I appreciate this sentiment, and I even preached something to this effect on 2 Corinthians 5 (cf., Rom. 5, 8) recently, but incidentally this very issue / terminology became the subject of debate during the Christian & Missionary Alliance’s General Council vote over a change in our statement of faith just yesterday (as regards the unrepentant human condition).
Over the course of the debate it became clear that a distinction needs to be made between two kinds of separation: an ontological separation, which the Bible explicitly rejects as impossible on account of God’s infinite nature (a la Ps. 139) and what might be understood in the plainest sense as a relational separation, which the Bible explicitly asserts as a consequence of sin, and apart from which reconciliation would be not only unnecessary but unintelligible.
For example: “Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, or his ear dull, that it cannot hear; but your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear” (Isa. 59:1-2).
I’d be curious if you see a need for that distinction and, if not, how reconciliation (and the need for it) figures in to your understanding. (It’s interesting that the verse in which Paul speaks of Christ being “made sin who knew no sin” (2 Cor. 5:21) is preceded by his plea/imperative: “Be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:20).
Yeah, I would disagree with the need for that distinction. I think the "separation" language in Isaiah and elsewhere in Scripture is about our awareness of God ("Your sins have hidden his face *from you.*") I'm with Bonhoeffer on this. The separation/fracture is not between us and God but within us. Sin separates me from myself, my true self (the one God created, sustains, and knows) from the false selves I create through sin.
Bonhoeffer says in his "Ethics" that "It is from his right relationship to himself that man is to recover the right relation to God and to other men."
So our sin does not (cannot!) change God in his nature or character. It obviously does not remove his presence from us and it does not affect how close he is to us relationally (and I think the deeper theological point here is that God's nature IS his character--to play on Aquinas). But it does affect us and our awareness of God's presence and his love for us which is unchanging.
Otherwise, to me, you've got God changing in relation to each person based on their sins. I think this is why Paul can say to the Corinthians "Be reconciled!" Why? Because they already are. God has reconciled the world to himself in Jesus Christ, so because he has done that, be reconciled. In other words: recognize the truth of who you really are. Leave your false life/self behind.
Taken in context, Bonhoeffer's claim is exactly opposite yours. When he says, "It is from his right relationship to himself that man is to recover the right relation to God and to other men" (29), he is speaking from the perspective of man's fallen condition, which represents a departure from his original condition. I'll provide the quote in context at the bottom of this response. In context, I believe is warning against the very thinking you’ve described and prescribed.
The text you cited is from his discussion specifically about conscience, *not sin,* per se. Bonhoeffer indeed sees “conscience” as the "sign of man's disunion with himself” (Ethics, 28). But this is predicated on an original disunion between man and God. He claims conscience is the manifestation of the knowledge of good and evil—the mutiny that is original sin, which places mankind in a position against God, “as gods”—so that “the knowledge of good and evil shows that man is *no longer at one with this origin.* In the knowledge of good and evil man does not understand himself in the reality of the destiny appointed in his origin, but rather in his own possibilities, his possibility of being good or evil. He knows himself now as something apart from God, outside God, and this means that he now knows only himself and no longer knows God at all; for he can know God only if he knows only God. *The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God*” (21-22).
I agree that reconciliation is already complete in Christ, and is indeed ours in advance, but for that very reason it requires a change *not in God's relation to us in Christ but in our relation to God through faith in Christ*: "For indeed faith alone sets life upon a new foundation, and it is this new foundation alone that justifies my being able to live before God. This foundation is the life, the death and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ" (121).
Apart from this, our relationship to God becomes self-wrought and self-referential. Bonhoeffer warns against this orientation, which seems similar to the one you've prescribed above. Hence Bonhoeffer’s warning, which includes the text you cited. Here’s the full quote:
"In shame man is reminded of his disunion with God and with other men: conscience is the sign of man’s disunion with himself. Conscience is farther from the origin than shame, it presupposes disunion with God and with man and marks only the disunion with himself of the man who is already disunited from the origin. It is the voice of apostate life which desires at least to remain one with itself. It is the call to the unity of man with himself. This is evident already from the fact that the call of conscience is always a prohibition. “Thou shalt not.” “You ought not to have.” Conscience is satisfied when the prohibition is not disobeyed. Whatever is not forbidden is permitted. For conscience life falls into two parts: what is permitted and what is forbidden. There is no positive commandment. For conscience permitted is identical with good, and conscience does not register the fact, that even in this, man is in a state of disunion with his origin. It follows from this also that conscience does not, like shame, embrace the whole of life; it reacts only to certain definite actions. In one sense it is inexorable; in forbidden actions it sees a peril to life as a whole, that is to say, disunion with oneself; it recalls what is long past and represents this disunion as something which is already accomplished and irreparable, but the final criterion remains precisely that unity with oneself which is imperiled only in the particular instances in which the prohibition is disobeyed. The range of experience of conscience does not extend to the fact that this unity itself presupposes disunion with God and with men and that consequently, beyond the disobedience to the prohibition, the prohibition itself, as the call of conscience, arises from disunion with the origin. This means that conscience is concerned not with man’s relation to God and to other men but with man’s relation to himself. But a relation of man to himself, in detachment from his relation to God and to other men, can arise only through man’s becoming like God in the disunion. Conscience itself reverses this relation. It derives the relation to God and to men from the relation of man to himself. Conscience pretends to be the voice of God and the standard for the relation to other men. It is therefore from his right relation to himself that man is to recover the right relation to God and to other men. This reversal is the claim of the man who has become like God in his knowledge of good and evil. Man has become the origin of good and evil. He does not deny his evil; but in conscience man summons himself, who has become evil, back to his proper, better self, to good. This good, which consists in the unity of man with himself, is now to be the origin of all good. It is the good of God, and it is the good for one’s neighbour. Bearing within himself the knowledge of good and evil, man has become judge over God and men, just as he is judge over himself. Knowing of good and evil in disunion with the origin, man begins to reflect upon himself. His life is now his understanding of himself, whereas at the origin it was his knowledge of God. Self-knowledge is now the measure and the goal of life. This holds true even when man presses out beyond the bounds of his own self. Self-knowledge is man’s interminable striving to overcome his disunion with himself by thought; by unceasingly distinguishing himself from himself he endeavors to achieve unity with himself" (pp. 27-29).
I don’t have time to respond to all this. The short of it is that I think you are misreading Bonhoeffer. His argument doesn’t stop there, as you know. Man has tried to make himself the center, but it was always a false center. Man’s attempt to be “sicut deus” is his own delusion. We make our own conscience the starting point for knowledge of good and evil, but it’s never been true. Jesus is the center—always has been and always will be. To live in rejection of this is to live in false reality and delusion (which is why I am insisting that sin causes a fracture in us).
This quote from Bonhoeffer comes in a section on conscience and so it refers to knowledge of good and evil, sin, God, others, and ourselves. My true relationship to God—and everyone’s—is Jesus’s relationship to God. He is the true human who, through his vicarious life, has offered the true response to God for us. And we are all already included in that. So here I am in agreement with Barth and Torrance. You can’t affect your relationship with God in any objective sense, only in the subjective sense (hence my point that sin is a fracture *in us*). My response to God cannot separate me from God. The truth of my life—and everyone’s—is that Christ has reconciled all things to God. Bonhoeffer goes on to make just this point in Ethics. The world and God share the same center: Jesus Christ. “There is no part of the world—no matter how lost, no matter how godless—that has not been accepted by God in Jesus Christ and reconciled to God” (p. 218 in my old edition).
So disunion is not the final truth for Bonhoeffer. Union between God and the world in Jesus is our truth already because of his incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.
Here’s a couple quotes from Bonhoeffer and Robert Jenson that sum it up for me:
“It is precisely this ‘disordered’ world that in Christ is reconciled with God and that now possesses its final and true reality not in the devil but in Christ. The world is not divided between Christ and the devil, but, *whether it recognizes it or not, it is solely and entirely the world of Christ. The world is to be called to this, its reality in Christ, and in this way the false reality will be destroyed which it believes that it possesses” (“Ethics” p. 201 in my old edition).
Robert Jenson: “Sin is simply man’s attempt to behave as if he were not reconciled to God through Christ” (Alpha and Omega, p. 37).
I appreciate your engagement, but I really can’t respond further. I don’t know you and do not have the time right now. Thanks!
Well thanks for your response. I was drawn to your post because of its thoughtfulness and my own struggling through this problem and so engaged (which I rarely do)—not to make a point but to work out my own thinking on the matter. Ironically, you’ve quoted (and claimed to represent the positions of….) three of the most formative theologians in my thinking (Jenson, Barth, and Bonhoeffer), but I don’t think you are representing their articulations on this matter accurately, which includes integrated language of separation and reconciliation indeed *in Christ* (I suppose the question, in the end, is whether it’s possible to be “outside” of Christ). You seem to have a ‘correcting narrative’ over scripture, not an interpretation of it (as they all represent) in this discussion. That’s my honest two cents. Thanks for the dialogue, nonetheless.
But never *only* “separation” in Christ—any more than cross is ever without resurrection—but “separation *and* reconciliation,” judgement and salvation, in Christ. So, again, my question is more precisely whether, in the end, we can speak of anyone/-thing being outside of Christ (or “separated” in the terms originally laid out).
Also, I'd have to disagree that the text from Isaiah discussed above is about our awareness of God ("Your sins have hidden his face from you so that *he does not hear*"). Obviously, in this and every text describing some aspect or action of God, we are dealing with analogical speech, using terms drawn from ordinary categories of human experience to speak about things that exceed its limits. But analogy works by logical comparison. Biblical interpretation goes awry, in my opinion, when the inner logic of a given analogy about God is lost either because it is not taken seriously as figurative language (as though it has no referent in “reality”) or because terms are absolutized and read anthropomorphically, not analogically (e.g., to think of "separation" from God as suggesting God is here but not there or that God literally "can't hear" us or has a "face" turned this way or that; cf., Ellul, Humiliation of the Word). So while I agree that our "sin does not change God in his nature or character," the logic of the analogy is that sin changes or has changed our relation *to God* (and thereby to ourselves), and that is conceived in terms of a separation, so that its undoing requires a change in our relation to God (and only thereby to ourselves), a change that can be described as reunion or reconciliation. I think this applies to the 2 Cor. 5 text as well.
I’ll try to cover that question more next week, but the short of it is that sin does not separate us from God but it does separate us from ourselves. The fracture sin brings is not between us and God but in us.
I appreciate this sentiment, and I even preached something to this effect on 2 Corinthians 5 (cf., Rom. 5, 8) recently, but incidentally this very issue / terminology became the subject of debate during the Christian & Missionary Alliance’s General Council vote over a change in our statement of faith just yesterday (as regards the unrepentant human condition).
Over the course of the debate it became clear that a distinction needs to be made between two kinds of separation: an ontological separation, which the Bible explicitly rejects as impossible on account of God’s infinite nature (a la Ps. 139) and what might be understood in the plainest sense as a relational separation, which the Bible explicitly asserts as a consequence of sin, and apart from which reconciliation would be not only unnecessary but unintelligible.
For example: “Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, or his ear dull, that it cannot hear; but your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear” (Isa. 59:1-2).
I’d be curious if you see a need for that distinction and, if not, how reconciliation (and the need for it) figures in to your understanding. (It’s interesting that the verse in which Paul speaks of Christ being “made sin who knew no sin” (2 Cor. 5:21) is preceded by his plea/imperative: “Be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:20).
Oh interesting!
Yeah, I would disagree with the need for that distinction. I think the "separation" language in Isaiah and elsewhere in Scripture is about our awareness of God ("Your sins have hidden his face *from you.*") I'm with Bonhoeffer on this. The separation/fracture is not between us and God but within us. Sin separates me from myself, my true self (the one God created, sustains, and knows) from the false selves I create through sin.
Bonhoeffer says in his "Ethics" that "It is from his right relationship to himself that man is to recover the right relation to God and to other men."
So our sin does not (cannot!) change God in his nature or character. It obviously does not remove his presence from us and it does not affect how close he is to us relationally (and I think the deeper theological point here is that God's nature IS his character--to play on Aquinas). But it does affect us and our awareness of God's presence and his love for us which is unchanging.
Otherwise, to me, you've got God changing in relation to each person based on their sins. I think this is why Paul can say to the Corinthians "Be reconciled!" Why? Because they already are. God has reconciled the world to himself in Jesus Christ, so because he has done that, be reconciled. In other words: recognize the truth of who you really are. Leave your false life/self behind.
Taken in context, Bonhoeffer's claim is exactly opposite yours. When he says, "It is from his right relationship to himself that man is to recover the right relation to God and to other men" (29), he is speaking from the perspective of man's fallen condition, which represents a departure from his original condition. I'll provide the quote in context at the bottom of this response. In context, I believe is warning against the very thinking you’ve described and prescribed.
The text you cited is from his discussion specifically about conscience, *not sin,* per se. Bonhoeffer indeed sees “conscience” as the "sign of man's disunion with himself” (Ethics, 28). But this is predicated on an original disunion between man and God. He claims conscience is the manifestation of the knowledge of good and evil—the mutiny that is original sin, which places mankind in a position against God, “as gods”—so that “the knowledge of good and evil shows that man is *no longer at one with this origin.* In the knowledge of good and evil man does not understand himself in the reality of the destiny appointed in his origin, but rather in his own possibilities, his possibility of being good or evil. He knows himself now as something apart from God, outside God, and this means that he now knows only himself and no longer knows God at all; for he can know God only if he knows only God. *The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God*” (21-22).
I agree that reconciliation is already complete in Christ, and is indeed ours in advance, but for that very reason it requires a change *not in God's relation to us in Christ but in our relation to God through faith in Christ*: "For indeed faith alone sets life upon a new foundation, and it is this new foundation alone that justifies my being able to live before God. This foundation is the life, the death and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ" (121).
Apart from this, our relationship to God becomes self-wrought and self-referential. Bonhoeffer warns against this orientation, which seems similar to the one you've prescribed above. Hence Bonhoeffer’s warning, which includes the text you cited. Here’s the full quote:
"In shame man is reminded of his disunion with God and with other men: conscience is the sign of man’s disunion with himself. Conscience is farther from the origin than shame, it presupposes disunion with God and with man and marks only the disunion with himself of the man who is already disunited from the origin. It is the voice of apostate life which desires at least to remain one with itself. It is the call to the unity of man with himself. This is evident already from the fact that the call of conscience is always a prohibition. “Thou shalt not.” “You ought not to have.” Conscience is satisfied when the prohibition is not disobeyed. Whatever is not forbidden is permitted. For conscience life falls into two parts: what is permitted and what is forbidden. There is no positive commandment. For conscience permitted is identical with good, and conscience does not register the fact, that even in this, man is in a state of disunion with his origin. It follows from this also that conscience does not, like shame, embrace the whole of life; it reacts only to certain definite actions. In one sense it is inexorable; in forbidden actions it sees a peril to life as a whole, that is to say, disunion with oneself; it recalls what is long past and represents this disunion as something which is already accomplished and irreparable, but the final criterion remains precisely that unity with oneself which is imperiled only in the particular instances in which the prohibition is disobeyed. The range of experience of conscience does not extend to the fact that this unity itself presupposes disunion with God and with men and that consequently, beyond the disobedience to the prohibition, the prohibition itself, as the call of conscience, arises from disunion with the origin. This means that conscience is concerned not with man’s relation to God and to other men but with man’s relation to himself. But a relation of man to himself, in detachment from his relation to God and to other men, can arise only through man’s becoming like God in the disunion. Conscience itself reverses this relation. It derives the relation to God and to men from the relation of man to himself. Conscience pretends to be the voice of God and the standard for the relation to other men. It is therefore from his right relation to himself that man is to recover the right relation to God and to other men. This reversal is the claim of the man who has become like God in his knowledge of good and evil. Man has become the origin of good and evil. He does not deny his evil; but in conscience man summons himself, who has become evil, back to his proper, better self, to good. This good, which consists in the unity of man with himself, is now to be the origin of all good. It is the good of God, and it is the good for one’s neighbour. Bearing within himself the knowledge of good and evil, man has become judge over God and men, just as he is judge over himself. Knowing of good and evil in disunion with the origin, man begins to reflect upon himself. His life is now his understanding of himself, whereas at the origin it was his knowledge of God. Self-knowledge is now the measure and the goal of life. This holds true even when man presses out beyond the bounds of his own self. Self-knowledge is man’s interminable striving to overcome his disunion with himself by thought; by unceasingly distinguishing himself from himself he endeavors to achieve unity with himself" (pp. 27-29).
I don’t have time to respond to all this. The short of it is that I think you are misreading Bonhoeffer. His argument doesn’t stop there, as you know. Man has tried to make himself the center, but it was always a false center. Man’s attempt to be “sicut deus” is his own delusion. We make our own conscience the starting point for knowledge of good and evil, but it’s never been true. Jesus is the center—always has been and always will be. To live in rejection of this is to live in false reality and delusion (which is why I am insisting that sin causes a fracture in us).
This quote from Bonhoeffer comes in a section on conscience and so it refers to knowledge of good and evil, sin, God, others, and ourselves. My true relationship to God—and everyone’s—is Jesus’s relationship to God. He is the true human who, through his vicarious life, has offered the true response to God for us. And we are all already included in that. So here I am in agreement with Barth and Torrance. You can’t affect your relationship with God in any objective sense, only in the subjective sense (hence my point that sin is a fracture *in us*). My response to God cannot separate me from God. The truth of my life—and everyone’s—is that Christ has reconciled all things to God. Bonhoeffer goes on to make just this point in Ethics. The world and God share the same center: Jesus Christ. “There is no part of the world—no matter how lost, no matter how godless—that has not been accepted by God in Jesus Christ and reconciled to God” (p. 218 in my old edition).
So disunion is not the final truth for Bonhoeffer. Union between God and the world in Jesus is our truth already because of his incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.
Here’s a couple quotes from Bonhoeffer and Robert Jenson that sum it up for me:
“It is precisely this ‘disordered’ world that in Christ is reconciled with God and that now possesses its final and true reality not in the devil but in Christ. The world is not divided between Christ and the devil, but, *whether it recognizes it or not, it is solely and entirely the world of Christ. The world is to be called to this, its reality in Christ, and in this way the false reality will be destroyed which it believes that it possesses” (“Ethics” p. 201 in my old edition).
Robert Jenson: “Sin is simply man’s attempt to behave as if he were not reconciled to God through Christ” (Alpha and Omega, p. 37).
I appreciate your engagement, but I really can’t respond further. I don’t know you and do not have the time right now. Thanks!
Well thanks for your response. I was drawn to your post because of its thoughtfulness and my own struggling through this problem and so engaged (which I rarely do)—not to make a point but to work out my own thinking on the matter. Ironically, you’ve quoted (and claimed to represent the positions of….) three of the most formative theologians in my thinking (Jenson, Barth, and Bonhoeffer), but I don’t think you are representing their articulations on this matter accurately, which includes integrated language of separation and reconciliation indeed *in Christ* (I suppose the question, in the end, is whether it’s possible to be “outside” of Christ). You seem to have a ‘correcting narrative’ over scripture, not an interpretation of it (as they all represent) in this discussion. That’s my honest two cents. Thanks for the dialogue, nonetheless.
Separation “in Christ”? What would that mean? I’m genuinely curious.
The cross.
But never *only* “separation” in Christ—any more than cross is ever without resurrection—but “separation *and* reconciliation,” judgement and salvation, in Christ. So, again, my question is more precisely whether, in the end, we can speak of anyone/-thing being outside of Christ (or “separated” in the terms originally laid out).
Also, I'd have to disagree that the text from Isaiah discussed above is about our awareness of God ("Your sins have hidden his face from you so that *he does not hear*"). Obviously, in this and every text describing some aspect or action of God, we are dealing with analogical speech, using terms drawn from ordinary categories of human experience to speak about things that exceed its limits. But analogy works by logical comparison. Biblical interpretation goes awry, in my opinion, when the inner logic of a given analogy about God is lost either because it is not taken seriously as figurative language (as though it has no referent in “reality”) or because terms are absolutized and read anthropomorphically, not analogically (e.g., to think of "separation" from God as suggesting God is here but not there or that God literally "can't hear" us or has a "face" turned this way or that; cf., Ellul, Humiliation of the Word). So while I agree that our "sin does not change God in his nature or character," the logic of the analogy is that sin changes or has changed our relation *to God* (and thereby to ourselves), and that is conceived in terms of a separation, so that its undoing requires a change in our relation to God (and only thereby to ourselves), a change that can be described as reunion or reconciliation. I think this applies to the 2 Cor. 5 text as well.
Thoughts?
Ooo. This is good. I'll need to confront my own thinking on this topic.
What does sin then do if not separate us from God? You've got me grappling with how to conceptualize this going forward, well done.
I’ll try to cover that question more next week, but the short of it is that sin does not separate us from God but it does separate us from ourselves. The fracture sin brings is not between us and God but in us.
Looking forward to your long answer next week. Thanks for the response.