Ser humano, ser para a outra pessoa: o significado da antropologia de Dietrich Bonhoeffer para a sua ética

Abstract

This thesis is a study of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's anthropology and its meaning for ethics. For this purpose, the thesis is divided in two complementary parts: foundations and development. In the first part, the foundations of Bonhoeffer's theology are presented from three perspectives: his life and work, his philosophical influences, and his theological influences. In the second part, three distinct works by Bonhoeffer are studied, which are: The Communion of Saints, Creation and Fall, and Ethics. The question that guides the thesis is: how important is Bonhoeffer's anthropological understanding for the construction of his ethics? It started from the suspicion that it is only possible to understand his ethics from his understanding of the human being in his real condition and his relationship with God. It is the definition of the human being that determines the conduct in the face of otherness. Therefore, the present thesis highlights the importance of the subject of anthropology within its theological thinking. His Christological hermeneutics makes him analyze all reality, beginning, middle and end, from the perspective of the specific revelation in Jesus Christ. He is the foundation and mediator of all reality. It is also noted that Bonhoeffer is a theologian in constant dialogue with the philosophical approaches of thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, with the historical context in which he lived, and with the Lutheran confessional tradition in which he is inserted. Thus, its anthropology and its developments in its ethical conceptualization are built on a critical dialogue mainly with idealism and philosophical materialism. After the introduction, the first two chapters offer a presentation about Bonhoeffer's life and work, as well as the approach to philosophy and theology with which he discusses and on which he bases himself. The other three chapters are devoted to a detailed analysis of the three works in which the subject of anthropology and ethics are evident. The intent is to demonstrate how these two themes are intertwined and present throughout Bonhoeffer's theology in the face of the contextual situations in which he was inserted. In short, it follows that for Bonhoeffer God assumes humanity so that it becomes human again. The incarnation reveals that one is not called to live a set of moral rules by which one turns to the best version of oneself. But in Christ's formation there is a real possibility of living beyond good and evil. The only means by which the human being is reestablished in his vocation to be for the other person.