Abstract
In this contemporary moment, there are perhaps few aspects of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life and thought that draw as much attention as his complicated involvement in subterfuge against Adolf Hitler. For decades, Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the conspiracy has been the subject of debate or even inspiration. These discussions draw a wide range of interested parties; from the committed pacifist Anabaptists to cultural conservative pundits, no shortage of groups lay claim to Bonhoeffer’s life and thought regarding what Kevin O’Farrell calls ‘the exception’. These are the waters O’Farrell masterfully dives into, facing headfirst the central questions of Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the conspiracy, namely, to what degree is Bonhoeffer’s involvement in continuity with his wider theological thought, and what are the wider implications of this involvement for today?
Through six major chapters, O’Farrell does not simply add another perspective to Bonhoeffer’s biography but instead utilizes the exception to draw out the constructive aspects of Bonhoeffer’s theology of revelation, philosophy of history, and broader theological ethics. The exception is, for O’Farrell, an event which comes to us from the outside and destabilizes our shared ‘frames of reference’ (p. 2), such that the exception describes an encounter with the truth which frees us from the illusions of necessity. Unlike debates about whether Bonhoeffer was justified in his involvement, O’Farrell seeks to take seriously Bonhoeffer’s claim that this encounter with the truth takes place in full temporality. Bonhoeffer’s thought on the exception raises provocative questions about the dynamics between ‘human action and the law in its various senses’ (p. 8), deemphasizing human deliberation about what qualifies as an exception to the norm and emphasizing the destabilization of human knowledge that the exception, as a historical moment, brings.
O’Farrell distinguishes his own approach from the many others in the first chapter, which summarizes the discourse surrounding Bonhoeffer’s theology of resistance and the exception. O’Farrell first surveys the ways in which Americans and South Africans interpret Bonhoeffer’s theology of resistance, which O’Farrell uses to display the contrast between the American invocation of Bonhoeffer’s biographical data for either non-violent resistance or fanatical violence and the South African reception which seeks to integrate Bonhoeffer’s insights into the present rather than directly translate his biography to the contemporary world. By drawing on the South African reception of Bonhoeffer, O’Farrell is able to introduce a critical distance between Bonhoeffer’s life and the contemporary world, a distance which allows O’Farrell to establish an alternative hermeneutic of history that does not see historical acts as fixed but rather exposing the reader as vulnerable to claims of historicity. These tensions are further highlighted by the discussion surrounding whether or not Bonhoeffer’s actions can be made sense of through the category of tyrannicide, a debate which O’Farrell uses to highlight questions of continuity in Bonhoeffer’s thought and the importance of the way one’s context is determinative of how one reads Bonhoeffer. This is clarified with O’Farrell’s treatment of traditioned readings of Bonhoeffer, namely the Anabaptist readings which argue for ambiguity in Bonhoeffer’s conspiracy involvement, and Lutheran readings which argue that Bonhoeffer’s actions are consistent with his Lutheran beliefs. These debates aid O’Farrell in arguing that these approaches all attempt to read Bonhoeffer’s biography as a fixed moment in history, resulting in a tendency to view his actions as coherent or in continuity with his wider thought. Finally, O’Farrell attends to questions of discernment regarding how the exception is decided upon to advance his overall reading that the exception is understood by Bonhoeffer to be something that comes from outside our frameworks of knowledge and deliberation.
The second chapter serves to further complicate an attempt at a coherent reading through Bonhoeffer’s biography by arguing that Bonhoeffer’s life and decisions are marked by fragmentation and rupture, a factor that is apparent since Bonhoeffer’s life is only accessed through texts that are themselves fragmentary. Drawing on Bonhoeffer’s poetry and theological thought, O’Farrell argues that the instability of human knowledge is key to how Bonhoeffer understands the exception. As human knowledge is fragmentary, there is no singular rationale for the exception. Systems of thought fall short of the ethical demand of the moment in history. This reality is key for recognizing the exception as a disruption of human assurance rather than a result of coherent deliberation. In some works, Bonhoeffer theorizes the acceptance of incurring guilt on behalf of others in the exception, whereas in other locations Bonhoeffer speaks of this moment as not one of clear good and evil but of a lack of clarity regarding self-judgment. In the realm of theological ethics, this highlights the situation of human sinful disposition in decision making and a reliance upon God’s intervening grace to act responsibly.
The fragmentary hermeneutic allows for a more constructive reading and narration of the exception in Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer’s reflections of the self reveal a larger picture that the self is elusive and unstable. As O’Farrell argues, the danger of a unified and coherent image of Bonhoeffer is one of theological importance for reading the exception, as it reads the conspiracy as an act of human agency, ‘thus diminishing the testimony … to the passivity, fragmentation, and hiddenness of the self that awaits God’s eschatological disclosure’ (p. 57). Indeed, this hiddenness that awaits the revelation of God is key for O’Farrell’s thesis that the exception represents the exposure of human frailty and contingency, which frees us to act in freedom. Thus, O’Farrell’s reading of the exception is Bonhoefferian, not Bonhoeffer’s, reflecting this fragmentary reality.
Chapters 3 and 4 thus read the exception through Bonhoeffer’s various accounts of history. In chapter 3, O’Farrell gives a closer reading of the relationship between the ‘moment’ and history, the moment being an event in which the moral and political resources of the present are exposed to be inadequate. History is always open to interruption, as divine revelation ‘undoes both history and ethics, requiring re-narration’ (p. 61). As the location of God’s revelation to us, history is determined by the fallen conditions of sin yet redeemed by Christ as the place of encounter with Him. The moment of revelation thus changes one’s relationship to time and perception of it. Exceptions, then, occur within fallen creation, liberating creatures from the determinations of sin and exposing the illusion of sufficiency (p. 75). It is here that O’Farrell’s Bonhoeferrian reading stages a critical intervention in both theological ethics and Bonhoeffer studies by emphasizing a shift in how Bonhoeffer understood the divine mandates. For O’Farrell, Bonhoeffer’s later work emphasizes the eschatological character of the mandates as oriented ‘to God’s reconciling work in history’ and thus open to interruption (pp. 81–82) rather than fixed orders of creation. This is further explored in chapter 4 by focusing on Bonhoeffer’s ‘History and Good, [Part] 2’ the location of much commentary regarding Bonhoeffer’s rationale regarding the plot against Hitler. Within this manuscript, Machiavelli’s concept of necessitá is deployed by Bonhoeffer to argue for the exception as a moment which forces one to act for the political good over and against the ethical good. However, O’Farrell reads ‘Bonhoeffer against Bonhoeffer’ (p. 94), arguing that the logic of necessitá ‘introduces a subtle account of self-justification’, thereby using notions of historical necessity to justify one’s actions, and thus denying the ‘unity of the Christ-reality’ (p. 94). These logics, O’Farrell wishes to illustrate, undermine Bonhoeffer’s treatment of revelation, ethics, and responsibility by removing responsibility from the judgment of Christ and into the hands of human knowledge. O’Farrell instead points to Bonhoeffer’s understanding of history as the location of sovereign divine action to reread the manuscript, arguing that while Machiavelli’s logic introduces the necessity of human action under the law, Bonhoeffer’s understanding of history emphasizes divine action which supersedes all historical determinations and frees human action for responsibility. The exception becomes, in O’Farrell’s narration, an act of divine judgment on the distortions of history and law, subverting ‘the totalitarian drives of the moment’ (p. 105) and reestablishing the law as a gift of God’s action. Divine action thus establishes human freedom to act for the good, displacing human moral deliberation and turning the self toward God and neighbor.
In the final two chapters, O’Farrell illustrates this argument further by first engaging Bonhoeffer’s thought on free political action which is oriented by God’s divine interruption and judgment. Bonhoeffer’s notion of ‘undetermined freedom’ (p.111) in the midst of totalizing political and historical claims is emphasized, as it frees human action from ideological fixity for the purpose of establishing new forms of life together. In this context, the conspiracy is a free venture which acts beyond the law within fallen history to imagine new forms of life. Free political action ‘depends upon something beyond the order itself’ (p. 134) yet is not arbitrary. O’Farrell posits the conspiracy as ultimately an act of repentance, as it suspends the temptation toward self-justification and acts for the good of the other. Thus, against those who interpret Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the conspiracy as either lawfully deliberated or an arbitrary act of fanaticism, O’Farrell understands the exception to be a moment that radically destabilizes human law and thought while also ‘unveiling free human life’ (p. 163), opening history to the possibility of new life in the midst of regimes that assume immutability.
O’Farrell’s intervention in interpreting Bonhoeffer’s theology of the exception is vital, as it draws out major themes of Bonhoeffer’s thought which have wider implications for philosophies of history, political theology, and theological ethics more generally. Particularly effective is O’Farrell’s emphasis that the exception not only negates human thought and law but does so positively in its anticipation of God’s renewal of the law. Radically decentering the self from the deliberation of exceptions, O’Farrell, drawing on Bonhoeffer, gestures toward a theological ethics which takes seriously the historicity of our decisions as well as a necessary openness to a living God who is capable of interrupting human patterns of rigidity and violence. This interruption is a ‘positive mode of perception’ which frees human persons to ‘perceive and act’ unfettered by the determinations and conditioning of our historical moment (p. 164). By attending to Bonhoeffer’s theological thought and his fragmentary life, O’Farrell reminds us that theological ethics is not primarily a mode of abstraction or deliberation but begins with the action of a living God and calls for a free response to God’s revelation. Not only does O’Farrell offer Bonhoeffer scholars, or those generally interested in Bonhoeffer’s theology, an insightful interpretation of the exception, but he has also signaled the possibility of theological ethics done beyond dominant forms of thought today.