Adolf von harnack bonhoeffer biography

Bonhoeffer completed two theology degrees by his 25th birthday. In he wrote Sanctorum Communio, a doctoral thesis in which he engaged philosophers and sociologists regarding the nature of the church. In he completed Act and Being , his habilitationsschrift. Neither relied significantly on Scripture.

Adolf von harnack bonhoeffer biography

He greatly disliked the American liberal theology he encountered. When he returned to Germany in July of , he spent two weeks in Bonn meeting the neo-orthodox theologian Karl Barth. Bonhoeffer had been an avid reader of Barth and had interacted with his works in Act and Being. In Bonn he attended lectures given by Barth as well as discussion groups in the evening.

At one point Bonhoeffer offered a quote from Luther which Barth greatly enjoyed. Bonhoeffer, already an admirer of Barth, began a close relationship with the theologian who would become a mentor of sorts. For the next few years Bonhoeffer served in the ministry, while at the same time working in the University of Berlin. During this time Bonhoeffer gave a series of lectures on the first three chapters of Genesis and on Christology.

Both of these lecture series turned into books: Creation and Fall and Christ the Center From to Bonhoeffer pastored a church in London. In Mahatma Gandhi personally invited Bonhoeffer to visit him. Bonhoeffer had been trying to make a trip to India for some time to visit Gandhi and to learn about community life and spiritual techniques that could be applied to the church in the West.

Of course Christianity did come from the East originally. Rather than traveling to India, in April of Bonhoeffer accepted a position to lead a new seminary to train preachers. Bonhoeffer wrote of this experience in his work Life Together His purpose, in contrast to his earlier works, was not to discuss a philosophical system but to detail the methods of preparing for ministry and living in community with others.

During these years Bonhoeffer began to think through his next work, The Cost of Discipleship. From its inception, the seminary was illegal under German law at the time. Though the classes were small, the seminary was full of men training to go into the pastorate. It, however, survived for only two years before the Nazis found it and shut it down.

After its closing, Bonhoeffer wrote what was perhaps his most widely read work, The Cost of Discipleship Countless Christians have read this work, and some think it is one of the most influential books for Christians in the twentieth century. With the Nazi threat increasing every day, Bonhoeffer began to work with a secret resistance group. Eventually he lost his teaching position and was banned from speaking in Germany.

After a Jewish safe-house was discovered by the Nazis, Bonhoeffer was implicated as one of the collaborators. He was arrested and spent the next two years in prisons and prison camps. During this time Bonhoeffer corresponded with his closest friend, Eberhard Bethge. These letters had to be smuggled in and out of the prison. Bethge saved the letters and eventually published them as a book, Letters and Papers from Prison —, published Bonhoeffer spent the rest of his days in German concentration camps under difficult conditions.

His second dissertation, "Act and Being," was written in against a background of such opposing philosophies as Kantian transcendentalism and Heideggerian ontology. This work tries to reconcile an existential theological approach with an ontological one. According to Bonhoeffer, these approaches work themselves out in the church, in which revelational contingency and institutional continuity merge.

Turning to the actual life of the church and to criticism of it, Bonhoeffer, in , published his controversial The Cost of Discipleship New York, Asserting that "cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church," this work, which is based on the sermon on the mount, critiques a Reformation heritage that breaks faith and obedience asunder. In Life Together New York, , Bonhoeffer's most widely read book, the author considers experiments to renew a kind of monastic life for serving the world.

In Bonhoeffer began to write a theological ethics, the work he intended to be his life-work, but he completed only fragments of it Ethics , New York, These fragments reveal Bonhoeffer as moving beyond a situational ethic to a Christ-centered one. The most influential of Bonhoeffer's posthumous publications has become Letters and Papers from Prison New York, Among his daily observations was a vision of a future Christianity ready for "messianic suffering" with Christ in a "nonreligious world.

Bonhoeffer was critical of Western Christianity because of its complicity with the Holocaust; his letters reveal his conviction that a life with Christ means "to exist for others. Bonhoeffer's thought emerged from his cultural heritage of German liberalism. He suffered when he experienced its weakness in the face of Nazism. He rethought this heritage within a Christocentric theology, thus becoming a radical critic of his contemporary church and of contemporary theology because they seemed to him to touch only the insignificant corners of life.

The originality of Bonhoeffer's thought may be summarized in three ways. First, by employing biblical and modern criticism of religion, he gave to theology and piety epochal stress on the idea that the God who is not of this world posits a requisite "this-worldliness" of faith, which is not, however, absorbed by immanentism. Second, Bonhoeffer's words and deeds teach that each generation must discern its own particular means to express its contribution to faith and action.

Third, in areas where developments press toward a "confessing church," Bonhoeffer challenges Christians to analyze and to resist ideological syncretism with any zeitgeist, whether the result is a Greek, a Teutonic, or an American Christ. His influence is worldwide for two reasons. First, his life as theologian and thinker was sealed by martyrdom.

Second, Bonhoeffer's legacy has stimulated ecumenism beyond his own national, spiritual, and institutional borders, including influence among Roman Catholics and Jews who see in him a Christian theologian who never cheaply evaded controversial issues. For a comprehensive listing of primary and secondary literature, see Clifford J. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

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Executed because of his part in the German resistance to Hitler, through his actions and writings he called for Christian involvement in the world. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on Feb. His father was a leading professor of neurology and psychiatry; his mother was the granddaughter of a distinguished church historian. All the orders of the world derive their value wholly from outside themselves, from Christ and the new creation.

These orders only exist under the preservation of God as long as they are open to the revelation of Christ. Therefore, Bonhoeffer argued that " any order … can be dissolved , and must be dissolved when it … no longer permits the proclamation of revelation" NRS Bonhoeffer stopped discussing ethics in terms of orders of preservation after because he felt that the decisive moment for dealing with the issue in these terms had already past Woelfel , Partly in response to the increasing abuses of the Nazi state, the later pre-war Bonhoeffer came to espouse a radically eschatological ethic, an ethic of the purely "ultimate" for a church in crisis This is the ethic found in The Cost of Discipleship , where ethical action is radical obedience to the concrete demands of the crucified Lord taking the Sermon on the Mount quite literally.

After Germany declared war on Europe in , Bonhoeffer renewed his interest in the penultimate problems in ethics. In the writings of the Ethics , Bonhoeffer affirms the importance of both ultimate ethics, which concerns the final consummation, and penultimate ethics, ethics for the concrete situation of the present world that continues to exist until the fulfillment of all things For Bonhoeffer, the implications of this for the Christian in Germany were obvious: "Only he who cries out for the Jews may also sing Gregorian [chant]" quoted from Woelfel , Bonhoeffer is perhaps most famous for his "Christianity without religion" project, the attempt to give a non-religious interpretation to Christian categories.

Although Bonhoeffer showed signs of shifting towards a non-religious interpretation in the Ethics , the main texts of the Christianity without religion program come from the letters he wrote to Eberhard Bethge while in prison. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience — and that means the time of religion in general.

We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more LPP In a world where people "simply cannot be religious," Bonhoeffer wondered if there still was a place for Christ, if Christ could be Lord of the religionless. In continuity with Feuerbach, Bonhoeffer regarded religion as human dependence upon God at the boundaries of life.

He gave specific content to this by defining religion more precisely as individualism the psychological attitude of a subject and a metaphysical system Gruchy , Therefore, Bonhoeffer saw religion as a genuine hindrance to true faith in Jesus Christ. According to Bonhoeffer, the church has failed in its mission to the modern world because it was not able to separate the message of Christ from religious trappings.

The church used God as a metaphysical deus ex machina , a God of the gaps that filled the holes of our knowledge. Bonhoeffer noticed that as secularism increasingly permeated the lives of modern people, this metaphysical God of the gaps was being pushed further away into irrelevance. For Bonhoeffer, this signaled a retreat into subjectivism, into the personal categories of sin, despair, and anxiety over against the objective work done by God in Jesus Christ.

Moreover, it only affirmed a God found in weakness, not in strength, a God at the periphery of our existence, not the center. Bonhoeffer felt that this interpretation was actually most in line with the gospel of the flesh-and-blood Lord. Bonhoeffer planned to write a book that gave a non-religious interpretation of Christian concepts, but before he had the chance he was executed for his part in the attempt to assassinate Hitler.

The greatest difficulty many Bonhoeffer scholars struggle with, however, is his theology. This is despite the doctrinal whitewashing some authors have provided Bonhoeffer. For example, Eric Metaxas told Christianity Today : "Bonhoeffer is more like a theologically conservative evangelical than anything else. He was as orthodox as Saint Paul or Isaiah.

How can such diverse groups from evangelicals to liberals to abortion doctor murderers to Death of God advocates claim Bonhoeffer as their hero? Admittedly, Bonhoeffer is not easy to figure out. He has been described as a puzzle with half the pieces missing. The pieces are all there, but it will take arduous work to locate them and assemble the picture of Bonhoeffer.

There are two possible reasons, Bonhoeffer is misunderstood. One reason Bonhoeffer is hard to interpret. One reason Bonhoeffer is difficult to decipher is because his writings appear on the surface to be evangelical, even though Bonhoeffer was a neo-orthodox theologian who endorsed German liberal theology. We need to remember the context in which Bonhoeffer lived.

Bonhoeffer was trained in the University of Berlin under German liberal theologians like Adolph von Harnack who was a neighbor and family friend. What a severely Greek idea this is we can see They explain why Athanasius strove for the formula that the Logos-Christ was of the same nature as the Father, as though the existence or non-existence of the Christian religion were at stake.

They show clearly how it was that other teachers in the Greek Church regarded any menace to the complete unity of the divine and the human in the Redeemer, any notion of a merely moral connexion, as a deathblow to Christianity. This holds Christianity to be a historical development from germs which were devoid of both dogma and miracle. Jesus was a teacher of ethics Greek influence