Who is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for Us, Today? A Survey of Recent Studies of Bonhoeffer

Abstract

Who Is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for Us, Today? A Survey of Recent Studies of BonhoefferBooks Reviewed:Politics in Friendship: A Theological Account. By Guido de Graaff. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014. 240 pp. $104.00 (cloth).Bonhoeffers Theological Formation: Berlin, Barth, and Protestant Theology. By Michael P. Dejonge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 208 pp. $95.00 (cloth).Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By Charles Marsh. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. 528 pp. $35.00 (cloth).The Church for the World: A Theology of Public Witness. By Jennifer M. McBride. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 320 pp. $24.95 (paper).Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. By Eric Metaxas. Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 2010. 608 pp. $29.99 (cloth).Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking. By Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony G. Siegrist, and Daniel P. Umbel. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2013. 272 pp. $30.00 (paper).Bonhoeffers Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance. By Reggie L. Williams. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2014.196 pp. $39.95 (paper).Dietrich Bonhoeffer holds an unusual place in Christian theology. It is difficult to name another modern theologian who is claimed by as many different Christians. A survey of recent Bonhoeffer publications is a case in point: what other theologian has been fruitfully engaged by liberationist Baptists, conservative American evangelicals, Anabaptists, and mainline liberal Protestants? There are certainly other major theologians who have been influential within many different denominations and churches. But with Bonhoeffer, it is not simply a matter of influence. There is also a desire to say, was a lot like us. Among these different borrowings, Bonhoeffer can be read faithfully, and applied and reinterpreted contextually. At worst, however, Bonhoeffer is a cypher, an empty vessel for an interpreter, and wielded like a weapon in conflicts both cultural and theological.The reason Bonhoeffer can be claimed by so many has to do with a quality that makes him, and his theology, easily recontextualized. A great deal of his most interesting work is found in exploratory letters and unfinished manuscripts. His work on Christian life and community tapped into a deep root of Christian experience. He wrote for audiences both popular and academic. The form of his work was myriad, including doctoral theses, sermons, addresses, and letters never intended for public consumption. Most importantly, he drank deeply from a variety of theological streams. The diversity of form, audience, context, and content leads Bonhoeffer s work to be a theological conversation within itself, a conversation that is open at the edges and thus available for different points of entiy by any number of different interpreters. Bonhoeffer has, in the past, been appropriated to American theological movements like the death of God theology, to Marxist East German theology, and to English liberal Christianity. These were early, if not very sophisticated, recontextualizations of Bonhoeffer, largely (except for Hanfried Mullers Marxist reading) outside Germany's postwar renegotiation of its own past and identity.1 Recent volumes are a continuation of this trend.This is not to say, however, that all interpretations of Bonhoeffer should be treated equally, and with the work of Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer's friend and theological conversation partner, a major corrective took place. With his biography, published in 1967, Bethge made use of his status as Bonhoeffers friend.2 Bethge, as he reminds us elsewhere, was there. He knew what Bonhoeffer meant.3 One of Bethge s aims was to redirect the course on Bonhoeffer toward a more comprehensive reading, seeing Bonhoeffer as a theologian whose core concerns were consistent from his earliest work as a doctoral student to his last letters from prison. …