Resistance and Submission: Confronting Fate in Bonhoeffer’s Prison Letters

The Lutheran tradition offers several theological concepts with which to accommodate the idea of fate. Tragic outcomes might be plotted as expressing the reign of the “law,” or the conditions of life under the “hidden God.” At the same time, early 20th-century Lutheran theologians were variously formed by the post-war Luther Renaissance and the emerging Dialectical Theology, so they had reason to interrogate the rule of fate as an iron law.

References to “fate” [Schicksal] are common among German Lutheran theologians working between 1919-1945, a period of acute political and economic crisis. Emanuel Hirsch (1888-1972) writes Deutschlands Schicksal, appealing overtly to fate in his early nationalist views. He would become a strident supporter of the Nazi party. Neo-Lutheran ethicist Werner Elert (1885-1954) retrieves a contrast between law and gospel freedom in his polemic against Karl Barth while distinguishing sharply between the hidden and revealed God. After the war, Elert reconfigures earlier references to “fate” through the scriptural idiom of “affliction.”

In Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer challenges the idea of fate directly. As he writes in “After Ten Years,” “I believe that God is no timeless fate [Fatum] but waits for and responds to sincere prayer and responsible actions” (DBWE 8:46). In his view, appeals to fate have a stifling effect on ethical freedom. Nevertheless, he does not abandon the idea altogether.

In a 1944 letter, Bonhoeffer speaks about a dynamic relation to one’s fate that includes both resistance and submission. “I’ve often wondered here where we are to draw the line between necessary resistance [Widerstand] to ‘fate’ [Schicksal] and equally necessary submission [Ergebung]” (DBWE 8, 333). Bonhoeffer observes that incessant resistance can lead to absurdity, as in the case of Don Quixote, whereas Sancho Panza models a combination of “cunning and complacency” that accepts things as they are. Beyond both figures, he remarks that we are to be just as resolute in standing up to fate as we are in submitting to it.

As I demonstrate, Bonhoeffer’s novel approach to fate reveals how his reception of Martin Luther comes to shape his philosophical resources such as personalism. Engaging with recent work on Bonhoeffer’s reception of Luther, I focus on Luther’s claim that God’s governance of the world occurs through social realities that function as God’s “masks” or “disguises” (see, e.g., LW 26:96). Bonhoeffer goes on to adapt Martin Buber’s concepts to make a qualified place for the I-It relationship as a mode of encountering God in the life of faith. Acknowledging the neuter form of Schicksal, he writes that “God meets us not only as Thou, but also in the ‘disguise’ of an ‘It’” (DBWE 8, 333-4). As a result, fate can be indicative of God’s guidance, and even Bonhoeffer’s appeal to a unified “Christ-reality” has a place for an apparently impersonal fate.

Next, I situate Bonhoeffer’s treatment of fate in the prison letters with respect to earlier works where he disavows the terms of tragedy. In Ethics he writes against a Protestant proclivity for the tragic. As he puts it, Luther does not speak of ultimate conflict but “the unity of God and the reconciliation of the world with God in Jesus Christ; not the inevitability of becoming guilty, but the plain and simple life that flows from reconciliation; not fate, but the gospel as the ultimate reality of life” (DBWE 6:265). I show that Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on the unity of God works against the ways that the Lutheran law-gospel dialectic can tend towards a distinction between the testaments that implies Marcionite di-theism.

Bonhoeffer’s challenge to “tragic” thinking in Ethics is intimated in a handwritten fragment from a few years prior to Ethics. The exact context of this fragment is unknown, though it likely dates from the inception of the Finkenwalde community. In the midst of mounting state pressure on his activities, he wrote the following exhortation:

Let us never pity ourselves, let us never be tragic. There is nothing tragic about our suffering. Let us realize that through suffering God is conforming us to his likeness, that our suffering is only part of God’s suffering and that finally the victory and triumph is his (NL, A 54.15).

This is a meaningful example of the way in which Bonhoeffer understands the face of God, even when disguised behind the “fated” reality of social life.

To summarize, this essay engages with Bonhoeffer’s prison letters through his references to “fate,” a key concept in his attempt to discern an ethics of resistance and submission in the providence of God. My investigation focuses on how he differs from his contemporaries’ invocations of fate, both through his reception of Luther and his creative modification of Buber’s personalism. Given the era in question, I close by considering how the question of fate is closely tied to the dynamics of cultural and religious supersession, in which one people’s alleged destiny becomes another’s harsh fate. Against such dynamics, this essay proposes a way to engage with the terms of fate or tragedy in non-supersessionist theologies.