Bonhoeffer Christ And Culture

The 2012 Wheaton Theology Conference was convened around the formidable legacy of Lutheran pastor, theologian and anti-Nazi resistant Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This collection, focusing on the man's views of Christ, the church and culture, contributes to a recent awakening of interest in Bonhoeffer among evangelicals.

In 1951, theologian H. Richard Niebuhr published Christ and Culture, a hugely influential book that set the agenda for the church and cultural engagement for the next several decades. But Niebuhr's model was devised in and for a predominantly Christian cultural setting. How do we best understand the church and its writers in a world that is less and less Christian? Craig Carter critiques Niebuhr's still pervasive models and proposes a typology better suited to mission after Christendom.

There is a growing awareness of cultural diversity and plurality on the one hand and shared responsibility for our planet on the other. The sense of cultural identity exposes the wealth and richness of our heritage but also introduces its risks, like the proliferation of often violent independence and separatist movements. A sense of shared responsibility represents the hope to avoid ecological catastrophe and highlights the problems of inequality, poverty and suffering. Is our understanding of cultures and contexts affected, or even dramatically transformed, by our perception of Christ and Trinitarian theology? This series of essays addresses the issues of cultural plurality and diversity, poverty, sexist and racist oppression and ecological crisis, and aims to discuss the place of Christ in our understanding of human contextuality. Authors include Gustavo Gutiérrez, Jürgen Moltmann, Johann Metz, Janet Martin Soskice and John de Gruchy.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in one of his last prison letters that he had come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. In Taking Hold of the Real, Barry Harvey engages in constructive conversation with Bonhoeffer, contending that the shallow and banal this-worldliness of modern society is ordered to a significant degree around the social technologies of religion, culture, and race. These mechanisms displace human beings from their traditional connections with particular locales, and relocate them in their proper places as determined by the nation-state and capitalist markets. Christians are called to participate in the profound this-worldliness that breaks into the world in the apocalyptic action of Jesus Christ, a form of life that requires discipline and an understanding of death and resurrection. The church is a sacrament of this new humanity, performing for all to hear the polyphony of life that was prefigured in the Old Testament and now is realised in Christ. Unable to find a faithful form of this-worldliness in wartime Germany, Bonhoeffer joined the conspiracy against Hitler, a decision aptly contrasted with a small French church that, prepared by its life together over manygenerations, saved thousands of Jewish lives.

Contemporary scholars aiming to articulate a ‘middle way’ between fundamentalism and liberalism regularly draw upon HansFrei and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, yet they are rarely brought together on this question, if at all. Here, Tim Boniface highlights the promise of reading them together, proposing especially that a discussion of Jesus’ transcendence derived from their responses to modernity is an effective locus for considering their combined contribution to a ‘middle way’ discussion. Having outlined a rationale for a theology of Christological transcendence, this work describes in detail how both Frei and Bonhoeffer point towards a nuanced approach to the transcendence of Jesus—especially in terms of the importance of articulating that transcendence at the level of the ‘unsubstitutable historical particularity’ of Christ in the cultural-linguistic setting of the Christian community (Frei) and the impact of a theologia crucis and a participatory cosmic Christology on such thinking (Bonhoeffer). Offering a unique summary of the key ways in which the two theologians’ works mutually critique and strengthen one another, Boniface then articulates a pneumatological emphasis lacking in both Frei and Bonhoeffer, stressing the supreme generosity of God at the heart of what it means to say that Jesus transcends.

The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood Western civilization to be “approaching a completely religionless age” to which Christians must respond and adapt. This book explores Bonhoeffer’s own response to this challenge—his concept of a religionless Christianity—and its place in his broader theology. It does this, first, by situating the concept in a present-day Western socio-historical context. It then considers Bonhoeffer’s understanding and critique of religion, before examining the religionless Christianity of his final months in the light of his earlier Christ-centred theology. The place of mystery, paradox, and wholeness in Bonhoeffer’s thinking is also given careful attention, and non-religious interpretation is taken seriously as an ongoing task. The book aspires to present religionless Christianity as a lucid and persuasive contemporary theology; and does this always in the presence of the question which inspired Bonhoeffer’s theological journey from its academic beginnings to its very deliberately lived end—the question “Who is Jesus Christ?”

In the last years of his life, Dietrich Bonhoeffer began work on an idea that he called unbewußtes Christentum, "unconscious Christianity." While Bonhoeffer’s other ideas from this period have been extensively studied and are important in the field of theology and beyond, this idea has been almost completely ignored. For the first time in Bonhoeffer scholarship, Eleanor McLaughlin provides a definition of unconscious Christianity, based on a close reading and analysis of the texts in which Bonhoeffer mentioned the term. From a variety of surviving texts, from a scribbled marginal note in his Ethics manuscript to the fiction he wrote in prison, she constructs a detailed definition of unconscious Christianity that sheds light not only on Bonhoeffer’s late work but his theological development as a whole.