Ours is a time of anthropological crisis when we as a society cannot agree on what it means to be human. Thus, theologians who faced that issue in Nazi Germany are obvious dialogue partners upon whom we can draw. Continue Reading »
There is no theology here,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to a friend shortly after arriving in America in 1930. He was referring to Union Theological Seminary, home to some of the day’s most respected liberal theologians, including Reinhold Niebuhr. But he didn’t just mean the seminary. Later . . . . Continue Reading »
If the cosmic king of the universe could reign from a tree, then we his ambassadors can minister from one also. Continue Reading »
( English Version | Simplified Chinese | Traditional Chinese ) At the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, when the Communist party defeated the Nationalists and founded the People’s Republic of China, Christians in China numbered half a million. Yet almost seventy years later, under the Chinese . . . . Continue Reading »
One year before Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis on the morning of April 9, 1945, he wrote from prison to his friend Eberhard Bethge: “What keeps gnawing at me is the question, ‘What is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today?’” To that question we must now pose . . . . Continue Reading »
David Mills has found himself in trouble—for making the stunning claim that conservative Catholics are not conservative Protestants, and conservative Protestants are not conservative Catholics. Continue Reading »
The year was 1943, and another Advent had dawned for Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer loved Advent and had often preached sermons on this holy season of waiting and hope as a metaphor for the entire Christian life. Just one year earlier, during the Advent of 1942, Bonhoeffer had written a circular letter to some of his friends and former students. Continue Reading »
Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by charles marsh knopf, 528 pages, $35 Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s appeal is no mystery: charismatic pastor, brilliant theologian, dedicated ecumenist, and anti-Nazi conspirator whose death at the age of thirty-nine terminated a life still ripe with promise. . . . . Continue Reading »
Sin and the Fall are what make government necessary. As such, government is not that which helps the human person to flourish, and Luther insists on the restraints and limits of government. Government is indeed, Bonhoeffer declares, “independent of the manner of its coming into being.” It is . . . . Continue Reading »
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