Bonhoeffer's Theological Formation: Berlin, Barth, & Protestant Theology. By Michael P. DeJonge.

Abstract

With Bonhoeffer’s Theological Formation (2012), Michael P. DeJonge has offered an insightful and exciting study focussed on Bonhoeffer’s second dissertation in view of Systematic Theology in historical perspective. The clarity and precision with which DeJonge engages in his theological argument is matched by a keen awareness that any systematic claim has to ground itself in a clear understanding of its historical situation and critical reflection of its methodology. Thus we do not only find here a critical analysis of the reception of Bonhoeffer’s early work in Act and Being (orig. 1929–30), but we are given a rigorous overview of the historical, philosophical, and confessional implications of Bonhoeffer’s thought. Bonhoeffer’s academic development is considered in relation to his engagement with Luther and his contemporaries’ pseudo-Lutheran polemics, as well as his teacher Karl Holl and the Reformed theology of Karl Barth. In so doing, Michael DeJonge identifies crucial differences but also structural similarities between the philosophical concerns of hermeneutics and Bonhoeffer’s negotiation between act-theologies and being-theologies in the theological context of the general problem of transcendence. DeJonge interprets Bonhoeffer’s proposal of rereading Lutheran Christology as a hermeneutics of the person as a distinct alternative to the theological positions of his mentors in Berlin. What DeJonge’s philosophical contextualization of Bonhoeffer shows is that dualistic thinking in its formal distinction between act and being necessarily misrepresents or neglects the ethical context, crucial for a historically relevant and accurate understanding of transcendence in Systematic Theology, from which our relationship with the divine emerges: ‘For this reason, Bonhoeffer finds it necessary to understand person as the unity of act and being, as the unity of willed encounter and historical continuity’ (p. 73).