Bonhoeffer on Natural Life: A Theological Conversation With Natural Law

This article brings Dietrich Bonhoeffer's christological conception of “natural life” into critical theological conversation with the natural law tradition. After briefly examining why Bonhoeffer critiques Protestant thought for omitting the category of the natural altogether and Roman Catholic thought for underappreciating the natural's christological determination, I explore Bonhoeffer's creative attempt to recover the concept of the natural “from the gospel itself.” I argue that while Bonhoeffer shares with natural law reasoning a teleological structure, he departs from it by locating the telos of natural life in the future coming of Christ (eschatology) rather than in a prelapsarian human condition (protology). Finally, I suggest that Bonhoeffer's mature account of the natural, though firmly grounded in Protestant commitments concerning justification by faith alone, nevertheless opens a limited but significant space for ecumenical cooperation in the penultimate sphere, where Christians and non-Christians alike discern and defend the material goods of human life.