the theologian is the enemy of theology

Currently I’m taking a class on Dietrich Bonhoeffer for my master’s degree. Bonhoeffer lived in the early 20^th century in Germany and was part of the resistance movement against Adolf Hitler. He conspired with other believers to assassinate Hitler. He also wrote a lot of books. One of them was Ethics, in which he uses the Sermon on the Mount to argue that Christ is the foundation of all Christian ethics. This seems pretty straight forward, right? Check out this sentence:

The decision between the clearly known good and the clearly known evil excludes human knowledge itself from the decision; it transposes the ethical into the struggle between the knowledge, which is already oriented towards the good, and the will, which still offers resistance, and it thereby fails to bring about that authentic decision in which the whole man, complete with his knowledge and his will, seeks and finds the good in the equivocal complexity of a historical situation solely through the venture of the deed.[1]

That is a single sentence, and I’ve read it a few times and I’m still not sure what it means. Granted, Bonhoeffer wrote in German, and this is a translation, but even if you separate it into two sentences, I doubt it would be less confusing. What is “clearly known good” or “clearly known evil”? Clearly known by conscience? If we know good and evil clearly, how is knowledge excluded? How is knowledge “oriented towards the good”? Why does the will offer resistance?

Placing the quote in context doesn’t help either:

The absolute criterion of a good which is a good in itself, assuming that a notion of this kind can be conceived in the first place without an inherent contradiction, makes good into a dead law, a Moloch to which all life and all liberty are sacrificed, and which fails to even impose a genuine obligation, simply because it is a metaphysical and self-contained construction which bears no essential relation to life itself.[2]

I have no idea. I don’t have the time to find an idea. There’s the problem. Maybe if you’re a seminary student, or a preacher, or a professional theologian who is paid to study this and make sense of it, maybe then you will invest the time and energy to find whatever golden nuggets of truth lie buried deep in the bowels of this single sentence. Maybe, but me? No way. I have a job and I have children and I have bills to pay and another job and a second course I’m taking to complete my degree and I don’t have the will or the strength to bury myself into this single, aggravating, obfuscating, abstract piece of horrible prose. I just want to learn and I don’t believe it should be this difficult. Obviously, learning takes effort, but many men have written on the same themes without this sort of profoundly infuriating and confusing word pile.

You are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Apart from Me, you can do nothing.

Love one another, even as I have loved you.

It’s not hard to speak clearly and concisely. Theologian, do you want non-theologians to read what you write? Do you want anyone to learn anything or do you want your theology to stay confined in your own little echo chamber? Write better. Thanks. 

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[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949), page 212.

[2] Ibid.