Dr. Paul Lim serves as the interim Director of NIFW, and is an award-winning historian of Christianity. He also serves as a faculty member at Vanderbilt University.
What do Jesus, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Buber have in common? Two of them—Jesus and Buber—have lived in Israel, and two of them—Buber and Bonhoeffer—have written books! Many Christians have heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), thanks to the modern-day spiritual classics, The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together. However, not as many have heard of Martin Buber (1878-1965), a Jewish existentialist philosopher. And even less are aware of the influence Buber has had on Bonhoeffer’s thought. I know, I know, you’re thinking: “There goes the professor, again, nerding out on things that only very few people in the world care about, and getting excited about things that have no real influence in the way I love God and my neighbor!” Well, I am not surprised you thought that! The immense delight I derive from engaging in teaching the Gotham curriculum year after year is to make the esoteric and arcane into essential and accessible for the Christian’s intersection of faith and work. So here we go! How can the “I-it and I-Thou” help my approach to faith and work?
It’s All About Relationships
Martin Buber is perhaps best known for his book, I and Thou (published originally in German in 1923 as Ich und Du), and in it, he emphasized that truly generous and generative relationships are based on the encounter between “I and Thou,” a dialogical relationship. For Buber, the foundational ground for the I-Thou is the encounter humans have with God. This I-Thou is designed to be transformative rather than transactional (as in the case of I-It). It was further understood to be the way to respect the authenticity, integrity and humanity of the Other, rather than using—and abusing—the relationship as a means to self-aggrandizement and power-play (as in the case of I-It). (1) As a personal aside, after I became a Christian as a junior in college, a close friend gave me Buber’s I and Thou, and it really rocked my world. The combination of reading it and Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling taught me the crucial role that a genuine, authentic, personal encounter with God in historical Jesus was the first step toward any meaningful journey of faith. Then for nearly 25 years thereafter I forgot about Buber’s I and Thou. That is, until I began teaching Bonhoeffer’s Life Together as part of the Gotham program 7 years ago.
No Footnotes?
I can’t tell you what year it was, but I can tell you the delightful surprise of finding the language of “I-Thou” and “I-It” in Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. I had taught Life Together previously, but hadn’t ever noticed it (you know how it goes! Just think Agent Dave Kujan and the bulletin board in the movie, The Usual Suspects) until that moment. More than just the juxtaposition of Buber and Bonhoeffer, I saw how pivotal personal encounter was for both of their approaches to life, especially encountering God in the mundane. In Life Together, Bonhoeffer uses the “it” and “Thou” without mentioning that this was a philosophical concept he had borrowed from Martin Buber. In fact, he does not even say “I-It” and “I-Thou.” He simply uses the shorthand form of “it” and “Thou.” But the idea is the clearly contained. If all our life’s pursuit was simply a matter of acquisition and accumulation of as many “It’s” as possible, according to both Buber and Bonhoeffer, life will remain insipid, vapid, ultimately leading to a puff of vapor. However, with the constant turning from “I-It” to “I-Thou.” I-It relations are transactional, impersonal, and utilitarian, where I-Thou relations are transformational, personal, and holistic.
Crushing It or Getting Crushed?
One of my friends recently said, “Paul, I am well on my way to crushing it in life, this time in Nashville!” He had been a successful person all along his life. He received an elite college education in the Northeast, flourished in his line of work, and believed that people and things were there to help him “crush it in life.” Much of his life’s mission was about conquering, crushing, and collecting trophies and trappings that the world had to offer. His Christian faith was fundamentally there to help him get there. In other words, for my friend, even Christianity was primarily about I-It. People and things in his work were there to serve him, but almost never the other way around. When I talked to him about the fact a true understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ inevitably leads one to see life as a series of I-Thou relationships, thereby becoming more focused on life as an opportunity for transformation (rather than merely transaction), and work has been appointed by God as a “means of liberation from himself,” he was genuinely perplexed. More on work as a divinely appointed method of “liberation” from ourselves below. Rather than looking at work as an arena to maximize profit or a playground of self-aggrandizement, what if we were to take seriously Bonhoeffer’s dictum that God makes “work a means of liberation from himself”? (2) Let’s turn to the chapter entitled “The Day with Others” in his Life Together to get a clue to gently remind my friend that life and work is neither about crushing or getting crushed. Instead, work is a place to participate in the “cultural mandate” as seen in Genesis 1:26-30 where we see the divine design and desires for the first humans: “so that they may rule over the fish…birds…livestock…and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” This reality of ruling over was an expression of divine outsourcing of God’s work to the co-regents of God, those who were uniquely endowed with the Imago Dei. In Genesis 1:28 we find God blessing the first humans with being fruitful and resulting in population growth, as well as being the type of ruler that God had always been: truly benevolent, beneficent, and expressing power for the purpose of shalom. Such was the design of the human work within the context of I-Thou. Yet the Fall brought about a rupture in the way we see people, places, and things. Thus comes the prevalence of an instrumentalist. utilitarian, and transactional mode of seeing everything: “how can she/he/it/they help me?”
Moving from I-It to I-Thou and Liberation from Self
Bonhoeffer’s writing style is simple, direct, and pulls absolutely no punches at all. Life Together is no exception. Over the years, I have had students who found that inordinate authoritarian and definitive tone bothersome; I have increasingly come to see the validity of their critique. But not to throw the baby with the bathwater… Shall we actually let Bonhoeffer speak for himself?
In an as-a-matter-of-fact manner, Bonhoeffer writes that “work plunges men into the world of things.” Leaving the world of “brotherly encounter,” the Christian worker finds oneself immersed in the “world of impersonal things, the ‘it’” (70). Here, Bonhoeffer offers an illuminating insight into the divine design regarding the purpose of work for one’s sanctification. The impersonal “it”-world is “only an instrument in the hand of God for the purification of Christians from all self-centeredness and self-seeking” (70). If we follow God into our work, Bonhoeffer argues, then our tendencies for seeking one’s own kingdom—as opposed to seeking God’s kingdom and his righteousness—and being excessively self-absorbed will be revealed for what they are: mirage and not true vision of human flourishing. Furthermore, the work—note here, Bonhoeffer makes absolutely no distinction between the so-called blue or white collar work—becomes a “remedy against the indolence and sloth of the flesh.” As a good Lutheran, Bonhoeffer saw that the institutions and laws of the world have a salutary function of curbing human tendencies for greater degeneracy, diminution and ultimately death.
Our “passions of the flesh” can “die in the world of things,” maintains Bonhoeffer. Wait a minute! I thought my passions of the flesh actually come alive in the world of things! How can this be? Bonhoeffer offers a key insight right here when he wrote: “But this can happen only where the Christian breaks through the ‘it’ to the ‘Thou,’ which is God” (70). Seeing “again for the first time” that this place where I am called to work—whether at a science lab, IT firm, funeral homes, healthcare consultancy, non-profit start-up, or at an investment bank—is the place of breakthrough, that is, where the impersonal “It” can be transformed into the “Thou.” That is God’s work through the means of grace of prayer. As the “I-It” and transformed into the “I-Thou” relationship, one can experience how God makes that particular “work a means of liberation” from oneself.
Your work matters to God! And your work does not define you! How? Because you are already loved. Being precedes Doing… These are some of the things you will hear a good deal at Gotham sessions, week in, week out. Bonhoeffer says that prayer and work are inextricably woven together, so much so that “without the burden and labor of the day, prayer is not prayer, and without prayer work is not work.” Without prayer, my work loses its integrity and moral direction. Without prayer, I will look at everyone as a thing to subdue, silence, use, and conquer for my own goal. Prayer throughout the day, rather than hindering the worker’s productivity, “promotes it, affirms it, and lends it meaning and joy.” Give us this day our daily bread, as we are taught to pray. This teaches that there is a Giver and that is not our immediate boss. The part of the Lord’s prayer teaches that there is a personal connection between my work, my food, and my religion. Let’s take a listen to Bonhoeffer one last time: “Thus every word, every work, every labor of the Christian becomes a prayer; not in the unreal sense of a constant turning away from the task that must be done, but in a real breaking through the hard ‘it’ to the gracious ‘Thou’” (71).
Jesus spoke about liberation and freedom a good deal, but the crucial thing was that for Jesus, he himself was the ultimate reference point and goal of liberation and freedom. He was the giver of liberation and freedom. So he said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” and that “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” Here, Jesus was referring to the teaching as referring to the fact that Jesus was in an unique, eternal relationship with the Father, and that he became Incarnate for us and for our salvation to liberate us from ourselves, including our work. I don’t know about you, but unless I watch it, I tend to see many of my relationships through the lens of “I-It” (its theme song is “What Have You Done for Me Lately”). But as I keep in step with the Spirit, I am empowered the myriad relationships in life and work as “I-Thou,” the venues where I can encounter the “gracious Thou” and thereby seeing that my work is a place of “liberation from myself.” Try that tomorrow, and see where the gracious Thou shall lead you.
1 – More on Buber’s thought, see Tamra Wright’s excellent essay, “Self, Other, Text, God: The Dialogical Thought of Martin Buber,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy, eds. Michael L. Morgan and Peter Eli Gordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 102-121.
2 – All references are taken from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, trans. John W. Doberstein (New York: HarperCollins, 1954), 70.