Bonhoeffer on Christ's presence

Continuing my look at theological articulations of Christ's presence, I'd like to now turn to some Protestant authors.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer paid special attention to the question of Christ's presence. In the last 1/3 or so of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer talks about the Saints, the visible community, and the Sacraments in light of the discussion in the first part of the book ("cheap" and "costly" grace, the Sermon on the Mount, etc). The angle Bonhoeffer uses has to do with Christ's presence. Bonhoeffer asks what seems to be a popular question in his time and ours: why and how should the life and work of a late Ancient Jewish man impact people today? In this part of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer is looking for theological and philosophical ways to say that Jesus Christ, and his personal call to radical discipleship, are still present to Christians today.

Bonhoeffer finds a way to articulate Christ's presence through Protestant theological ideas of Word and Sacrament. He says:

"The preaching of the Church and the administration of the sacraments is the place where Jesus Christ is present. If you would hear the call of Jesus you need no personal revelation: all you have to do is to hear the sermon and receive the sacrament."

In a chapter entitled "The Body of Christ," Bonhoeffer gives Christ's body - both Jesus' flesh and the body of believers with Jesus as their head - a central role in salvation that looks theologically very similar to that which we see with Aquinas. Bonhoeffer says that Protestants must never play down the importance of baptism and the Lord's supper because these are communion with Christ's body, both the body of the Church (in baptism) and Jesus' flesh (in the Lord's supper).

Bonhoeffer also says that Christ is present in the church's preaching, something that I have been interested in. Karl Barth also focuses his discussion of God's presence more strongly on preaching than the sacraments (and in fact critiques Catholics and some Protestants for over-emphasizing God's presence in the sacraments to the neglect of God's presence in the preached Word). I'll write more about the connection between preaching and God's presence in Barth and Bonhoeffer soon. For now I wanted to point out the discussion of presence in Bonhoeffer, and his surprising similarity to Aquinas.

Participating in Christ's presence (Aquinas)

Lately I've been doing a kind of mini-series on unusual or overlooked aspects of Christology. Last week I talked about the theological idea of Christ's "presence," a theological idea that has gotten more and more attention in recent years, especially by Protestant theologians. I'd like to present a a bit of what Thomas Aquinas says on Christ's presence this week, with a second post on the same issue by Protestant thinkers later this week.

One overlooked part of Aquinas's Christology is the way he talks about believers "participating" in Jesus's mystical body. He says that Christians are present in Christ, even though Christ's glorified body is sitting at the right hand of God (Heb. 1:3). While we are not actually physically close to Jesus' body, Aquinas says that Christ is present to us since all Christians have Christ as their "head." In discussing our participation in Christ's session, he says "since Christ is our Head, then what was bestowed on Christ is bestowed on us through Him." Aquinas here follows where Paul says that God "raised us up with [Christ] and seated us with him in the heavenly places" (Eph. 2:6).

Aquinas says that Christ is present to us mystically. Of course, Aquinas also holds that Christ's body is actually made present in the celebration of the Eucharist. But the "mystical body"-rooted presence with Christ outlined above gives us both a somewhat overlooked angle on Aquinas's thought, and a kind of ecumenical slant, as starting with this more neglected theological concept keeps us from getting bogged down in older debates.

Christ's Presence?

My last post addressed Christ's mediation, an older christological concept. In this post I'd like to address what I think is a newer christological concept: the idea of Christ's "presence."

"Presence" has quietly snuck its way into theological discourse. For example, the Baptist theologian James McClendon describes presence as a special Christian virtue. He says the virtue of presence is founded in the stories and beliefs we have about Jesus Christ: "God's presence with us is one of the great gifts of the gospel, associated with the incarnation of the Word, the giving of the Spirit, and the return of the Lord; in Christian history his presence is celebrated in every eucharistic meal, invoked at every baptism, and claimed anew at every gathering of disciples" (Ethics, 115).

McClendon finds clear reflections of this christological presence in the behavior of Christian people. He gives examples of Christians embodying the virtue of "presence" like the presence of Clarence Jordan's Koinonia farm in Georgia, or Catholic religious who live in prisons and jails in order to be present to the prisoners inside.

In the next few posts I may explore around to see the roots of this theological idea of "presence," which has become pretty much a set piece of christology and moral theology in certain theological circles, although not in others. I am also interested to see what the examination of new and old christological concepts teaches about the task of christology and theology itself.

Christ the Mediator?

An underappreciated aspect of Christology today is the role of Christ as mediator. Christ's "mediation" between God and human beings played a central role in the theology of the early Church and in Augustine and Aquinas. This reflection came from their reading of 1 Timothy 2:5 - "there is one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus."

Premodern Christian theology could sometimes have a much more creative and expansive meditation on the work of Jesus Christ in reconciling the world to himself than we have today. Aquinas, for instance, thought not only that the atoning sacrifice of the Cross was necessary in a way for our salvation, but also that the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and even the Ascension play essential roles in our salvation as well. Contemporary Christology, of various stripes and predilections, tends to focus the mystery of our salvation solely on the Cross. The sole emphasis of some preachers and authors on Jesus' death being a "satisfaction" of God's anger, for example, passes over this richer history.

Part of my inspiration for this comes from me working on my French by making a very elementary, very unofficial translation of a recently published article by Gilles Emery on Christ as Mediator in the Greek Fathers, Augustine, and Aquinas. Emery traces the history of reflection on Christ's mediation all the way back to Irenaeus who, in reference to 1 Tim. 2:5, said that Jesus Christ must be both divine and human to have "kinship" with both parties of God and humanity, so that, in Christ, "God might meet human beings and human beings might offer themselves to God."

Preaching and Theology

In thinking about what to write my dissertation on, I've been drawn to thinking about the intersection between preaching, doctrine, and catechesis. I'm drawn to this question because the theologians that I've probably spent the most time reading - Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, and my favorite Baptist theologian, James McClendon - all wrote around the intersection of these three fields. Preaching, particularly, plays a major role in the work of all four (the role of preaching in Aquinas is just beginning to be explored). Preaching is also a major, if not the central, aspect of Baptist life and worship.

One of the ideas they drilled into us at Duke Divinity School that I'm most thankful for is their emphasis on Preaching as a theological event. This idea, which was usually taught to us through Barth or Bonhoeffer, was that a congregation that hears sermons based on scripture is hearing the Word of God, however weak and human the sermon might be. Bonhoeffer famously said to his preaching students before he read their work, "let's see what God is telling us today in your sermon." Karl Barth has a very strong emphasis on preaching throughout the Church Dogmatics, and he regards the common Sunday sermon as a theological miracle with its basis in the work of Jesus Christ. Barth says, for instance, "humanly speaking, it is a stark impossibility that men should speak what God speaks, but it is one which in Jesus Christ is already overcome" (CD 1/2-22).

This emphasis on the theological event of preaching was taught to me through largely Protestant sources. Yet as an "ecumenical Baptist" studying at a Catholic university, I'd like to have an "ecumenical eye" in these issues. I'm interested to learn more about theologies of preaching being developed by Catholic theologians, and to learn how they connect preaching and doctrine.