a feminist reading of Bonhoeffer's Christology by Lisa E. Dahill

Jesus for you: a feminist reading of Bonhoeffer's Christology
Currents in Theology and Mission, August, 2007 by Lisa E. Dahill

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Self and other

Various scholars have commented on the striking other-orientation in Bonhoeffer, finding it a salutary Christian alternative to the self-indulgent pieties of American consumerism and privilege, and locating him within a developing tradition of philosophical alterity manifest also in such thinkers as Adorno and Levinas (3) as well as in subsequent liberation theology. (4) From the beginning of his writings Bonhoeffer identifies the "other" (whether divine or human) as the experienced locus of transcendence, drawing a person's attention away from one's own self as "totally claimless," sterile, and isolated to find authentic life and reality in surrender to the "absolute demands" of the other. (5) From the philosophical categories of Sanctorum Communio, through the powerfully enacted surrender to Christ in Discipleship and to the human other in confession and service in community (Life Together), he continued to develop this motif of the priority of the other over the self for Christian maturity. And at the end of his life, even as he was beginning to notice problems with this "unconditional surrender" of self to other, nevertheless the dominant tone of his writings in this regard is still that of the sheer joy and freedom he experiences in radical self-surrender, a process simultaneously sacrificial and redemptive. That is, in one's own becoming a "person for others" one participates in the very being and mystery of Jesus Christ himself, the consummate person for others. Thus for him

a transformation of all human life is given in the fact that "Jesus is
there only for others." His "being there for others" is the experience
of transcendence. It is only this "being there for others," maintained
until death, that is the ground of his omnipotence, omniscience, and
omnipresence. Faith is participation in this being of Jesus
(incarnation, cross, and resurrection). Our relation to God is not a
"religious" relationship to the highest, most powerful, and best Being
imaginable--that is not authentic transcendence--but our relation to God
is a new life in "existence for others," through participation in the
being of Jesus. (6) read it all