Many of you have asked if my books are on Kindle. The answer is yes. Click the titles below, and you’ll be brought to the Kindle versions on Amazon.
The Untold Story of the New Testament Church
Future Kindle titles will be placed on this page as they are released.
I’m happy to announce that my new book REVISE US AGAIN: Living From a Renewed Christian Script is now available.
This book was born on the anvil of three decades of spiritual experiences, struggles, observations, suffering, failures, questions, reflections, and the insights that are born from each. As such, it contains both light and shade. 
The book is unlike anything else I’ve written to date. And it’s the shortest as well (only 176 pages). It is written for all Christians in every denomination, movement, and church structure.
Unlike From Eternity to Here and Jesus Manifesto, it doesn’t contain the element of the sublime. Nor it is written to the right brain.
Unlike Pagan Christianity, Reimagining Church, Finding Organic Church, and The Untold Story of the New Testament Church, it’s not a book about the church or church practice.
Instead, REVISE US AGAIN explores ten vital issues of our faith that work at the unconscious (subterraneal) level. Issues that are rarely addressed today. Some of the chapters include: “Being Captured by the Same Spirit You Oppose” … “Your Christ is Too Small” … “What’s Wrong With Our Gospel?” … “The Felt-Presence of God” … “The God of Unseen Endings” … “Revising the Holy Spirit’s Ministry” … “Let Me Pray About It: Revising Christian Code Language” … “The Lord Told Me: Revising Christianeze.”
The book isn’t written as a story. The chapters don’t build upon one another. The book is a collection of essays written at different times and places. But they are all tied together by the theme of rescripting and revising. Continue Reading…
The rest of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volumes 7 to 16, are made up of personal letters that he wrote, sermons, meditations, essays, diary entries, a novel, and lectures spanning from his early life to his last days in prison.
These are all fascinating works and give us great insight into DB’s thinking and life.
Of particular note is Lectures on Christology (American title: Christ the Center) 1933, which is contained in Volume 12 of the set.
These were the last lectures that DB gave before leaving the University of Berlin. Continue Reading…
You don’t know what you have until you no longer have it.
Ever since I began living in organic church life, an observation I’ve made is that when people no longer have the experience of body life, they virtually always say:
“I really didn’t know what I had! This is so rare. I long for that experience again.”
Note that I’m not talking about the vanilla house church experience. I’m speaking of the organic expression of the church of Jesus Christ in all of its depths, multifarious splendor, sublime realities, light, shade, and varying seasons.
We just uploaded to the podcast a message I delivered in Ireland years ago. It’s called Who Is This Woman? God’s Ultimate Passion. The message underscores just how important the ekklesia (as God called her to be) is to Him . . . and to those who have known her in experience. The talk is on iTunes also.
If you are experiencing the real thing, I hope you don’t disregard or take it for granted. Because you don’t know what you have until . . .
Letters and Papers From Prison, 1943-44 (formerly entitled A Prisoner for God).
In the history of 20th century Christianity, there probably is no other book that has been so misunderstood and misused. (This book has a similar track-record for our day.)
Letters and Papers from Prison is not a theological treatise or a book of devotions. It is, as the present title puts it, a collection of occasional notes and letters from a man in prison. Because that man is a thoughtful theologian, it contains some tentative thoughts and surmises that DB never had the chance to test and polish.
Some liberal theologians and teachers try to claim DB just like they try to claim Thomas Merton. They do it by making the assertion that in their last years they completely changed their theologies.
But a careful reading of DB’s entire body of work, including his Letters show clearly that 1) DB believed in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. 2) DB believed in the triune nature of God. 3) DB was fully orthodox in his beliefs. Continue Reading…
Isn’t it strange
That princes and kings,
And clowns that caper
In sawdust rings,
And common people
Like you and me
Are builders for eternity? Continue Reading…
Ethics, 1940-1943.
Ethics is comprised of fragments of a book that DB never had the chance to write (though the book weighs-in at 593 pages with editors notes and appendixes). This is a heavy theological tome. Three important themes are presented within it.
DB distinguished between the ultimate and the penultimate dimensions of our lives. In the ultimate, we recognize that we are all sinners and stand only through the gracious forgiveness of our sins extended to us in Christ.
In the penultimate dimension, we are friends and family members. We are neighbors and recognize that we owe to each other our good works even though those works will never justify us. In the ultimate, we realize that our love for God must exceed any and all of our other loves in life. In the penultimate, we rejoice in the beauty and goodness of nature and in the capacity for creating beauty which God has given us. DB felt that Christians were far too often eager to rush past the realm of the penultimate and try to live exclusively in the ultimate. Continue Reading…
In this post I will treat two books that DB wrote which are combined together in the Collected Works series.
Life Together, 1938.
When DB spoke to a group of former students of the underground seminary at Finkenwalde, he drew on their life together as a Christ-centered community. In this work, DB describes the practices of their community and explains why all Christians should engage in such practices. He regarded the disciplines he covers in this book as vital for being formed into Christ’s image.
The book is especially useful for helping us to understand what DB meant in his last letters by the disciplina arcane, which is what enables us to go into a godless world as servants of its unacknowledged Lord.
As someone who has experienced organic church life for over twenty years, I recognize that DB touched this experience in the community at Finkenwalde and was describing parts of it. Although suited for academic students, the community they had nonetheless described some of the realities of body life and Christian community, a theme that DB wrote on beginning with his first book. Continue Reading…
The next three books I will review are my favorite works by Bonhoeffer. All of them are prophetic works as opposed to his academic books. These were written and spoken in the midst of the Confessing Church’s struggle with Nazism.
Discipleship, 1937 (later published as The Cost of Discipleship).
Discipleship is DB’s best known and most influential book.
Faithful Christians in Germany were facing persecution and possible martyrdom as Hitler attempted to take over the Church. In these circumstances DB boldly declared that “when Christ calls a man he calls him to come and die.”
In this book, DB gives us the overall shape of Christian practice. That overall shape is discipleship/obedience to Jesus Christ and something virtually forgotten today in the Christian faith . . . cross-bearing. What stands in the way of radical discipleship to Jesus? Social conformity, nationalism, and separating the teachings of Jesus as a set of moral principles to follow that are detached from the Person of Jesus. The latter is something that Len Sweet and I address at length in our book Jesus Manifesto. Continue Reading…
