Books by Bonhoeffer

No Rusty Swords / The Cost of Discipleship / Letters and Papers from Prison  /  Sanctorum Communio

A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings  /  Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible /  Ethics  

No Difference in the Fare: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Problem of Racism

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a theologian, a pastor, a spiritual writer, a musician, and an author of fiction and poetry. The integrity of his Christian faith and life, and the international appeal of his writings, have received broad  recognition and admiration, all of which has led to a consensus that he is one of the theologians of his time whose theological reflections might lead future generations of Christians into creating a new more spiritual and responsible millennium. Bio & Chronology 

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"It's a queer feeling to be so utterly dependent on the help of others, but at least it teaches one to be grateful, a lesson I hope I shall never forget. In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others." Letters and Papers from Prison

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The most influential contribution made by the Negro to American Christianity lies in the "Negro Spirituals," in which the distress and delivery of the people of Israel ("Go down, Moses . . ."), the misery and consolation of the human heart ("Nobody knows the trouble I've seen"), and the love of the Redeemer and longing for the kingdom of heaven ("Swing low, sweet chariot . . .") find moving expression. Every white American knows, sings and loves these songs. It is barely understandable that great Negro singers can sing these songs before packed concert audiences of whites, to tumultuous applause, while at the same time these same men and women are still denied access to the white community through social discrimination. The Negro Church

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"At Abyssinian, Bonhoeffer sat under the ministry of Powell almost weekly for over six months. Powell's culturally engaged sermons blended the artful rhetoric and congregational, noncreedal style of the black Baptist church with the best of American social pragmatism. Powell had learned to appreciate John Dewey through their work together at the NAACP. We have recently learned through the research of Ralph Garlin Clingan that some of Bonhoeffer's theological vocabulary was borrowed from the pulpit work Pastor Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. For example, Powell complained that the problem of the Euro-American church was 'cheap grace'." Ralph Garlin Clingan, "Against Cheap Grace in a World Come of Age: A Study in the Hermeneutics of Adam Clayton Powell, 1865-1953, in His Intellectual Context." A Drew University Ph.D. dissertation (UMI Microfilm 9732791, Ann Arbor, Mich. 1997).  First We Take Manhattan

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Barth was the first theologian to begin the criticism of religion,-and that remains his really great merit-but he set in its place the positivist doctrine of revelation which says in effect, "Take it or leave it": Virgin Birth, Trinity or anything else, every-thing which is an equally significant and necessary part of the whole, which latter has to be swallowed as a whole or not at all. That is not in accordance with the Bible. There are degrees of perception and degrees of significance, i.e. a secret discipline must be re-established whereby the mysteries of the Christian faith are preserved from profanation. The positivist doctrine of revelation makes it too easy for itself, setting up, as in the ultimate analysis it does, a law of faith, and mutilating what is, by the incarnation of Christ, a gift for us. The place of religion is taken by the Church-that is, in itself, as the Bible teaches it should be-but the world is made to depend upon itself and left to its own devices, and that is all wrong.  May 5th 1944

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Even though there has been surrender on all secular problems, there still remain the so-called ultimate questions—death, guilt—on which only "God" can furnish an answer, and which are the reason why God and the Church and the pastor are needed. Thus we live, to some extent, by these ultimate questions of humanity. But what if one day they no longer exist as such, if they too can be answered without "God"? We have of course the secularized off-shoots of Christian theology, the existentialist philosophers and the psychotherapists, who demonstrate to secure, contented, happy mankind that it is really unhappy and desperate, and merely unwilling to realize that it is in severe straits it knows nothing at all about, from which only they can rescue it. June 8th letter

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updated 4 November 2007