*around 59:30 I intend to say prostitution is a secular endeavor, not a sacred one

"387 The penultimate must be preserved for the ultimate, even as the ultimate upholds the value of the penultimate. This, in part, is where Bonhoeffer’s thinking in “Christ, Reality, and Good” is headed. As we further track the structure of his logic in the formative manuscript, we see that since God is the ultimate reality, the purpose of Christian ethics is not moral growth or “making the world a better place,” as some ethical systems would have it, but witness to God’s ultimate goodness, even if such a witness comes at the expense of improvement. 388 This does not mean, of course, that the pursuit of theocentric goals will inevitably lead to demoralization, guilt, or neglect of the world’s needs, but it does at least radically transform the rationale for pursuing these penultimate ends even as it may call them into question more broadly."   



"When reality as a whole is divided into a churchly realm and a worldly realm, the tendency is to envision each realm as mutually exclusive and self-contained. This is problematic because it contributes to the autonomy of both realms. Thus there develops a notion that the world behaves according to laws of its own, while the church is supposed to live according to another, wholly different set of laws. The more definite and absolute the lines are drawn between church and world, the greater the alienation of the church from the world and the world from the church. Bonhoeffer suggests as much when he says, “Realm thinking as static thinking is, theologically speaking, legalistic thinking. . . . Where the worldly establishes itself as an autonomous sector, this denies the fact of the world’s being accepted in Christ, the grounding of the reality of the world in revelational reality, and thereby the validity of the gospel for the whole world.” Similarly, when the Christian realm is understood as autonomous, the world is cut off from the community of God formed in Christ. Bonhoeffer concludes, “A Christianity that withdraws from the world falls prey to unnaturalness, irrationality, triumphalism, and arbitrariness.” 393 Bonhoeffer’s language is quite insistent on this particular point because the more absolutely one distinguishes between “church” and “world,” the more damage one does to the church, the world, and ultimately to the perceived efficacy of Christ. The church becomes alienated from the world, preoccupied with its own internal order, or, alternatively, it becomes increasingly hostile to the world of unbelief. The world, on the other hand, is left entirely to its own devices and to its own self-understanding. In this way the universal scope of the incarnation is undermined, and reality is no longer reality from, in, and toward Christ. Rather, a totalizing definition of the world is articulated in which Christ is simply one parochial element among others. In dogmatic terms, justification is aborted."


“Instead of being a program that we can run, “formation occurs only by being drawn into the form of Jesus Christ, by being conformed to the unique form of the one who became human, was crucified, and is risen. This does not happen as we strive ‘to become like Jesus,’ as we customarily say, but as the form of Jesus Christ himself so works on us that it molds us, conforming our form to Christ’s own (Gal. 4: 9). Christ remains the only one who forms.” 415 Bonhoeffer’s point is that Christians do not remake the world with ideas distilled from Scripture or even Christ’s teachings. After all, Jesus did not come to teach a revised form of piety, but to form human creatures anew. The reason Bonhoeffer rejects a view of Christ as “essentially” a teacher is rooted in this central concern: if Christ is primarily a teacher, then it is what he teaches rather than who he is that is of central importance. Bonhoeffer suggests that when this occurs, inevitably a moral ideal or a system of moral principles stands as substitute for Jesus Christ.”