The Theological Art of Failure Reading Bonhoeffer’s Late Writings with Jack Halberstam

In an important essay, “The Limitations of Modern Theology”, Gustavo Gutierrez argues that Bonhoeffer’s reflections on “religionless Christianity” and “a world come of age” gave insufficient attention to issues of positionality and class. Gutierrez acknowledges that Bonhoeffer had “begun to move forward in the perspective of ‘those beneath’—those on the ‘underside of history”, but judges that he still “did not manage to engage these challenges directly” (p.231). In particular, Gutierrez suggests that Bonhoeffer did not account for the violence and exploitation that underpins modern Western societies. While Bonhoeffer’s focus on God’s suffering and a religionless faith have real promise, they need to be developed in ways that are more attentive to these realities.

Recently, scholars such as Lisa Dahill, Andrew Clark-Howard, and Chris Whyte have all begun taking up Gutierrez’s challenge to develop Bonhoeffer’s “view from below.” (For example, in a recent essay, “ ‘The View from Below’ from Above”, Clark-Howard has connected this violence of Western societies to specific histories of settler colonialism). In line with these scholars, this AAR paper will also aim to respond to Gutierrez’s challenge. I will do so, however, by bringing Bonhoeffer’s late theology into conversation with Halberstam’s queer theory. My claim is that Halberstam’s insights into failure and its possiblities can help to radicalise and extend some of Bonhoeffer’s reflections on suffering and weakness.

In the first part of this paper, I will engage with Bonhoeffer’s prison writings, setting out some of his reflections on suffering and weakness. Bonhoeffer’s claim that “only the suffering God can help”, for example, is central for his proposal for a “religionless Christianity” that responds to “the world come of age.” In his late theology, Bonhoeffer follows Luther by giving sustained emphasis to God’s powerlessness and weakness on the cross: “Who is God? Not primarily a general belief in omnipotence… We know God in ‘the Crucified One” (DBWE 8, 501).

Building on this, Bonhoeffer provides an account of Christian faith as “sharing in the suffering of God” (DBWE 8, 481). He reflects on this in one of his prison poems: “People go to God when God’s in need / find God poor, reviled, without shelter or bread / see God devoured by sin, weakness, and death / Christians stand by God in God’s own pain [Leiden]” (DBWE 8, 460). For Bonhoeffer, faith involves having our assumptions about God overturned and being confronted by God’s weakness. Moreover, Bonhoeffer’s contrasts this unstable, fluid faith with a Christianity that has depended on “temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, the inner life, and so on” (DBWE 8, 364).

In his late theology, Bonhoeffer also draws out the freedom entailed in faith. By subverting our expectations, the cross frees us to be in the world in a different way. In light of God’s suffering, he reflects, “our lives are allowed to be ‘worldly’, that is, we are delivered from false religious obligations and inhibitions” (DBWE 8, 480). In other words, God’s suffering frees us to recognise the world and its claims upon us; we no longer need to use religion to secure meaning or redemption from beyond this world. On this basis Bonhoeffer insists that “the Christian is not a homo religiosus but simply a human being, in the way Christ was a human being” (DBWE 8, 485).

While Bonhoeffer’s late theology contains important challenges, he does not directly explore the political and economic implications of weakness. In the second part of this paper, I therefore turn to Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011). In this book, Halberstam provides a series of concrete reflections on failure, drawing examples from popular culture and “the ‘silly’ archives of animated film” (p.19). Without endorsing or celebrating failure as such, Halberstam focuses on possibilities that are present in experiences of failure: “While failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects – such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair – it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life” (p.3).

Like Bonhoeffer, Halberstam is interested in the ways in which experiences of failure can lead to new forms of resistance and freedom. In particular, Halberstam attends to how these experiences can interrupt a narrow pursuit of wealth accumulation and order: failure can help us “escape the punishing norms that discipline behaviour and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods” (p.7). As Halberstam elsewhere writes, experiences of failure can direct us to “different ways of being in the world and being in relation to one another” (p.2).

In the final part of this paper, I will directly reflect on how Halberstam’s queer insights into failure can help us to extend and radicalize Bonhoeffer’s theology. On the one hand, I will suggest that reading Bonhoeffer with Halberstam can help us to avoid a general endorsement of suffering that sometimes appears in Bonhoeffer’s work. On the other hand, Halberstam’s clearer focus on the logics of normalisation and capitalism can assist us with developing Bonhoeffer’s theology in light of current economic and political challenges.