"going troppo - the way of obedience"

Bonhoeffer believed that the only way to truly comprehend the revelation of God in scripture is by approaching it with the pre-commitment to obey it. For those interested in weird theological terms, he calls this ‘tropological exegesis’ or simply ‘tropology’. Bonhoeffer can therefore speak of discipleship as a ‘problem of exegesis’ and goes on to say, “By eliminating simple obedience on principle, we drift into an unevangelical interpretation of the Bible.” So, if we never obey God we can never understand or follow him. Simply believing right doctrine is not enough. As followers of Jesus, we have to start obeying long before we know and understand much of Him whom we obey. More than that, if we take obedience out of the equation, we cannot even hope to truly understand the bible. Calvin can claim that true knowledge of God is born out of obedience, and to obey takes us to the path of action, of praxis, of goodness.

We are saved by grace, not by works. Hence we cannot glorify works. Yet doing them is indispensable, for they are prepared in advance by God, they are in his ‘plan,’ and we are created to do them (Eph.2:10). In Paul, then, practice (praxis) is the visible criterion that we have seriously received grace and also that we have entered effectively into God’s plan. For Paul, as for Jesus, practice is the touchstone of authenticity. “We are in the presence here of something that is constant across the centuries (J.Ellul, Subversion of Christianity, 5).

(sent from the blog of Alan Hirsch)