Academics don’t “do” much. If you ever walk up to a strategic thinker or content creator or philosopher or problem solver who appears to be doing precisely nothing, there’s a chance they are actually doing what they do best, which is to say, not “doing” much at all, externally at least.
One of my earliest full-time, real-deal, actual adult-ing jobs was to create weekly video content from scratch for a multi-campus children’s ministry of one of the largest churches in the country. In many ways, it was an extraordinarily fun and creative job, which involved acting, screenwriting, ideation, content creation, curriculum development, and collaboration with two of the most creative and talented people I’ve ever known. Despite all this, and the fact that we consistently delivered custom, focused, original content on a weekly basis for thousands of kids, there was some friction with our boss, from time to time, when it came to what we actually “did” during work hours.
One day, the boss walks into our office, and one of us is editing video, and another is writing something down, but I happened to be doing the kind of nothing that creatives and thinkers and academics do while they are doing what they do. To all appearances, I was doing precisely nothing, except for having a snack and sitting in a rolling office chair, staring off into space. The boss looks at me and says something to the effect of “what are you doing, aren’t you supposed to be working? You aren’t doing anything!” To which I replied, “No, I’m doing something, I’m eating a peach!” You can imagine that my chosen reply didn’t go over very well with my boss, so I had some explaining to do.
I was trying to point out that my boss was operating on the wrong level, in terms of judging what was actually going on in that room. Technically, I was “doing” something; I was eating a peach. On a deeper level, I was actually doing the hardest part of my job; I was ideating, creating, thinking about how to solve problems, planning, “noodling.” Later in the creative process, had my boss observed me, he would have seen me writing, finding actors, acting, participating in the shooting, directing, and editing process, and presenting our content to hundreds, if not thousands, of children. And, to be fair, if all I did was sit in that chair all day and think, I wouldn’t really be doing the job I promised to do.
Similarly, if all academics ever did was think and talk to other academics, they would be less than useful to most other people. Thankfully, many academics also teach, actively participate in public discussions, lead and advise governmental and private organizations, write popular-level things that normal people actually read, connect with people who can put their research into practice in the real world, and a host of other things. The interior work is often most impactful when it is translated to more exterior realities. The relationship between these two kinds of “doing” is complex, often mutually reinforcing and refining, and can be seen in pretty much every area of human life, practice, culture, and society.
Likewise, for religious people, there is almost always a complex relationship between thought and practice, doctrine and praxis, ideas and actions, thinking or speaking or learning on the one hand, and actually “doing” on the other. For Christians, we have preaching and service, theology and ethics, relating to God and relating to other people, the mystery of the next life and the reality of the present one. Some might call this dialectic “faith” and “ (good) works,” or for more contemporary culturally-awakened conversation, “faith” and “social justice.” In other words, how much should a person of faith focus on telling other people about their faith or focusing on their own internal growth in their faith, and how much should they focus on making the world a better place, here and now? Should a pastor or a church focus more on the story of Jesus and the transformation they believe Jesus brings to people’s lives and souls and families, or should they focus more on feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, fighting unjust laws and systems, digging wells, sending doctors to remote villages, ending social oppression, erasing food desserts; in short, solving the very real problems that continue to plague our communities and our societies?
Bonhoeffer found both major approaches to answering this question to be lacking. He recognized that, for Christians, there is an “ultimate” reality, which is associated with God, with Jesus, with the “end of the world” or the final destiny of humanity, with the grace of God breaking into the world and pulling it into a better future, and there is also a “penultimate” reality, which is pretty much everything that leads up to that final, ultimate destiny or reality. We obviously live in the penultimate, in most respects. But what are the two proposed solutions that Bonhoeffer found so inadequate to the task of living well in the tension and in the light of these two realities? He called them “radicalism” and “compromise.” What follows is taken from chapter 2 of my book, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics of Formation, which focuses on the core argument and structure of Bonhoeffer’s magnum opus, Ethics:
Ultimate and Penultimate Things
The justification of the sinner is something ultimate. “Ultimate and Penultimate Things” addresses justification (the final word of God’s grace) and its relationship to everything leading up to it; namely, the things that most kinds of ethics tend to be concerned with. Justification is ultimate in two senses. It is qualitatively ultimate as God’s final word; there is no greater reality. This word is also the temporally ultimate word; everything that has come before, namely the penultimate, precedes it.
Bonhoeffer argues that not only is this final word of justification by grace alone, but it is also through faith alone; faith in the work of Jesus Christ. Because this work has been accomplished by a timeless God “the past and future of the whole life flow together in God’s presence. The whole of the past is embraced by the word ‘forgiveness;’ the whole of the future is preserved in the faithfulness of God…This life knows itself stretched and sustained from one eternal foundation to another, from its election before the time of the world toward eternal salvation to come.”