In his relatively unknown 1932 lecture “The Right to Self-Assertion,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers an incisive analysis of the ideological underpinnings of modern Euro-American history. Amidst the alienating conditions of modern capitalist societies, Bonhoeffer makes the case that in order to reclaim their dignity and value, modern European humans must assert their own rights and self-expression on an increasingly violent basis—what Bonhoeffer calls the “right to self-assertion.” Such crises in the modern Euro-American world highlight the more primordial struggle of one’s own survival and existence, in which individuals must strive with ever increasing force to defend their own existence or else be subsumed by more powerful groups. Through such a process under the conditions of modernity, self-assertion in the West comes to mean that the struggle for existence is a struggle necessarily at the expense of the other rather than a surrender to the other. Resonating with more recent genealogies on the nature of white supremacy and settler colonialism, Bonhoeffer evocatively concludes that the “European must struggle against nature to receive the right to life, [and] not only against nature, but also against other human beings. His life means in the most essential sense ‘killing’” (DBWE 11:252).1
In the second half of the lecture, Bonhoeffer contrasts his analysis of the violence of self-assertion in the modern West with the pacifism of Gandhi’s anti-imperialist religiosity. Speaking in highly exoticized and romantic terms of “the distant, fertile, sunny, form-and idea-rich world of India,” Bonhoeffer praises Gandhi for his application of Hindu principle of tat tvam asi “toward a people in a national question” (DBWE: 250-251). Whereas the “solution” to modern alienation proposed by “European-American civilization” has been “the solution of wars and factories”—exemplified in Bonhoeffer’s epoch by “the European thought that only by killing the other could one create living space [Lebensraum] for oneself”—Bonhoeffer thus searches for a different response by “looking East” (DBWE 11: 253). His otherwise rich analysis of alienation, self-assertion, and freedom in the modern age is thus explicated along the lines of an East-West binary that attempts to construct an alternative response the problems associated with what he would later call the “world come of age.”
In this paper, I argue that Bonhoeffer’s laudable attempt to interpret the violence of the modern Euro-American world ought to be understood through the conceptuality of “orientalism,” that is, as famously defined by Edward Said, a particular exoticized construction of the “orient” in contrast to the “occident” aimed implicitly at further control over the Majority World.2 While Bonhoeffer’s so-called “interest in India” has long fascinated Bonhoeffer’s interpreters in the West as a generative site of further dialogue, I therefore seek to make a more critical interjection of our understanding of Bonhoeffer’s encounter with the Majority World itself; while Bonhoeffer makes a beginning at moving towards a different positionality within history that may help him face the injustices of the modern world, he is unable to meaningfully engage voices “from below” precisely because of his orientalist gaze. Following Gustavo Gutiérrez, I therefore argue that his theology, and, by extension, the theological tradition he passes down, remains ultimately disconnected from the actually-existing lives of those outside his liberal German imagination.3 I apply this claim to the contemporary reality of freedom in Palestine, a freedom continually thwarted by the machinations of Western and Israeli settler colonialism—evidences of what Bonhoeffer usefully identifies as violent process of self-assertion in modern Euro-American society. Because “Palestine” is often mediated theologically and politically through the lens of Western orientalism, exoticized as the birthplace of Jesus and interpreted through the drama of biblical events, it is sometimes used by Christian theologians otherwise sympathetic to the Palestinian cause to deny the reality and history of actually-existing Palestinians today.4 Both these moves speak to the need for a fundamentally alternative theological approach than is currently offered by the Western liberal tradition, a tradition whose efficacy continues to be profoundly challenged in the aftermath of Gaza and the ongoing exploitation of the Majority World today.
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1 See, for example, Patrick Wolfe’s paradigmatic definition of settler colonialism as an ideology premised on the necessary elimination of the other: “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (2006): 387–409. See also J. Kameron Carter’s analysis of the emergence of the modern nation-state its requirements for a racialised others to be eradicated from the white (settler) body politic: Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008), 53-77.
2 See Edward Said, Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978).
3 Gustavo Gutiérrez, “The Limitations of Modern Theology: On a Letter of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” in The Power of the Poor in History: Selected Writings, trans. Robert R. Barr (SCM Press, 1983).
4 See further Mitri Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, the People, the Bible (Orbis Books, 2023); Nadia Abu el-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago Press, 2001).
This paper offers a critical reading of Bonhoeffer’s 1932 lecture “Right to Self-Assertion” by arguing that his otherwise laudable attempt to make sense of the violence underpinning modern Euro-American society is nonetheless limited by his problematically orientalist understanding of “the East.” Though his analysis of the modern Euro-American struggle to assert one’s (white settler) life over and against the life of others remains incisive, I argue that there is a fundamental gap in Bonhoeffer’s wider political and theological imagination of the actually-existing lives of those living in the Majority World. I argue that this gap is mirrored in the ongoing erasure of actually-existing Palestinian life by Christian theologians otherwise committed to freedom and justice in Palestine, suggesting a dire need for alternative theological approaches that decentre the Western liberal tradition whose limits have been laid bare in Gaza and beyond.