Christ And Revelatory Community In Bonhoeffer S Reception Of Hegel

Back cover: How is God revealed through the life of a human community? Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theological ethics begins from the claim to 'Christ existing as community', which David Robinson presents as one of several critical and politically astute variations on G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy of religion.

In this enlightening study, renowned twentieth-century theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers a careful textual analysis of the story of creation, approaching the biblical tale of Genesis with the eye of a philosopher and the soul of a true Christian. “Creation and Fall” is Bonhoeffer’s lucid, brilliant analysis of the first three chapters of Genesis. Here he discusses the seeming scientific naiveté behind the creation story, God’s love and goodness, and humanity’s creation, its free will, and its blessedness. Bonhoeffer also tackles difficult questions that are raised from the first book of the Bible, questions about the seemingly redundant second story of creation, about God’s own beginning, about the source of the light that was created the first day. The author then expounds upon Adam and Eve’s fall from grace: How could they, creatures made in God’s image, have thought to oppose God so foully? Where did the first evil come from? How did humanity lose its right to live in paradise? In “Temptation,” Bonhoeffer questions how temptation appeared in the midst of Eden’s innocence, and he explores the very nature of evil. Bonhoeffer explains that Jesus Christ helps us to understand and conquer physical and spiritual temptation through His grace and goodness.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer publicly confronted Nazism and anti-Semitic racism in Hitler's Germany. The Reich's political ideology, when mixed with theology of the German Christian movement, turned Jesus into a divine representation of the ideal, racially pure Aryan and allowed race-hate to become part of Germany's religious life. Bonhoeffer provided a Christian response to Nazi atrocities. In this book author Reggie L. Williams follows Dietrich Bonhoeffer as he encounters Harlem's black Jesus. The Christology Bonhoeffer learned in Harlem's churches featured a black Christ who suffered with African Americans in their struggle against systemic injustice and racial violence--and then resisted. In the pews of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, under the leadership of Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Bonhoeffer was captivated by Christianity in the Harlem Renaissance. This Christianity included a Jesus who stands with the oppressed, against oppressors, and a theology that challenges the way God is often used to underwrite harmful unions of race and religion. Now featuring a foreword from world-renowned Bonhoeffer scholar Ferdinand Schlingensiepen as well as multiple updates and additions, Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus argues that Dietrich Bonhoeffer's immersion within the black American narrative was a turning point for him, causing him to see anew the meaning of his claim that obedience to Jesus requires concrete historical action. This ethic of resistance not only indicted the church of the German Volk, but also continues to shape the nature of Christian discipleship today.

The Bible is meant to be read in the church, by the church, as the church. Although the practice of reading Scripture has often become separated from its ecclesial context, theologian Derek Taylor argues that it rightly belongs to the disciplines of the community of faith. He finds a leading example of this approach in the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who regarded the reading of Scripture as an inherently communal exercise of discipleship. In conversation with other theologians, including John Webster, Robert Jenson, and Stanley Hauerwas, Taylor contends that Bonhoeffer's approach to Scripture can engender the practices and habits of a faithful hermeneutical community. Today, as in Bonhoeffer's time, the church is called to take up and read. Featuring new monographs with cutting-edge research, New Explorations in Theology provides a platform for constructive, creative work in the areas of systematic, historical, philosophical, biblical, and practical theology.

Departing from the Reformed tradition and its potential to contribute to the discussion about the connection between liturgy and ethics, this volume offers in-depth studies in how to understand God’s acting in worship, the centrality of justice, and the formative meaning of the liturgy.

A fresh vision of the common good through pnumatological lenses Daniela C. Augustine, a brilliant emerging scholar, offers a theological ethic for the common good. Augustine develops a public theology from a theological vision of creation as the household of the Triune God, bearing the image of God in a mutual sharing of divine love and justice, and as a sacrament of the divine presence. The Spirit and the Common Good expounds upon the application of this vision not only within the life of the church but also to the realm of politics, economics, and care for creation. The church serves a priestly and prophetic function for society, indeed for all of creation. This renewed vision becomes the foundation for constructing a theological ethic of planetary flourishing in and through commitment to a sustainable communal praxis of a shared future with the other and the different. While emphatically theological in its approach, The Spirit and the Common Good engages readers with insights from political philosophy, sociology of religion, economics, and ecology, as well as forgiveness/reconciliation and peacebuilding studies.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the intellectual progeny of the competing liberal and dialectical theological camps of his time. Yet he found both camps incapable of properly accounting for Christ’s relation to time and history, which both grounds their conflict and generates further theological problems, both theoretical and practical. In this book Nik Byle argues that Bonhoeffer was able to mine Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time for material theologically useful for moving beyond this impasse. Bonhoeffer sifts through Heidegger’s analysis of human existence and finds a number of moves and concepts useful to theology. These include Heidegger’s emphasis on anthropology over epistemology, his position that one must begin with concrete existence, and that human existence is fundamentally temporal. Bonhoeffer must, however, reject other hallmark concepts, such as authenticity and Heidegger’s entire anthropocentric method, that would threaten the legitimate theological use of Heidegger. Making the appropriate theological alterations, Bonhoeffer applies the useful elements from Heidegger to his Christocentric theology. Essentially, Christ and the church become fundamentally temporal and historical in the same way that human existence is for Heidegger. This sets a new foundation for Bonhoeffer’s Christology with concomitant effects in his ecclesiology, sacramentalism, theological anthropology, and epistemology.

Standing Under the Cross focuses on Bonhoeffer's rich theological and ethical thinking. It places Bonhoeffer in conversation with a wide range of modern theologians, including Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Jürgen Moltmann, and James Cone. The book gives particular attention to hermeneutics, the body, and Bonhoeffer's rich reflections on community and discipleship. Mawson attends to the complex ways in which these aspects of Bonhoeffer's thinking work together, and shows how they can assist us in responding to some of the challenges confronting us today.