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Darkness does not win
4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:4-5, NIV) I have this text in mind as I read through the life of Bonhoeffer. Currently, I am searching out the opinions of those scholars who believed Bonhoeffer was only “assassin-adjacent,” so to speak, along with those…
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Bonhoeffer, the Barmen Declaration, and resistance
The Confessing Church in Germany saw the dangers of Nazism encroaching and in 1934, leaders met in the city of Barmen-Wuppertal to put together a declaration that would magnify their Christian convictions and point out areas of dissent.
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Bonhoeffer’s approach to the rise of Nazism
It was 1933 and the German national church was almost entirely on board with Nazi propaganda. Over 90 percent of the student body in the theology department at the university in Berlin had joined the National Socialist Party.
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The prophetic church
Bonhoeffer asked the powerful question: When will it be that Christianity says the right word at the right time?
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To keep the main thing the main thing
Walking my way through Marsh’s biography on Bonhoeffer, there is a time in New York where Bonhoeffer attends Union Seminary for a year. He also encounters Reinhold Niebuhr. He leaves after a year of study at Union frustrated because he found their theological approach too weak.
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Dealing with our current American Church culture
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither…
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We need a new “Confessing Church”
There are times of decision and we’ve been in a decade of choice… and somehow still refuse to make the one away from worldly power. Still, there are many who realize the moment in which we live and maybe there is a ripple of movement for a new “Confessing Church” of some sort. “If you board the wrong train, it…
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The difference between social media “action” and action
It is one thing to teach theology (like Niebuhr, Barth, Tillich, and most theologians) in the safe environs of a classroom and quite another to live one’s theology in a situation that entails the risk of one’s life. (Martin Luther) King agreed fully with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian pastor hanged in 1945 by the Nazis for resisting Hitler: “When Christ…
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The call to discipleship
I am working my way through Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book, Discipleship, and I am challenged once again by the simplicity of the call to Jesus. Discipleship is commitment to Christ. Not the idea of Christ. Not the doctrine of Christ. Christ himself. Christianity without the living Jesus Christ remains necessarily a Christianity without discipleship; and a Christianity without discipleship is always…
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Heaven… on earth
“The earth is preserved by salt; the world lives because of these poor, ignoble, and weak people, whom the world rejects… (This salt) penetrates the entire earth. It is the earth’s substance. Thus, the disciples are focused not only on heaven, but are reminded of their mission on earth… (Christ) brings them into his work… The community of disciples must…
Tag: Dietrich Bonhoeffer
