Freedom in Dependence: Reflections on the Conditions of a Christologically Grounded Anthropology

Abstract

This article reconceives Christian freedom as dependence. It diagnoses how modern Protestant semantics, despite relational rhetoric, tend to default to the autonomous subject. It retrieves Luther's paradox ‘lord of all/servant of all’ and reads Bonhoeffer's freedom as responsibility and vicarious representative action in his Ethics as a test case: a Christologically framed ethic that, because it requires judgment and decision, remains vulnerable to subject-centred recoding. Disability theology functions as a hermeneutical correction, relocating freedom within vulnerability, shared agency, and enabling relations. Dogmatically, in the unio hypostatica and communicatio idiomatum, the crucified-and-risen Christ's enduring wounds disclose divine freedom as shared self-commitment. Returning to Bonhoeffer, the article unfolds the imago Dei within an ‘ontology of the Name’, proposing a Christologically grounded, relational anthropology. It finally asks whether the difficulty of thinking beyond autonomy reflects a tacit split between anthropology and soteriology, and explores how a Christological reorientation might reconfigure the field.

Freedom as Autonomy? Critical Observations on Theological Usage

In contemporary Western discourse, freedom is most often pictured as autonomy, independence, and self-possession: the image of the solitary individual who needs no one and masters life alone. Such cultural semantics of freedom are not abstract but deeply inscribed in modern imaginaries, shaping who is perceived as free and who is not. Freedom here appears primarily as freedom from constraint, relation, or dependence, as release from bonds rather than participation in them. According to Charles Taylor, freedom appears primarily as the ability to relieve oneself of dependencies and to secure one's own integrity, the buffered self that regards contingency, relation, and dependence as threats to authenticity rather than its conditions. ¹ This imaginary has shaped social policies, educational frameworks, and therapeutic models, but most significantly it has informed theological and ecclesial discourses on freedom. It has insinuated itself into doctrinal formulations, ethical systems, and ecclesial practices, subtly guiding what is taken to count as truly human and genuinely free. The attraction of autonomy has left deep traces on modern Protestant semantics of freedom.

Contemporary German-language Protestant theology offers a clear formulation. Martin Laube writes that freedom is ‘constitutively linked to the self-interpretation and self-attribution of the acting subject. To be free means to understand oneself as the non-revisable author of one's actions’. ² Read within modern semantics, such wording shows how theological talk of freedom, while claiming divine grounding, still leans on the grammar of autonomy. Theological freedom can then appear bound to the subject's capacities of self-interpretation and appropriation. The effect is subtle but decisive: what is received as gift is recoded into competence. Here, theology mirrors the cultural imaginary of the autonomous self, even where it intends to resist it.

This tendency is not new. It can be traced already in the reception of Luther. Luther's paradox of the Christian as simultaneously ‘lord of all’ and ‘servant of all’ ³ yields a concept of freedom that has often been read as profiling Luther as a pioneer of modern subjectivity. This interpretation is plausible and helps explain why Luther is rarely controversial: he appears compatible with an ideal of freedom that aligns with the buffered self of modernity, aiming at self-determination and control. However, this interpretive move carries the risk of weakening Luther's relational seriousness. What was intended as a paradox that grounds freedom in relation, received in faith and enacted in service, is flattened into a prototype of autonomy. The paradoxical formulation opens a horizon of dependence and relation, but once translated into modern categories, it is often subsumed under the scheme of the sovereign subject.

In this reception, freedom is construed primarily as an inner capacity of the self, asserting itself vis-à-vis the world and others. Similar tendencies recur in systematic-theological receptions that construe freedom primarily as the subject's capacity for appropriation, discernment, and response. ⁴

Here the theological question comes into sharp focus. Recognition of freedom's relational character must not be set in opposition to the hard-won rights of self-determination and emancipation. Rights prove to be spaces of protection and participation where relationships are sustained and life opportunities open up precisely where people experience exclusion. Thus, the ambivalence of every theological reflection on freedom, balancing justified criticism of the autonomy paradigm with the recognition of historically acquired rights, is significant. A rereading is therefore necessary. Rights do not rival relationality; they secure spaces in which freedom becomes livable. ⁵ Self-determination is not the opposite of relationships; rather, it is the successful practice of autonomy within relationships, measured by its enabling effects on concrete life experiences.

Taken together, the current discourse on freedom reaches a conceptual turning point. Either freedom is considered a possession of the individual that is socially regulated and morally accountable, or it is understood as an attribute that is conditional and derived from a pre-existing relationship. In this case, the person is called upon, belongs, and is instructed. The underlying anthropology is decisive here. If human beings are primarily understood as autonomous and accountable, freedom tends toward self-empowerment and the transformation of gifts into skills. Conversely, if human beings are understood as called, belonging, and dependent persons, then conditionality and dependence move to the centre, not as deficiencies, but as horizons of possibilities for freedom.

At this point the question is: How might freedom be construed and lived as an ascribed, conditioned relation that discloses responsibility as a shared practice of common life without recoding God's gift as the competence of an autonomous subject?

Disability theology functions as a hermeneutical check. Rather than studying deficits, it offers a theological-epistemic correction that reveals what modern semantics of freedom overlook: freedom's conditional nature—physical, social, and institutional—and its enabling effect. Dependence and vulnerability are not merely obstacles to be overcome; they are the concrete forms through which freedom emerges among us. This shifts the concept of responsibility from the performance of an isolated self to a shared capacity for action and co-responsibility for the conditions under which freedom can be lived. This, in turn, lends the diagnosis theological depth. When vulnerability and interconnectedness are acknowledged, Christian discourse on freedom becomes grounded in soteriology and ecclesiology rather than being morally charged. The body of Christ is a broken body. Belonging is more than mere inclusion. Freedom manifests as a response to an address that places the individual in networks of ecclesiastical, social, and sacramental relationships and liberates them in this manner.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in turn, serves as a touchstone. His account binds freedom to responsibility (Verantwortung) and vicarious representative action (Stellvertretung), ⁶ which can be read in two ways. It can be understood as relationally grounded freedom: a response within a prior relation. Alternatively, it can be understood as a moral improvement in the performance of a sovereign self. The prevailing interpretation depends on the underlying anthropology.

From this diagnosis, the guiding thesis is as follows: Christian freedom is freedom in dependence. It is not the private possession of a sovereign self, but an ascribed, conditional relation of response. Its conditionality is not a deficit but the medium in which freedom arises. Responsibility therefore springs from participation in the divine address and embodiment of the conditions under which people can live and act freely, especially where exclusions are effective. ⁷

To examine this thesis, I will take four steps. First, I will reconstruct the current semantics of freedom and its presuppositions to reveal the conceptual direction that defines it: freedom as self-possession or as a response to a prior relationship. I will examine this alternative in close connection with Bonhoeffer. Second, I will refine this with insights from disability theology. Then, I will provide a dogmatic justification in light of Christology within the context of an ontology of the name of God. The normative interpretation of freedom will be determined here. Third, I will return to Bonhoeffer in order to unfold freedom from the createdness in the image of God; from there I will develop the consequences for an anthropology grounded in an ontology of the name of God. Finally, I will draw together soteriology and anthropology. This last step clarifies the relationship between them and gives rise to a theological movement that frees the concept of freedom from the grip of the logic of the autonomous subject and opens it up to an ontology of gift, relationship, and brokenness.

In short: The goal is to redefine freedom as a theological, relational category, not as worldly sovereignty but as shared participation in the wounded, transformed Christ.

Luther's Paradox of Freedom in Recent Reception: Subjective Logic Despite Gift

To recall only the essentials: in De libertate christiana Luther presents the well-known dual definition: ‘A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to everyone’. ⁸ Freedom is a gift derived from union with Christ and takes shape in love. ⁹ The problem, however, does not arise primarily with Luther himself but with influential modern receptions of his account. Despite their point of departure in a theology of gift (promissio), these receptions frequently fall back into a modern subject-logic.

This article does not aim at a specialist contribution to Luther studies; rather, it tracks a systematic drift that quickly sets in across Protestant discourse, particularly visible in German-language receptions of Luther. To frame the issue, Dietrich Ritschl's heuristic distinction is useful. He contrasts an ‘Athenian’ view of humanity that stresses moderation, harmony, self-empowerment, and self-attribution with a ‘Jerusalem’ view that stresses invocation, dependence, and commission. ¹⁰ Ritschl insists that this is not a rigid historical dichotomy but a hermeneutical tool to analyse semantic orientations in theology. He unfolds this contrast to show how modern Protestant thought frequently gravitates toward the Athenian pole of subject competence. In systematic theology, the Athenian type resonates with humanist traditions that emphasise rational self-determination, while the Jerusalem type resonates with biblical motifs of calling and dependence before God. Read as heuristic rather than historical dichotomy, ‘Athens/Jerusalem’ names a semantic drift that illuminates how gift-language can be recoded into competence-language.

Read with Ritschl's lens, Paul already holds both strands in tension: freedom as a call that demands discernment and accountable decision (Gal. 5:1, 13; 1 Cor. 8:9; Rom. 14:5), and freedom as participatory belonging, communion with Christ and membership in his body (1 Cor. 10:16-17; 12:12-27; Rom. 6:3-5). The same double resonance continues in Luther. On the one hand, Luther sharply criticises self-justification on the basis of Scripture; on the other, he deploys humanist-classical language that can be taken to articulate the subject with great force, opening his texts to divergent receptions. Read in the Athenian sense, freedom tends toward self-empowerment and the transformation of gifts into competencies. Read in the Jerusalem sense, freedom appears as a response that thrives on invocation, dependence, and commission.

Modern reinterpretations variously mobilise these resonances: some shift from ascription (Zueignung) to appropriation (Aneignung), while others retain the grammar of gift as relation. Diagnostically, when appropriation, judgement, decision, and attribution are emphasised, the interpretation leans toward subject competence; when promissio, ascription, and extra nos are guiding principles, freedom remains intelligible as relation. ¹¹ Dietrich Korsch's account is exemplary. He elaborates the shift in justification with great precision, clearly profiling iustitia passiva, promissio, and works as the fruit of promise, relieving the ego of self-justification. ¹² Yet in his systematic formulation, the gift of freedom can be read as a resource of the responsive self; appropriation, discernment and decision, hallmarks of modern subject competence, quietly set the frame. Read against modern reason's drift toward sensory certainty, world appropriation and individual responsibility for meaning, this diagnostic is plausible. ¹³ Korsch is instructive at this point. He carefully profiles iustitia passiva and promissio and presents the ‘joyful exchange’ (fröhlicher Wechsel) as a twofold communicative event of ascription and appropriation. These are safeguards of the extra nos; nonetheless, in contemporary reception this polarity may be misheard as a return to subject competence if it is detached from promissio. ¹⁴

Martin Laube shifts the emphasis even more clearly. To ensure the inevitability of freedom, he links it to self-interpretation and self-attribution. According to Laube, free is the person who understands themselves as the author of their actions. ¹⁵ Although the reference to God remains, structurally the subject moves to the place of freedom. Thus, Luther's relational semantics become compatible with modern models of competence and sovereignty. The Jerusalemite aspect of being called recedes and the Athenian pole of subject power gains interpretive authority. This shift affects the ontology and semantics of attribution: freedom appears as that which is attributed to the ego because the ego understands itself as the originator. Here gift becomes possession and relation becomes competence. ¹⁶

Similarly, Ulrich Körtner holds freedom and responsibility together by locating ethical action with an answerable subject. Justification does not presuppose prior capacities; it calls and re-constitutes the person as responsible. Read in this light, gift-language remains in view while accountability organises the ethical discourse. The interpretive risk is that freedom may be heard as recentred in the competent subject—even where the extra nos is confessed. The tension, then, is whether Luther's grammar of gift governs the semantics, or whether freedom again appears as a predicate of the capable subject. ¹⁷

At this juncture I turn to Bonhoeffer: given his theology's deep grounding in Luther, his distinctive emphasis on responsibility (Verantwortung) and vicarious representative action (Stellvertretung), and his exceptional international reception, his account in Ethics provides a clarifying test case.

Bonhoeffer: Freedom as Responsibility and Representation

Bonhoeffer centres ethics Christologically. Goodness does not derive from human abilities but from the reality of Jesus Christ. The question of God's will is central to his Ethics and to Christian ethics in general. ¹⁸ This stance is intrinsically anti-autonomous. Precisely this Christologisation, however, leads Bonhoeffer to a highly performative grammar of responsibility.

He insists that the form of Christ taking shape here and now requires concrete judgements and decisions. There are concrete commandments that demand obedience, ¹⁹ and this obedience is not abstract but must be carried out in practice. ²⁰ Bonhoeffer emphasises that obedience is concrete and mediated through the divine command, not abstract principles. ²¹ These semantics make the texts powerful yet susceptible to reinterpretation centred on the acting subject. Despite attachment to Christ, the subject comes strongly into focus because it must discern, judge, and act.

Across Ethics, responsibility appears as a double movement: binding oneself to reality and to the other in vicarious representative action (Stellvertretung), and risking concrete decision by accepting accountability (Selbstzurechnung). Bonhoeffer can put it starkly: the responsible person ‘must observe, weigh, and judge the matter, all in the dangerous freedom of one's own self’. ²² The map of mandates—church, marriage and family, culture and work, authority—marks the spheres in which such responsibility is tested in practice. ²³ He makes clear that mandates are not autonomous spheres but concrete forms of God's command, grounded in Christ and witnessed in scripture.

Although Bonhoeffer explicitly criticises the individualism of conscience, ²⁴ the pressure on the individual to act is hardly reduced. The alternative is not fewer decisions, but decisions bound to Christ. The burden of competence remains high, but it is framed theologically and addressed to Christ. ²⁵ This clarifies how Bonhoeffer's concept of responsibility can be read into a modern logic of the subject: responsibility appears as the profile of an ‘I’ capable of judging, discerning, and deciding, only Christologically addressed. Framed in Ritschl's grid: does the Athenian pole (self-mastery, judgement, sovereignty) in fact gain the upper hand over the Jerusalem motif (call, dependence, commissioning)? This reading suggests itself because Bonhoeffer gives strong weight to the concrete decision. ²⁶ Hence the question is not only what responsibility requires, but under what conditions freedom as responsibility can come about at all when judgement and decision are limited.

Many readers take Bonhoeffer to articulate an ethics of responsibility that overburdens the acting subject; the sense of overstrain in Ethics reflects the gravity of his own life and death. At the same time, Bonhoeffer sets counterweights that prevent a purely individualist reading. He describes human love as purely passive, in the mode of participation: ‘To love God is merely the other side of being loved by God’. ²⁷ The subject does not produce love but receives and passes it on. Here a logic of sharing and resonance emerges, locating the subject not as the source but as participant, undermining the pathos of achievement. ²⁸

The question, then, is not only what responsibility demands, but under what conditions freedom, precisely as responsibility, can take shape especially when judgement and decision-making are limited. Here disability theology begins its intervention, since it understands dependence and conditionality not as deficits but as theological keys, thereby adjusting the semantics of freedom.

The Christological Deep Structure of Freedom: Vulnerability, Dependence, and Relationship

Disability Theology as an Inquiry of the Hermeneutical Key

This analysis thus far shows that even where Protestant theology speaks of freedom in relational terms, it often tacitly presupposes personal prerequisites: those who can hear, discern, decide, and take responsibility count as ‘free’, while those with limited resources are pushed to the margins. Freedom becomes, in effect, a category of the capable. Disability theology enters precisely here, not as a thematic add-on but as a hermeneutical intervention.

It reorients the gaze: freedom is not determined by self-sufficiency but by the conditions under which people can live, act, and be supported together. Deborah Creamer criticizes theological anthropologies for often framing vulnerability, dependence, and institutional dependency as deficits. ²⁹ Her model of ‘limitness’ reframes limits as constitutive conditions of human life within which relation, gift, and responsibility become possible. ³⁰ This changes the guiding question. Rather than asking, ‘Who can achieve how much?’ it is more precise to ask, ‘Under what shared conditions does freedom become possible?’. Theologically speaking, if freedom is physically and socially mediated, then it cannot be understood as the disposable possession of a sovereign self. Rather, freedom is an ascribed relationship sustained by gift, resonance, and shared responsibility. Retranslating gift into competence misses its character.

This hermeneutical correction is concrete. It discloses itself where freedom happens: in vulnerability and need, in care and assistance, in legal protections and spaces of participation, and in liturgical and communal practices. From this vantage, attention falls on vicarious co-agency and shared responsibility for conditions, rather than on maximising the performance of an isolated subject. ³¹ John Swinton develops this ecclesiologically: the move from inclusion to belonging challenges models that grant formal access without transforming relations. Inclusion can remain paternalistic; belonging, on the other hand, names resilient, reciprocal membership in which persons are recognised as indispensable and freedom is shared communally. ³² Semantically, ‘responsibility’ shifts away from a decision-maker's competence profile toward shared responsibilities for enabling conditions of freedom. ³³ At the same time, ‘dependence’ is not in itself life-giving: in political arrangements it can be instrumentalised to bind and control. ³⁴ For that reason, the theological reframing insists on rights as protective and participatory spaces and on practices that transform relations rather than intensify paternalism. ³⁵

On this account, dependence is not the opposite of freedom but its generative condition. Those who are supported and can support others, who give and receive and act within stable, resilient relationships, experience freedom as a gift. Therefore, the question of freedom is inseparably linked to the question of enabling life to be lived legally, socially, physically, and liturgically. Far from moving away from theology, this hermeneutic insight leads to its centre: God's freedom appears not as unavailability but as self-commitment. Here theological deepening begins. Nancy Eiesland's image of the disabled God draws attention to the enduring wounds of the Risen One; ³⁶ Lisa Powell extends the line from a trinitarian perspective. ³⁷ The wounded body of Christ becomes a key for a freedom located not in withdrawal but in vulnerability. This is not a decorative metaphor but a dogmatic-ontological claim: the wounds signify divine self-giving and a form of freedom that sustains relationship rather than overcoming it. ³⁸ From here, dogmatic specification is required. Unio hypostatica and communicatio idiomatum indicate that divine freedom assumes and shares creaturely dependence rather than suspending it. Only thus can responsibility be defined as vicarious participation, not as the moralisation of a previously autonomous freedom.

Unio hypostatica and communicatio idiomatum as the Dogmatic Deep Structure of Freedom

From this pressing question, the step into dogmatics must lead into Christology. If freedom is to be understood theologically not as a disposable power of a sovereign self but as relation, gift and being carried, its ground lies where God enters relation and dependence, in the Incarnation and in the Paschal mystery. The classical doctrine of the unio hypostatica lays this ground: the one Christ is true God and true human, as defined by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which confesses Christ as one person in two natures, without confusion, change, division or separation.

The Son does not assume an idealised, ‘buffered’ humanity, but a concrete, vulnerable and dependent existence, from birth and nourishment to social, political and legal exposure. This is no weakness. Here divine freedom appears as self-commitment in love. Bonhoeffer captures the point succinctly: ‘[i]n Christ we are invited to participate in the reality of God and the reality of the world at the same time, the one not without the other’. ³⁹ God encounters humanity not behind or above the world but within it. Christian existence is participation in this reality and takes shape from the relationship to the Crucified and Risen One. ⁴⁰

The communicatio idiomatum deepens this connection. ⁴¹ In the one person of Christ, the properties of the divine and human natures are truly predicated of the one person, according to the respective nature, without confusion or change, without division or separation. Accordingly, the dependence of Jesus attested in the Gospels is not merely a human constraint. It is the locus of God's self-revelation. ⁴² Jesus lives from the care of others. He is vulnerable, persecuted, liable to be killed. ⁴³ Precisely here a freedom comes to light that consists not in inaccessibility but in enduring relation. ⁴⁴ Luther sharpens this in the light of incarnation and sacrament: Real Presence and the ‘joyful exchange’ (fröhlicher Wechsel) articulate that God's saving reality is communicated in and through the finite; a conceptual pattern that existentially opens mutual communication and theologically binds together relation, gift, and participation. ⁴⁵

This signature of divine freedom culminates on the cross. The Son dies as one given, not as a self-asserting sovereign. Here the communicatio signifies more than a doctrinal formula. The wounds of the Crucified are not provisional marks erased in the resurrection. They remain as signs of divine self-giving that does not evade suffering but shares it. ⁴⁶ In this light, freedom appears as an event of relation, a Paschal freedom that draws human beings into participation in Christ's life. ⁴⁷

Read Christologically, responsibility likewise receives its deeper structure. Bonhoeffer construes responsibility as committed action, summoned by Christ, within the concrete command. It is not the enhancement of autonomous agency, but an answering within the space of reconciliation: vicarious participative action instituted by Christ. ⁴⁸ Modern reception shows, however, how readily the discourse of responsibility slides back into a subject-model that privileges judgement, decision and control.

Here the dogmatic movement is decisive: the subject does not carry the relation. The relation, that is, the reality of Christ, carries the subject. ⁴⁹ Where the unio hypostatica is received as God's radical self-commitment and the communicatio idiomatum as real communication and participation, responsibility becomes legible as participation in Christ's mission, not as a moral add-on to a previously autonomous freedom.

This Christological deep structure connects directly to the hermeneutical correction advanced by disability theology. If God's freedom appears in vulnerability and dependence and thereby opens relational participation, then human freedom cannot be measured by self-sufficiency and unimpaired integrity, but by the possibility of being born within relations and acting with others. Ecclesially, freedom is sacramentally and bodily mediated, as belonging that recognises persons as indispensable members and as agency that is communicated, shared and apportioned. ⁵⁰

Pursued consistently, this yields a conceptual shift: Freedom is a Paschal relation, an event of communicatio in which God gives Godself and human beings receive a share. Accordingly, dependence is constitutive of freedom. It names the relation in which this divine self-commitment grants and sustains it. In brief, freedom springs from and is continually formed and upheld by God's self-commitment. ⁵¹

From this hermeneutical correction and Christological grounding follows a systematic re-articulation in which freedom is a life-enabling relation, responsibility is a shared and vicarious practice, and rights are the protective and participatory spaces of this sharing.

Theological Redefinition of Freedom: Relationship Instead of Self-Possession

Bonhoeffer's Understanding of Being Created in the Image of God

The Christological deep structure of unio hypostatica and communicatio idiomatum clarifies the shift already indicated: freedom is not the self-possession of a sovereign ego but a relational event that occurs within dependence and vulnerability. Against this horizon, Bonhoeffer's ethics merits a fresh look—not for harmonisation, but to uncover its foundation.

For Bonhoeffer, being created in the image of God is not an inherent human quality; it is a relation established and sustained by God within which freedom occurs. In Creation and Fall he expressly ties Gen. 1:26-27 to this relational configuration: the human is constituted as God's counterpart (Gegenüber), addressed, blessed, and commissioned—free because placed before God and called into love of the neighbour. ⁵² In Bonhoeffer's own terms this amounts to a relational correspondence, an analogia relationis rather than an analogia entis: likeness is according to relation, not according to an inner substance or capacity. ⁵³ The primal command gives the very form of freedom—permission preceding prohibition—so that boundaries protect and structure freedom rather than negating it. ⁵⁴

Created freedom is freedom in God (Freiheit in Gott): it is conditioned by God's address and command and, precisely thus, releases the human to be free for God, the neighbour, and the world. ⁵⁵ The Fall inverts this ‘for’ into a ‘from’ (freedom from God and the other) through the self's curving in upon itself (incurvatus in se). Christologically concentrated, this created freedom ‘in God’ is not abolished but fulfilled: in Christ the image is restored and the ‘for’ is re-opened as participation. Accordingly, imago Dei is realised not by retreat into the self but as being-with the other (the ‘not good to be alone’ of Gen. 2:18 discloses image as companionship), creaturely placed within time, place, and entrusted task. Within this framework, freedom is neither autonomy nor mere ability; it is granted, conditioned freedom, proved and practised in relations, and it already anticipates responsibility as vicarious participation (Stellvertretung).

This insight is not derived from moral elevation but from confession of Christ. In him, the divine person inseparably bears human existence, vulnerable and needy. The communicatio idiomatum prevents any spiritualising contrast that would oppose vulnerability to divine freedom. Accordingly, the enduring bodily reality and wounds of the Risen One are not transitional marks but the signature of relational freedom. Luther's sacramental consolidation of this underscores that God's saving reality is communicated in and through the finite, and that the believer's freedom is received participation, not autonomous achievement. ⁵⁶

Against this backdrop, Bonhoeffer's concept of responsibility comes into focus. Responsibility is not the enhanced performance of a discerning ego, but vicarious representation (Stellvertretung) of the related person and participation in Christ, who bears the world. Ethics is conceived as formation from the presence of Christ: not ‘Christian principles’ shaping the world, but Christ forming persons in his image. ⁵⁷

Thus, the neighbour in need becomes a locus of freedom. Judgement and decision remain necessary, yet they lose the character of sovereign acts; they are understood as responses within received relations. ⁵⁸

An Ontology of the Name

Building on the previous insight that imago Dei is constituted as relation (analogia relationis), the biblical witness already understands the Name of God as the place of divine presence (Exod. 3:14-15; Deut. 12:5-11; Num. 6:24-27). The Name carries promise and relation: it blesses, protects, and commissions. Bonhoeffer takes up this line when he anchors the imago Dei in the revelation of the Name in Jesus Christ, the one in whom God encounters humanity as its counterpart. Systematically, an ontology of the Name must therefore be mediated with the classical Christological teaching: in the unio hypostatica, the Name is bound to the human Jesus, and in the communicatio idiomatum, divine and human predicates are truly communicated in the unity of his person. Thus, the relational depth of the Name becomes the ontological ground of a freedom that is not self-possession but participation in God's self-commitment.

This connection opens an ontology of the Name of God in which relation stands at the core. The human bears God's image insofar as they exist as addressed, called, and blessed; identity arises from the call, not by self-constitutive positing: ‘I have called you by name; you are mine’ (Isa. 43:1). In Scripture, the Name denotes presence and promise; to be named is to belong and to be commissioned. Christologically construed, the revelation of the proper Name resists objectification; identity denotes belonging rather than inner potency. Relation precedes capacity: human beings are called into being by the divine address; response is enabled, not presupposed. Even where capacities to respond are limited, the constituting relation abides. ⁵⁹ Knowledge of creaturely reality begins from this self-promise of God and is Christologically gathered ‘in the Name above every name’, that is, in Jesus Christ, true God and true human (Phil. 2:9-11). ⁶⁰

Freedom, accordingly, is the gift of a divine relational ontology, a mode of participation. ⁶¹ This ontological register renders the relational grammar of freedom intelligible. In Christ, the hypostatic union and communicatio idiomatum ensure that divine freedom appears as self-committing in love, not as withdrawal from the finite but as accessibility in and through it.

The dependence, suffering, and death narrated in the Gospels are truly predicated of the Son according to his human nature, while the distinction of natures is preserved. The enduring wounds of the Risen One are thus not transitional signatures but the mark of relational freedom. ⁶² From this centre it follows that freedom is not a private resource of the subject but a given participation that occurs within relations and through mediation.

The grammar of gift holds the structure together. Justification is iustitia passiva: God acts extra nos in the promissio; faith receives what Christ is pro nobis. Correlatively, freedom takes the form of love, as a participatory communion: received from Christ (pro nobis) and enacted as practices that enable the neighbour's participation. Within the Lutheran sacramental horizon, salvation is communicated in and through the finite: the incarnate Word and the sacramental union (‘in, with and under’ creaturely elements) enact real participation, grounding freedom in the communicatio idiomatum rather than in autonomous achievement. ⁶³ Thus, gift precedes competence and sustains it, rather than being recoded into the competencies of an autonomous self.

Accordingly, Bonhoeffer's ethics takes shape without recourse to a sovereign subject. Responsibility is bound, summoned action within the concrete command: it is a vicarious participative act in Christ's bearing of the world, rather than a performance profile of autonomous discernment. ⁶⁴ Judgement and decision remain, yet are de-sovereignised as responses within received relations, ecclesially mediated through Word and sacrament and socially embodied in practices that foster protected and participatory spaces for freedom. ⁶⁵

In sum: A Christologically grounded ontology of the Name redefines freedom as participatory response to the divine address, bodily, ecclesially, and socially mediated. Dependence is constitutive: freedom is participation in God's self-commitment, and it frees us for God and for the neighbour. Consequently, responsibility is vicarious participative action, and rights are the institutional forms that secure belonging and enable shared agency.

Outlook: A Theology of Freedom in Dependence

Freedom now comes into view in a new light, opening the way to the final consequences. This study began with the cultural imaginary of the buffered self and a Protestant reception that reads freedom as an inner capacity. Bonhoeffer sharpened the ambivalence: his grammar of responsibility is powerful, yet open to a subject-centred reinscription. Disability theology intervened hermeneutically: dependence is not a deficit but the generative condition of freedom; freedom is mediated, bodily, socially, ecclesially, and becomes visible where enabling relations hold. Christology supplies the ontological depth: in the unio hypostatica and communicatio idiomatum God's freedom appears as self-commitment; the ontology of the Name discloses a reality in which identity is bestowed and belonging precedes capacity. In this light, imago Dei is freedom in God and thus for God and the neighbour.

Why, then, is it so difficult to think freedom and with it responsibility beyond the autonomous subject? The difficulty lies not only in modern habits of speech. It lies in a structural split: anthropology is tacitly detached from soteriology. When the human is first defined by private capacities and only then related to grace, gift becomes competence, responsibility becomes performance, and rights turn from forms of relation into rivals to it. Ecclesial and social mediations of freedom become invisible, and ‘freedom’ quietly contracts to the freedom of the capable. The question shifts from ‘Under what shared conditions is freedom possible?’ to ‘Who can achieve how much?’ and the subject bears a moralised burden.

The Christological alternative reverses the order: anthropology is gathered into soteriology, not placed beside it. In Christ, divine self-commitment takes up creaturely dependence; the Son bears human vulnerability without abolishing it. Freedom therefore appears as participatory relation: an event of communicatio in which God gives Godself and human beings receive a share. Dependence is constitutive, not contrary; boundaries protect and shape freedom; and the ‘for’ of created freedom is reopened: free for God, the neighbour, the world. From here, responsibility is legible as vicarious participation rather than sovereign performance, and rights appear as the institutional forms that secure belonging and enable shared agency.

Put diagnostically: wherever anthropology is abstracted as a theory of powers and soteriology is added only later as religious meaning or moral motivation, the semantics of freedom relapse into possession and control. Where, by contrast, anthropology is Christologically re-located—within the ontology of the Name and the ecclesial mediation of participation—freedom is given, carried, and shared. The question of ‘capacity’ is not denied but redistributed: capacities are derivative and apportioned; they are given within relations and ordered to the neighbour's participation.

In conclusion: The persistent difficulty in thinking freedom (and responsibility) beyond the autonomous subject arises from the separation of anthropology and soteriology. Reuniting them in Christ, where God's self-commitment bestows identity and gathers human life into participatory belonging, redefines freedom as a life-enabling relation: not private possession, but response to the divine address; not sovereign performance, but vicarious, shared agency sustained by right and supported in common life.