Taking Stock of Bonhoeffer by Plant Stephen J

Author:Plant, Stephen J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Penultimate and the Ultimate

A second element in Bonhoeffer’s theopolitics already discernible in the Gideon sermon, but developed most fully in the Ethics, concerns the relationship between penultimate and ultimate things. As we have seen, though Bonhoeffer does not use the terms ‘penultimate’ and ‘ultimate’ in his Gideon sermon, he had already linked them to politics in his radio talk on ‘The Younger Generation’s altered view of the concept of the Führer’ a matter of hours after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor. In the Gideon sermon, the penultimate and ultimate are clearly discernible beneath the surface.

It is tempting to think that the terms ‘penultimate’ and ‘ultimate’ can be mapped straightforwardly onto politics by locating all politics in the penultimate and the life of faith in the ultimate. But the simplicity of this formula is deceptive. For a moment, consider a phrase lifted from the middle of the Magnificat, Mary’s joyous song in Luke’s birth narrative (Luke 1:52–53):

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.

The terms used by Mary/Luke are certainly political; but do they speak of penultimate or ultimate things? In my view, they are both at once. On the one hand, such political vocabulary may be articulated in purely penultimate ways, speaking of a penultimate, a this-worldly, political revolution. On the other, the same words used by Christians may speak of a more than this-worldly; an ultimate turning of things on their head. Like all theological language, that is, theopolitical words and concepts work because, on the one hand, they are recognisably and intelligibly similar to the ways we use the same words and concepts in day to day political discourse while, on the other, these same words and concepts are transformed when we use them theologically. Political and theopolitical words and concepts are not identical, but are analogously related.

In his Ethics Bonhoeffer does not couch his discussion in terms of the grammar of political theology; yet his discussion of the ways in which penultimate and ultimate things are related to each other provides a good example of such a grammatical rule in operation. For Bonhoeffer, grace alone, faith alone, are ultimate: ‘[i]t is faith alone that sets life in a new foundation, and only on this foundation can I live justified before God’.35 God’s Grace and faith in God are ultimate things because they alone consummate human life. They are ultimate qualitatively, in that there is nothing beyond them and in that they mark a complete break with penultimate things. But they are also ultimate temporally36 in the sense that they are always preceded by penultimate things. Penultimate things are not, Bonhoeffer continues, interesting therefore for their own sake, ‘as if they had some value of their own’; rather, theology speaks of penultimate things because they precede and in some way prepare for the coming of the ultimate37 in a Christian’s life.

For Bonhoeffer, Christians have often tended to relate the penultimate to the ultimate in one of two mistaken ways.

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