The Time of Grace
“The time of grace is the final time in the sense that one can never reckon with a further, future word beyond the word of God that confronts me now. There is a time of God’s permission, waiting, and...
View ArticleBodily Presence
“Jesus’ community with his disciples was all-encompassing, extending to all areas of life. The individual’s entire life was lived within this community of the disciples. And this community is a living...
View ArticleBit of Bonhoeffer
“The Word of God seeks out community in order to accept it. It exists mainly within the community. It moves on its own into the community. It has an inherent impulse toward community. It is wrong to...
View ArticleThe Possibility of a Protestant Church
“[T]he struggle regarding the church government is actually the question necessarily emerging from church history regarding the possibility of a Protestant church for us. It is the question whether,...
View ArticleThe gift of life together
I was rereading Bonhoeffer’s Life Together the other night. Definitely a book to consistently return to. On thing that struck me afresh was Bonhoeffer’s insistence in the early pages of the book on the...
View ArticlePraying for the kingdom
Bonhoeffer’s 1932 essay, “Thy Kingdom Come! The Prayer of the Church-Community for God’s Kingdom on Earth” (in the Berlin: 1932-33 volume of the DBW series) is nothing if not stirring: If we are to...
View ArticleThe kingdom of resurrection
Yet more from Bonhoeffer’s “Thy Kingdom Come! The Prayer of the Church-Community for God’s Kingdom on Earth” (in the Berlin: 1932-33 volume of the DBW series): “Thy kingdom come” — this is not the...
View ArticleThe church as the presence of the humiliated Christ
More Bonhoeffer, this time from the new translation of his Lectures on Christology (popularly published as Christ the Center) in the Berlin: 1932-1933 volume: With the humiliated Christ, his church...
View ArticlePrayer and action
Our church has been fighting during these years only for its own self-preservation, as if that were an end in itself. It has become incapable of bringing the word of reconciliation and redemption to...
View ArticleBetween me and all others
Emotional, self-centered love cannot tolerate the dissolution of a community that has become false, even for the sake of genuine community. And such self-centered love cannot love an enemy, that is to...
View ArticleBonhoeffer and the body of Christ
Too often we tend to talk about the church as the body of Christ in a way that occludes the distinctly Christological and soteriological importance of this biblical image. The way the image tends to...
View ArticleBonhoeffer conference at Notre Dame
CALL FOR PAPERS New Conversations on Bonhoeffer’s Theology A Graduate Student Conference at the University of Notre Dame April 10-11, 2011 Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45) remains one of the most...
View ArticleOnly the devil has an answer
Bonhoeffer’s discussion of Jesus’s encounter with the Rich Young Man seems to me to be a fitting post for Ash Wednesday indeed: The young man’s question [of which commandments he ought to obey] shows...
View ArticleGood Friday
Ethics and religion and church all go in this direction: from the human to God. Christ, however, speaks only and exclusively of the line from God to human beings, not of some human path to God, but...
View ArticleAdvent and the end of religion
There’s a somewhat famous quote from Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison (November 21, 1943, pp. 188-89) on the nature of Advent: “By the way, a prison cell like this is a good analogy for...
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