Editor’s Note: This essay won the First Prize in the 2024 TLC Student Essay Contest.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s communal and relational Christology are the clear throughline of his theology and ethics. Less developed, but in some ways lurking under the surface of much of his writing, is Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the imago dei. There is no lecture series devoted to it or even too many extended musings of how he understands humans to have been made in God’s image, and yet the pieces of information Bonhoeffer gives us on the imago dei show a powerful, if underexplored, foundation on which he builds his understanding of humanity and its relationship to God. This essay will pull together into one place a coherent reading of Bonhoeffer’s views on the imago dei, which impacted how he sees the human person and humanity corporately. I will also address why Bonhoeffer appeared to spend so little time writing about the imago dei: the obviousness of it in his own thinking.
Access to Bonhoeffer’s writings within this paper are based on those available in Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Clifford J. Green, The Bonhoeffer Reader (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013). Parenthetical citations will indicate which specific Bonhoeffer text is being used and the page number from The Bonhoeffer Reader.
Like his Christology and ecclesiology, which are intimately related, Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the imago dei is communal and relational in nature. As early as his dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, we can see the hints of his beliefs about how humanity is made in the image of God, most notably in his discourse on You/I and relationality. During that discourse, Bonhoeffer describes that at the center of the human person is I. Because I can only be understood by me, I encounter every other person as You. While technically each person is an I, I am incapable of understanding another’s I as such, because to understand as I is to understand myself and no other. And because we experience God as You and not I, there is nothing of the divine nature that can be learned from within ourselves as individuals. If people are made in the image of God, that image cannot be found by me in my I, because I know God as You. As a result, I can only catch glimpses of the imago dei in others whom I experience as You, because to experience a person as You is to experience them as I experience God. As Bonhoeffer writes,
every human You is an image of the divine You …. since the human You is created and willed by God, it is a real, absolute, and holy You, like the divine You. One might then speak here of the human being as the image of God with respect to the effect one person has on another…. (Sanctorum Communio, 27. Emphasis in original).
Here we see Bonhoeffer’s conviction that, if the imago dei is embedded in humans, it is embedded specifically in other humans. In this is also the seed of Bonhoeffer’s disdain for individualistic understandings of the Christian religion. Without relationship, there is no experience of another person, and therefore no experience of the divine Person. We are incapable of experiencing God as I, and therefore we are incapable of recognizing any hint of the imago dei in ourselves. I look at God and see You, not I. It is in the very experience of others that I experience God, because in others I experience not an individual I, but rather the concrete proof that there is more than I. There is You. And in others, we catch a glimpse of God’s You-ness, and thus are capable of meditating on and contemplating the imago dei before our eyes.
This communal experience of both human and divine goes on to affect other aspects of Bonhoeffer’s thinking. A year after publishing Sanctorum Communio, Bonhoeffer would describe true theology as beginning “with veni creator spiritus. To know is to acknowledge, to think is to reflect” (The History of Twentieth-Century Systematic Theology, 165). The German word used there includes both metaphorical and literal reflection — in order to reflect, a mirror must have someone to be reflected — a definition of image that Bonhoeffer would return to in Creation and Fall. Bonhoeffer would similarly find this relationality to be pivotal to his own understanding of proper ecclesiology, which would follow him throughout the German church crisis as he attempted to thread the needle between the institutional church and the catholic, universal Church: “The correct proclamation of the word requires theology as the first extra-ecclesial function next to the church, the assembly of the church (council), which makes decisions about theology (heresy), and the dogma created by the council. This trinity is intended to serve the first trinity” (The Nature of the Church, 198. Emphasis in original). This communal action of the Church finds its footing in the relationality of the Trinity and in the recognition of the imago dei that can only be found in relationship with others. Without that, there is no Church.
Creation and Fall (1933) represents Bonhoeffer’s extended run on the imago dei as such. He begins by asserting that having been created by God does not by necessity impart the image of God onto that which has been created (Creation and Fall, 221). For a created being to be said to contain the image of God, God must be able to see himself in it, as one might see one’s image in a mirror. With this straightforward definition of image, Bonhoeffer denies that anything made by a person (or Person) is made in her image, no more than a potter could claim to see her in her work more than metaphorically. Contra other possible understandings of the ways in which humans are expressions of the imago dei — like the possession of reason or the ability to create — Bonhoeffer explicitly mentions freedom as the key characteristic of God that must be found in order for something to be said to bear the imago dei (Creation and Fall, 221). And therein lies the initial problem: how can a dependent creature be created free?
Freedom, Bonhoeffer asserts, is not a quality a person or object has. Freedom as such exists only in relation to something else. The common misconception that arises is the idea that freedom is understood as “freedom to” do something, which is an individualistic understanding of what freedom is. A fully individual human in a vacuum is free to do whatever he wants. At the same time, a fully individual human in a vacuum does not exist in our lived reality, nor is such a human’s existence possible, because to believe in such a human existence is to believe in that human’s aseity — an absurdity with respect to both biology and theology. “To be more precise, freedom is a relation between two persons. Being free means ‘being-free-for-the-other,’ because I am bound to the other. Only by being in relation with the other am I free” (Creation and Fall, 222). For Bonhoeffer, it is the experience of the other that makes freedom happen (Creation and Fall, 223). Because God appears to create in such a way as to be in relationship with humanity, this appears to be the kind of freedom God desires: freedom for the joy of being in relationship. Likewise, humanity expresses its own freedom when it lives for the other, both in each other and in the divine. After spending several pages claiming that in freedom we can see the imago dei, Bonhoeffer finally defines freedom in such a way that recalls his relational experience of the imago dei found in Sanctorum Communio.
Where Bonhoeffer makes a new and astounding leap is in his description of who, exactly, contains the image of God. He writes, “Created freedom is freedom in the Holy Spirit, but as created freedom it is humankind’s own freedom” (Creation and Fall, 223). Because the imago dei is expressed in our relationship with each other, it refuses to be categorized as an individualistic characteristic of each person as such. Rather, it is humanity as a whole that exhibits the imago dei. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that breaking relationship with others not only harms those who have been cut off, but harms all of humanity, which corporately bears the image of God. In this understanding, it becomes easy to see Bonhoeffer’s foundational need to protect Jewish Christians from the Aryan Articles; to deny any group of Christians is to deny both Christ and the imago dei itself.
If his understanding of the imago dei shared so much with his relational Christology and ecclesiology — few thinkers have taken the idea of the Church as the Body of Christ more seriously — why did he spend so relatively little time developing it? The answer may lie in one of his prison letters. In answer to his rhetorical question “What does it mean to ‘interpret religiously’?” he responds:
It means, in my opinion, to speak metaphysically, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, individualistically. Neither way is appropriate, either for the biblical message or for people today. Hasn’t the individualistic question of saving our personal souls almost faded away for most of us? Isn’t it our impression that there are really more important things than this question (— perhaps not more important than this matter, but certainly more important than the question!?)? I know it sounds outrageous to say that, but after all, isn’t it fundamentally biblical? Does the question of saving one’s soul even come up in the Old Testament? Isn’t God’s righteousness and kingdom on earth the center of everything? And isn’t Rom. 3:24ff. the culmination of the view that God alone is righteous, rather than an individualistic doctrine of salvation? What matters is not the beyond but this world, how it is created and preserved, is given laws, reconciled, and renewed. What is beyond this world is meant, in the gospel, to be there for this world—not in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystical, pietistic, ethical theology, but in the biblical sense of the creation and the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. (May 5, 1944, 781)
The underlying assumption speaks volumes. Bonhoeffer asks us, Haven’t we moved on from such a narrow perspective by now? The relational nature of humanity, the corporate good of the gospel, the other-centeredness of Jesus Christ, preclude anything but this communal understanding of the imago dei. In a sense, the relational experience of the imago dei is so fundamental and foundational to his cosmology that it need not be defended or defined beyond what already exists over the course of four or five pages of writings and lectures. How could anyone not see it?
While Bonhoeffer spent relatively little time writing about the imago dei itself, it seems clear that his interpretation of it was deeply formative for him. From it stems much of his communalism and relational theology. He believed at his core that the thing about him that reflected the image of the divine could only be found in others; not only others, but all others. It is possible that this understanding of the imago dei also played a part in his early disillusionment with German nationalism and Just War. By looking for the echoes of his theology of the imago dei, we can begin to discern some of the “why” behind his more celebrated and well-known contributions to the field.
