Seasoned Speech: Rhetoric in the Life of the Church

by James Edward Beitler

It is helpful to compare what Bonhoeffer implies here about Christ’s appearance to humans with what Burke writes about Hitler’s rhetorical approach.49 Recall that, according to Burke, Hitler’s identification with Germany hinged on the visibility of his enemy. He provided a “point-to-able form” that he and his followers could separate themselves from.50 In this rhetorical respect, Hitler was indeed a kind of the antichrist.51 He revealed his so-called glory to humanity by distancing himself from the so-called evil ones, whereas Bonhoeffer’s Christ hid himself among humanity by identifying himself with the evil ones—by becoming one of us. Paradoxically, through Christ’s identification with humans in our sinfulness, he simultaneously separates himself—Bonhoeffer uses the language of being “veiled” to indicate this rhetorical division—from all of humanity.52 For Bonhoeffer, no one can stomach the likeness of a “sinner”-God apart from the gift of faith. (For those with power, wealth, privilege, and self-righteousness, this Christ is acutely unappealing; for the world’s beggars, outcasts, and sinners, the rhetorical division, while still present, may not be quite as sharp.) It is, moreover, precisely because of the God-man’s hiddenness that faith can exist at all: “The form of the stumbling block is the form that makes possible all our faith in Christ. . . . Only when I give up having visible confirmation do I believe in God.”