By James Carroll

In March 1943, two bomb attempts were made on Hitler’s life. They failed, but in early April the Gestapo arrested a number of the conspirators. One of these was a young Lutheran theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. For two years, he was imprisoned—first at Tegel military prison in Berlin, ultimately at Buchenwald and Flossenbürg concentration camps. A committed pacifist entangled in a plot to kill a tyrant, he wrote, “The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation shall continue to live.”

Bonhoeffer was executed three weeks before the war ended, before the full horrors of 1945 were laid bare. Yet there is a hint in his statement that, in the thick of the evil, he had grasped what was now at stake—nothing less than the moral self-destruction, and perhaps the physical self-extinction, of the human species; its “continuing to live.” In subsequent years, the fragments of thought he left flashed through Christian theology like crystal shards through a darkened conscience. That was especially so once Auschwitz was paired with Hiroshima—absolute evil absolutely armed: the death camp and the genocidal weapon all at once bracketing the human future. The mad nuclear competition that followed then made the problem of human survival literal.

A year before his death, Bonhoeffer declared himself in a letter to his student and friend Eberhard Bethge:¹ “What keeps gnawing at me,” he wrote, “is the question, What Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today?” That line, written in a Nazi cell, is a shorthand proclamation of Bonhoeffer’s penetration to the deepest question about the human condition, which raised, for a serious Christian, an equally grave question about Jesus Christ and the tradition that takes its name from him. Bonhoeffer was a first witness to the apocalyptic fervor of the Third Reich, the millennial character of the crisis—and the fact that “Christendom,” a culture in place since Charlemagne and nearly the sole context within which Jesus Christ had been understood, was mortally undermined by racist Nazi imperialism. He grasped how the ethical shattering of Christendom extended to the keystone of Christian faith—to Jesus himself. It falls to us to confront far more directly than Bonhoeffer could what precisely has happened. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, Auschwitz and Hiroshima changed everything, except human ways of thinking and believing. Here is more from Bonhoeffer’s statement to Bethge:

We are approaching a completely religionless age; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore . . . [I]f we eventually must judge even the Western form of Christianity to be only a preliminary stage of a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, for the church? How can Christ become Lord of the religionless as well? . . . The questions to be answered would be: What does a church, a congregation, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we talk about God—without religion? . . . Christ would then no longer be the object of religion, but something else entirely, truly lord of the world. But what does that mean?²

It is clear from this passage that Bonhoeffer was groping for words to express what remained an unspeakable experience.

Paul Tillich, a German Lutheran twenty years Bonhoeffer’s senior, lived to carry on the postwar inquiry.³ Tillich had been dismissed from his Frankfurt professorship by the Nazis, and he, too, found the crisis of Nazism at the center of his reflection. Like Bonhoeffer, he saw a consequent religionlessness as somehow necessary, but also as revelatory. Indeed, it formed the basis of his existentialist theology, which came to fruition in his postwar reflections.⁴ Here, in slightly more abstract language, is Tillich’s echo of Bonhoeffer’s letter:

The relation of man to the ultimate undergoes changes. Contents of ultimate concern vanish or are replaced by others. . . . Symbols which for a certain period, or in a certain place, expressed the truth of faith for a certain group now only remind of the faith of the past. They have lost their truth, and it is an open question whether dead symbols can be revived. Probably not for those to whom they have died!⁵

The most important symbol that had “lost its truth” for Tillich was the primordial symbol of God, which, after Hitler, had been irrevocably undermined.⁶

Whether obsequies for “theological theism” are a function of maturity is debatable—think of the twenty-first-century phenomenon of so-called fundamentalism—yet Bonhoeffer’s seemed an uncanny anticipation of Europe’s broad postwar exodus from religion, with the resulting mass redundancy of church buildings, and the muting of the voices of clergy. Today, apart from the hollow formalism of royalty-ruled churches in Britain and Scandinavia, institutional religion has entirely vacated the public realm of Europe—and, in some places, the private conscience, too.⁷

I locate this question, first, not in poll numbers or philosophical debates, but in a deeply personal problem: Having myself imbued—and learned to take for granted—basic assumptions of the so-called Secular Age, what of my own religious inheritance can I believe without being dishonest? I am no fundamentalist, and the limits of religion, even its perversity, are fully apparent to me. If the faith continues to impose itself as a primal option, it does so in my case despite—or is it because of?—the crises of 1945. What happens when traditional belief falls into the abyss of Hiroshima? Or even more, for a Christian, when it slams into the wall of the Holocaust?

Here is my simple proposition: Even more than the challenges of secularity, or of, in Tillich’s phrase “justified atheism,” a Christian retrieval of the meaning of Jesus in the twenty-first century can only be accomplished by a much fuller reckoning with the famously necessary, if insufficient cause of the Shoah—the long-in-coming catastrophe of Christian anti-Semitism. A widespread church refusal to reckon with an essential Christian failure about the Jews, for that matter, is at least part of why the spirit bled from mainstream Christian denominations in the decades since the failure showed itself. And it is why—I hold—the only form of Christian belief to actually grow in these years is a faith dedicated to the restoration of the very biblical literalism that put “Christ-killer” Jews at risk in the first place. (“Let his blood be upon us and upon our children.”) Bonhoeffer’s death-row recognition was simple, and may yet prove timeless: “An expulsion of the Jews from the west,” he wrote, “must necessarily bring with it the expulsion of Christ. For Jesus Christ was a Jew.”⁸ If Jesus were remembered across most of two thousand years as the Jew he was, the history of those millennia, and their climax in the crimes of the Thousand Year Reich, would be very different.

But memory is uncertain. Jesus is elusive. If he were not, he would be useless to us. An ultimate paradox lies at the heart of Christian belief: Jesus is fully human; Jesus is fully divine. Best to say frankly at the outset of a post-Holocaust and—dare I say?—postmodern attempt at retrieval: Jesus-as-God and Jesus-as-man are the brackets within which this inquiry will unfold.

Jesus is fully divine? What can that mean now? If Jesus were not regarded as God almost from the start of his movement, he would be of no interest to us. We would never have heard of him. Nothing but his divinity accounts for his place in Western culture (or in my heart): not his ethic, which was admirable, but hardly uncommon; not his preaching, which was firmly in line with Jewish proclamation; not his heroic suffering, which was typical of many anti-Roman Jewish resisters; not his wonder-working, which was attributed to all kinds of charismatic figures in the ancient world.

The God-Man affirmation need not condemn this pursuit to irrationality or absurdity—or to a separate “non-overlapping magisterium.”⁹ Instead, it can sponsor a recovery of the light, depth, and beauty of Christian tradition at its best, even while offering a new way to say that Jesus is Christ; that Jesus Christ is God. Speaking quite personally again, nothing matters more to me than that.

To renounce the divinity of Jesus—as do a corps of the new Jesus scholars, never mind the new atheists—is to attribute, paradoxically, some reality to divinity itself. Isn’t it better to acknowledge an essential ignorance about what—or who—lies, as we say, “beyond”? The intuition that Jesus is the Christ, and therefore somehow “of God,” far from being the product of naïveté or superstition, can be rooted in a profoundly sophisticated grasp of the meaning of existence. It pushes past the boundaries of what is readily known and suggests that the realm “out there” is real.¹⁰

Believers directly confront an ultimate mystery: all that we know for certain about God is that we do not know God. Here, for Christians, is the pointed relevance of Jesus Christ, for in him we have the knowledge of God that matters. Only if we accommodate and protect some kind of belief in the divinity of Christ, as critically informed as it is true to the tradition—let’s call it a postmodern faith—does Jesus Christ have a future as more than a misunderstood victim, a mere practitioner of the good deed, or, perhaps, as an avatar of rebellion—a “zealot.”

But when we assert, presumably with far less complication, that Jesus was a human being, is the matter, really, any clearer? We do not know with certainty what or who God is, but it is equally true, in fact, that we do not actually know what a human is.¹¹ The inability to grasp the mystery of our own meaning as humans defines the contemporary crisis of identity more sharply than anything. God is not the problem. We are the problem to ourselves.

Realities as basic as time and space are not the distinct realms they seem to be, any more than energy and matter are truly separate entities. We used to think matter was the solid unmovable ground of being, but now we know that matter is motion. Physics tells us that what we imagine to be solid is actually mostly emptiness within which waves fluctuate. And not just physics, metaphysics: Every universal truth is perceived from a particular perspective, which can seem to undercut universality. All is flux, which humans have felt forever. But now, because of Kant, Einstein, Wittgenstein, and their heirs, we see flux for what it is: everything. “God” is not fixed. “Jesus” is not fixed. “We” are not fixed. We humans can no longer take the measure of our world with anything like precision, because the measures themselves are always changing.