Letters and Papers From Prison, 1943-44 (formerly entitled A Prisoner for God).

In the history of 20^th 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…

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…

Have you ever read the Old Testament . . .  all of it?

It’s riddled with episodes of God becoming angry, God being filled with hot-boiling wrath, God changing His mind, God commanding Israel to destroy other nations — including the women and children, God creating “seemingly” crazy unreasonable laws, God allowing injustices, etc. etc.

Right?

All of this has given atheists, agnostics, and those hostile to Christianity ample ammunition to try and discredit the faith.

At the end of the 19^th century, Enlightenment thinkers like Robert Ingersoll argued that the God of the Old Testament was a savage, unjust, awful Person. And that no one in their right mind could be a Christian as a result.

We have reincarnations of Ingersoll in people like Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins (a.k.a. “The New Atheists”) who employ the same logic and line of reasoning in support of atheism. (Ingersoll was agnostic, but his arguments contra the Hebrew/Christian God are identical to that of Maher, Hitchens, and Dawkins.) Continue Reading…

Some of my most popular blog posts are author-blogger related. (You can read them all in the Archives.)

Among them is a recent post I wrote called Advice for Christian Authors.

In that piece, I talk about building a readership of people who share the same passion that you communicate in your writing. Building a website is one way to do this. A blog is another. And of course Twitter, which I highly recommend.

On this point, I have a friend who happens to be an incredibly creative and highly-skilled website and graphics designer. The very best that I know.

Yesterday, he finished creating three new websites for my work. These sites feature many free resources. They also include some connectivity tools for Facebook and Twitter.

You can take a look at his designs here (each one matches the book it’s named after): Continue Reading…