Book Review: The Virtue of Bonhoeffer's Ethics: A Study of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics in Relation to Virtue Ethics

Abstract

The of Bonhoeffer's Ethics: A Study of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics in Relation to Ethics. By Jennifer Moberly. Princeton Theological Monograph Series 194. Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick Publications, 2013. xvi + 254 pp. $30.00 (paper).This important book by Jennifer Moberly marks the first sustained and detailed engagement with the question of how Bonhoeffer's Ethics as a whole might be related to what is now called ethics. Following the introduction, the second chapter, and Virtue Ethics,' deals with the question central to the book itself: would Bonhoeffer have understood himself as what we might call a ethicist? Dealing honestly and openly with the ostensible reasons why we might reply to this in the negative, Moberly examines the manuscripts of Ethics in detail (as well as secondary commentators) to demonstrate why there are no prima facie reasons simply to deny that Bonhoeffer was a virtue ethicist on the grounds of his comments about Aquinas and ambivalent uses of the term virtue. This chapter lays the foundations for the explorations in the remaining chapters and allows the issues examined to be developed in depth.The following chapter offers a detailed overview of the tradition of virtue ethics within the Christian tradition, examining Augustine, Aquinas, and MacIntyre. This description recognizes the particularity of these different thinkers and the innate danger in overly systematizing their works into a unified whole, but goes on to outline the kinds of concerns and questions which typify such ethicists. These concerns form the basis of the examination in chapter 4, where Moberly examines Bonhoeffer's ethics as a whole in relation to such a description of virtue ethicists. The mediating concept in this analysis is the doctrine of sanctification: Moberly contends that becoming virtuous might find a theological analogy in being sanctified.Chapter 5, Mode of Ethical Discourse, applies the insights of chapter 4 (and its analysis of Bonhoeffer in relation to virtue ethics) to specific ethical topics: the natural; suum cuique; the right to bodily life; arbitrary killing (a typical example); suicide (an atypical example). The chapter then offers an overview of Bonhoeffer's modes of ethical thinking in relation both to Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison. The final material chapter considers Bonhoeffer's ethics in relation not to the virtue components of his thought, but to the (Barthian) divine command approach to ethics which is also very prevalent in his thinking. …