Rostova N.N. Philosophical-anthropological analysis of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christian concept

Abstract: This article analyzes the Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christian concept, formulated in his famous “Letters and Papers from Prison”. Bonhoeffer proclaims the beginning of the unreligious era and the need, due to this fact, to reconsider the essence of Christianity, thus counterpointing religion and Christianity. The idea of the “apriority” of religion is considered erroneous by Bonhoeffer. Religion is just a temporary stage of human development, and it should not be identified with Christ. It is possible to overcome religion without overcoming Christianity. Is Christianity possible in a godless world? – wonders Bonhoeffer, and finds the answer in the notion of maturity of the modern Christian. The author distinguishes three conceptual blocks of Bonhoeffer’s theory – man, religion, Christianity, and conducts a philosophical-anthropological analysis of each of them. In the author’s opinion, there us a gap between the anthropological types of traditional Christianity and the anthropological type of Christianity renewed by Bonhoeffer. The measure of this gap serves the figure of God, because according to Bonhoeffer, transcendence of Christ and therewith the essence of Christianity consists in the being for other, i.e. the transcendent becomes immanent. The author underlines that the notion of maturity for Bonhoeffer is associated with elimination of the notion of sin, in other words the inner world of a man, because in Christianity, sin is something that does not allow a man to become one with the world. The proposed by Bonhoeffer model of man is the model, to which the binary oppositions of “body and soul” and “human and world” are foreign. The author notices in Bonhoeffer’s concept the vision of Foucault’s philosophy. Foucault believes that human is a temporary configuration that can vanish as quickly as an image on shore sand, while Bonhoeffer suggests that the inner world and religiousness are transitional phenomena. Both thinkers are turned to the situation of post-humanity, which Bonhoeffer considers to be unreligious.

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