BONHOEFFER for FRIDAY

BONHOEFFER for FRIDAY

March 23, 2007

Penultimate Things

The justifying word of God is...the temporally ultimate word. Something penultimate always precedes it, some action, suffering, movement, intention, defeat, recovery, pleading, hoping - in short, quite literally a span of time at whose end it stands. The only thing that can be justified is something that has already come under indictment in time. Justification presupposes that the creature became guilty. Not all time is a time of grace; but now - precisely now and finally now - is the "day of salvation" (2 Cor. 6:2). The time of grace is the final time in the sense that one can never reckon with a further, future word beyond the word of God that confronts me now. There is a time of God's permission, waiting, and preparation; and there is an ultimate time that judges and breaks off the penultimate. In order to hear the ultimate word, Luther had to go through the monastery; Paul had to go through his piety toward the law; even the thief "had to" go through conviction and the cross. They had to travel a road, to walk the full length of the way through penultimate things; they had to sink to their knees under the burden of these things. And yet the ultimate word was not a crowning but a complete break with the penultimate.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer -