Creation and Fall/Introduction

From YoKim

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the 21 end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end. "Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing"^[1] (Isa. 43:18-19). The new is the real end of the old; the new, however, is Christ. Christ is the end of the old. Not the continuation, not the goal, the completion in line with the old, but the end and therefore the new. The church speaks within the old world about the new world. And because it is surer of the new world than of anything else, it sees the old world only in the light of the new world.

The church cannot please the old world because the church speaks of the end of the world as though this has already happened, as though the world has already been judged. The old world is not happy to let itself be declared dead. The church has never been surprised at this. It also is not surprised that again and again there appear within it people who think as the old world does. Who after all does not still at times think like this? What must certainly arouse the church to real indigna¬tion,^[2] however, is that these children of the world that has passed away wish to claim the church, the new, as belonging to them. They want the new, and they know only the old. And in that way they deny Christ, the Lord.

Only the church, which knows of the end, knows also of the beginning. It alone knows that between the beginning and now there lies the lame breach as between now and the end, that the beginning and now ire related in the same way as life is to death, as the new is to the old. The church therefore sees the beginning only in dying, from the viewpoint of the end.^[3] It views the creation from Christ; or better, in the fallen, old world it believes in the world of the new creation, the new world If the beginning and the end, because it believes in Christ and in noth¬ing else.

The church does all this because it is founded upon the witness of Holy Scripture.^[4] If The church of Holy Scripture - and there is no other church' -lives from the end. Therefore it reads the whole of Holy Scrip¬ure as the book of the end, of the new [vom Neuen], of Christ.^[5] Where Holy Scripture, upon which the church of Christ stands, speaks of creation, of the beginning, what else can it say other than that it is only from Christ that we can know what the beginning is? The Bible is after all nothing other than the book of the church. It is this in its very essence, or it is nothing. It therefore needs to be read and proclaimed wholly from the viewpoint of the end. In the church, therefore, the story of creation must be read in a way that begins with Christ and only then moves on toward him as its goal; indeed one can read it as a book that moves toward Christ only when one knows that Christ is the beginning, he new, the end of our whole world.

Theological exposition takes the Bible as the book of the church and interprets it as such. This is its presupposition and this presupposition :onstitutes its method; its method is a continual returning from the text as determined by all the methods of philological and historical re-search)^[6] to this presupposition. That is the objectivity [Sachlichkeit] in the method of theological exposition. And on this objectivity alone does it base its claim to have the nature of a science [Wissenschaft¬lichkeitj]^[7]

When Genesis says "Yahweh," it 'means', from a historical or psycho¬logical point of view, nothing but Yahweh; theologically, i.e., from the 23 viewpoint off^[8] the church, however, it is speaking of God^[9] For in the whole of Holy Scripture God is the one and only God [der Eine Gott ]^[10] with this belief the church and theological science [Wissenschaft] stand or fall)^[11]

[edit] Notes

1. ↑ NL-A 31.3 (Bonhoeffer's own manuscript) has only "the words, "Remem¬ber not what happened before"; above the dots Bonhoeffer added the word, "create." From this it appears that he had in mind Isa. 43:19a ("I wish to create something new"). For the 1933 edition the quotation was completed in the words of the LB.
2. ↑ Instead of the word for "indignation," the 1933 edition printed another German word meaning "uproar, agitation, turmoil, revolt." "Indignation" occurs also before this in a deletion from NL-A 31.3.
3. ↑ In NL-A 31.3 the words follow, crossed out: "The world, which does not wish to know about the end, because it does not wish to die, sees." The 1933 edition reads "the end" in place of "dying."
4. ↑ In NL-A 31.3 this replaces: "because Holy Scripture is its only authority."
5. ↑ In NL-A 31.3 the words follow, crossed out: "Christ is the center of Scripture.”
6. ↑ The parenthesis is a late addition in NL-A 31.3.
7. ↑ See above, 7.
8. ↑ In NL-A 31.3 the words follow, crossed out: "God's revelation in."
9. ↑ Cf. Hans Schmidt, Die Erziihlung von Paradies und Siimdenfall, 29: "The god whom this ancient story [of the tree of knowledge] knows is not the God in whom we believe; nor is this god Yahweh, the God of the great Israelite prophets, or the God of Moses" but the Canaanite god Baal.
10. ↑ In NL-A 31.3 Bonhoeffer replaced "God is God" with this wording.
11. ↑ Bonhoeffer wrote the Introduction and the Preface, in this order (see NL-A 31.3), for the 1933 edition, after the lecture course. Erich Klapproth gives an impression of how the lecture course itself started on November 8, 1932: "The word of God [is] neither fiction nor fairy tale nor myth; on the contrary one must read it word for word [buchstabieren] like a child and learn to rethink completely what the historical critical commentaries teach us. One can never hear it, if one does not at the same time live it - and this involves especially exercitium ['practice']. For us the word of God always lies hidden like a treasure in a field [Matt. 13:44], for we always have to come to the knowledge of God via the cross of Christ. In its catechumenate the ancient church allowed the story of creation to be discussed only at the end of the course of instruction [for baptism]; in the same way we come to it not just with a speculative approach but from the center of the Bible. We must place ourselves under the same Lord under whom the Bible stands. That is the only 'methodological presupposition'" (EK [1]). The comment about the catechumenate of the ancient church appears also in FL (1). In Hilde Pfeiffer's notes taken down during the lecture the conduding sentences of the introduction read: "In these three chapters the very God speaks to us as those who are under judgment, as those who have been put to death in and with Christ, as children and heirs of Adam who was driven out [of Paradise], as those who know about the church. We take the Bible into our hands here as the church of Christ" (HP [1]).