FIRST WE TAKE MANHATTAN, THEN WE TAKE BERLIN: BONHOEFFER’S NEW YORK by Scott Holland of CrossCurrents. By Scott Holland In Harlem, Bonhoeffer learned about the improvisation of jazz, the contingency of the blues, and the liberation of black spirituals.
That's not all he learned. SCOTT HOLLAND is a contributing editor to Cross Currents. They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within. I'm coming now I'm coming to reward them. By 1930 Dietrich Bonhoeffer had completed his doctorate at the University of Berlin, Friedrich Schleiermacher's University. Bonhoeffer was the son of a liberal, humanistic, yet aristocratic German home. It is therefore not surprising that Bonhoeffer found himself desiring something other, something different, something more. At the time Bonhoeffer thought the ugly ditch of history that so tormented his soul was the emblem of the infinite qualitative difference between the human and the divine. The lonely theologian chose for his dissertation topic, Sanctorum Communio -- The Communion of Saints. Timeline - Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Union Theological Seminary. Friends He Met in America - Christian History & Biography - ChristianityTodayLibrary.com.
Friends He Met in AmericaThree colleagues from Union Theological Seminary who deeply influenced BonhoefferDr.
F. Burton Nelson is professor of theology and ethics at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois, and co-author of A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (HarperCollins, 1990). October 1, 1991 Franklin Fisher (1906–1960) When Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived for the 1930–31 academic year at Union Theological Seminary in New York, he had encountered few blacks during his life. Through Fisher, Bonhoeffer gained “a detailed and intimate knowledge of the realities of Harlem life,” according to Eberhard Bethge. After 1931, the two friends did not meet again, but Bonhoeffer spoke of Fisher to his Finkenwalde students, to his family, and others. A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer's Interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount: A Literal Reading from a New Covenant Piety Perspective. In 1937, a book by controversial theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer presented the Sermon on the Mount as the paramount description of discipleship, generating much stir in Nazi Germany due to its label of the nation's religion as antinomian.
Disgusted with the condition of the church and state, Bonhoeffer responded to the need for reform by bluntly relating the difference between the common religion and Christ's intention for His followers. Responding to the political and spiritual condition of Nazi Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in The Cost of Discipleship, takes a new covenant piety approach to the Sermon on the Mount, maintaining that discipleship is a necessary response to the grace extended in the call to Christianity.During the time between the two World Wars, Germany underwent vast political changes with the rise of Hitler's Third Reich while at the same time experiencing a period of spiritual depravity and antinomianism.
Disillusioned With Your Church? - Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By Dietrich Bonhoeffer (An excerpt from his book entitled, Life Together) Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.
By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both. Beware of visions for church God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. And is not what has been given us enough: brothers, who will go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of his grace? When fellowship is paltry and petty. Existential Primer: Karl Barth.