PsalterMark

Tim Judson, Awake in Gethsemane: Bonhoeffer and the Witness of Christian Lament, Waco, Texas: Baylor Press, 2023. 220 pages. ISBN 978-1-4813-1830-3

I have never singled out the cover designer in a theological book review before, but Kasey McBeath deserves a mention here. The dark olive tree cover motif conjures Gethsemane before the book is even opened. Gethsemane has always cast a shadow over my reading of both Bonhoeffer’s works and his life. Knowing as we do the end of the story—at least the earthly one—the appeal of Bonhoeffer is surely his short life lived out consistently with his words. Unlike the Lord he so compelling sought to serve, his Gethsemane lasted rather longer than a night.

Despite the model title and slick design this book is no popular attempt to market a martyr. This is a rich academic book for those who already have some familiarity with Dietrich Bonhoeffer or perhaps those who have heard the call to recover lament. It is ideal for the reader who is still wrestling with who Bonhoeffer was and his legacy. It seems to me that Judson’s work has an underpinning motivational question: what can we learn from this man? Whilst a thoroughgoing academic contribution, the learning found here is not just for the mind but for the heart too.

The introduction argues that we can only understand Bonhoeffer by grappling with the interplay between his Christology and Ecclesiology. For Bonhoeffer, in Judson’s words, ‘Christ is envisaged ecclesiologically, and the church is understood Christologically’ (p.19). Judson is, however, also attentive to the centrality of Bonhoeffer’s rich understanding of Scripture. In particular, the prominent place given by him to pneumatology, at a time when the Spirit was eclipsed by other ideas in the academy’s efforts in biblical interpretation.

Judson’s Chapter 1: A Theology of Lament makes a convincing case that lament is central to a faithful conception of Bonhoeffer’s theology. Indeed, lament is ‘“vicarious solidarity” with and for the world reconciled in Christ’ (from p.45 with original emphasis preserved). The move to Chapter 2’s focus on ethics is thus a logical next step.

In Chapter 2: An Ethic of Lament we see Bonhoeffer echoing, even developing, Augustine’s understanding of the Psalms through the lens of the totus Christus (total Christ). This understanding sees Christ as the head of the church adopting a posture of identity with his body, the church, in not only lament but in penitence too. This is Bonhoeffer’s understanding of how Christ bears the sins of the world, and yet this becomes an ethic for the church not just a mechanistic aspect of the atonement.

Doubtless, readers will come to Chapter 3: A Liturgy of Lament with different understandings and experiences of liturgy. Here it seems liturgy means both the form and content of gathered worship. Judson concisely explores Bonhoeffer’s conception of there being two arenas for worship, the truly public and what Judson terms the arcane context, i.e. the community closed from the outside as in the case of the Finkenwalde seminary. For Bonhoeffer, it is clear that the Psalms are the content of liturgy par excellence in both community worship and personal piety.

Chapter 4: A Chorus of Lament marks a turn in emphasis from then to now as Judson would have us learn from Bonhoeffer what we have forgotten to our cost. He reminds us that Bonhoeffer had to adopt a thoroughgoing understanding of providence to account for his daily experiences from the early 1930s right up to 9th April 1945. The call to appreciate the richness of providence in contrast to conceiving it as shallow Christian fatalism opens the door to rediscovering lament. Judson finds a rich coherence for Bonhoeffer’s spirituality in John Colwell’s testimony to experiences of darkness and abandonment in the life of faith. Here we learn that lament does not even start with words but by being alongside others.

In Chapter 5: A Story of Lament Judson takes us via Bonhoeffer’s powerful challenge of the possibility we have chosen cheap grace, to the complicity of the church in societal oppression, and then on to right worship. Such a call to theological reflection in the cause of recovering a place for ethics could not be timelier for the Western church. Part of the malaise that affects us is no doubt inflicted upon us, at least in part, by Judson’s three contemporary spectres of individualism, consumerism and triumphalism (p.123). Recovering lament might, perhaps ironically, be part of the way back to recovering a confidence in the gospel that is both theological and ethical good news. Albeit we need to recognise with Bonhoeffer, and the Apostle Paul, that both need to be worked out ‘with fear and trembling’.

I wonder if we might go further in Judson’s lament of the lack of lament. It is arguably the case that the attempt to recover the practice of lament has been ongoing for around a hundred years, but without it ever breaking into the Western church widely. Bonhoeffer was taught by an academy who had wholeheartedly recognised, via form criticism, the extent of lament in the Old Testament. The prevailing historical critical wind celebrated the situations in life when the faithful could do nothing other than call upon God—though it was fossilised unhelpfully ‘then’. Subsequent generations of scholarship have alerted us to lament’s biblical presence and present potential. Our deaf ears make Judson’s call to awake even more urgent as we seem so resistant to wanting to lament. Perhaps this is because we collectively manifest the Reformers’ cor curvum in se (heart turned in on itself). Judson’s frequent use of this conceptualisation of the human condition points to Bonhoeffer’s insight that lament is a God-given antidote we would do well to (re)discover.

In closing I should declare that Baylor University Press were kind enough to send a review copy of this book to me. In addition, I also know Tim from his time in Guildford when he was completing the doctorate, of which this book is one of the fruits.

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