. (Fruit cake, that is, because of its density. What can I say: I was in my 2nd year of Seminary when I wrote it.)

In Ethics, Bonhoeffer argues that because of Jesus it is no longer possible for us to “think in terms of two spheres,” the divine and the worldly, the holy and the profane, the Christian and the un-Christian, but only the single reality of the world-reconciled-to-God-in-Christ. “Whoever professes to believe in the reality of Jesus Christ, as the revelation of God,” he writes, “must in the same breath profess his faith in both the reality of God and the reality of the world; for in Christ he finds God and the world reconciled.” Elsewhere he makes these two realities inseparable, claiming that: "In Christ we are offered the possibility of partaking in the reality of God and in the reality of the world, but not in the one without the other. The reality of God discloses itself only by setting me entirely in the reality of the world, and when I encounter the reality of the world it is always already sustained, accepted and reconciled in the reality of God.”

So it is that in his reconciliation of the whole world to God, Christ makes a claim over the whole of life: “It is as whole men, who think and act, that we are loved by God and reconciled with God in Christ. And it is as whole men, who think and act, that we love God and our brothers.” Christ’s claim over the whole of life precludes the possibility of withdrawing from the world, rather it sends us out into the single reality of the-world-reconciled-to-God-in-Christ, proclaiming this reality to the world: “The world is to be called to this, its reality in Christ ... It must be claimed for Him who has won it by His incarnation, His death and His resurrection.”

... Bonhoeffer’s claim that Christ is the one who brings the reality of the world and the reality of God together can only be understood in light of his conception of Christ as the centre, the mediator between God and humanity and between humans and the world. The centrality of Christ is a continuous theme throughout his work. For Bonhoeffer, Christ the reconciler is the mediator and centre of all reality: “The figure of the Reconciler, of the God-man Jesus Christ, comes between God and the world and fills the centre of all history. In this figure the secret of the world is laid bare, and in this figure there is revealed the secret of God.”