A Theology of Everything

“Whoever looks at Jesus Christ sees in fact God and the world in one. From then on they can no longer see God without the world, or the world without God.” So wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer late in life in his Ethics (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works Volume 6, p. 82). What seems obvious is a conundrum of either one of two problems. Either we are obsessed with “God” so that “theology” is simply filled with concepts that we call “doctrine” but unconnected to our often hurting lives and the wider world. Or we have an equally reductionistic view of “the world” that is susceptible to what Bonhoeffer called the “phraseological”: concepts we think consist of “the world” such as “the true,” “beauty,” “good,” “freedom,” “justice,” and especially today, “equality,” and “inclusion,” that we think can be understood without God, or as Bonhoeffer points out, reality ( Letters and Papers from Prison, To Eberhard Bethge, April 22, 1944, New Greatly Enlarged Edition, p. 275). This is a “theology of everything,” that demands to be a theology, that is, radical thinking about the living God in Jesus Christ, but also, because of Jesus Christ, “the world,” being not afraid but called to be incarnational, taking on topics of the world.

Christ as the Image God is an emphasis found in both the Eastern Christian tradition, such as the patristic writers, and in the Protestant Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as the Anglican theologian Rowan Williams has recently pointed out in his book, Looking East in Winter: Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition (pp. 123-124). “The divine word of invitation,” such as found in Isaiah, is that which forms personal identity, not our achievements in our natural lives. There is a place for definite human agency as participation in the agency of the eternal Son’s obedience to the Father through the Spirit, a thoroughgoing Trinitarianism. Thus, the early Christian confession, “Jesus is Lord” (Rom 10:9) is not just an affirming of Jesus’ power, but of his filial relation to the Father, that we now share in, in the midst of the world in which we live, and in whom we are.