The Other Bonhoeffer: An Evangelical Reassessment of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

by Georg Huntemann

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801043824
• ISBN13: 9780801043826
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group (MI)
• Length: 342 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

to evangelicals: Bonhoeffer is one of us and he is still relevant

a good book, a little difficult of a read, partly due to the subject matter, partly because it is translated from the German. But i think the time spent well worth while even if i didn't understand or internalize near enough of it. Bonhoeffer is a hard read, i've found better luck reading about him then reading his stuff itself. This book is literally a better introduction to D.Bonhoeffer then the two books by him that we are reading. The author is conservative, both theologically and culturally. His big point is that Bonhoeffer is a conservative not a radical as some over the years have claimed, but rather is very interested in and committed to a top down law and order authority. This versus the bottom up, mob mentality that the Nazi's represent and lead to destruction. The author's contention that the Nazis are a left wing, socialist movement not a right wing fascist one, is something i had not thought about and am convinced that he is right. It is things like this that make this an interesting and somewhat difficult read, i had to read carefully, aware that much of it would challenge ideas that i had, even to the point of changing my mind about some thing, hey that is a good definition of an excellent book!! The book is organized into 10 parts: 1-Bonhoeffer's Life and Thought 2-Bonhoeffer's Church 3-The Decline of Christianity and the Religionless Christ-Mysticism 4-Biblical Revelation in Babylonian Captivity 5-The power and Powerlessness of God 6-Christian Existence as Concrete Truth 7-Bonhoeffer's Ethics of Order 8-bonhoeffer in the Resistance 9-Bonhoeffer and the Established Protestant Church 10-Unity in the Church and Peace in the World The structure is mostly recapitulated chronology, that is the author has a set of points he wishes to prove about Bonhoeffer's thinking and do so by introducing each in a timeline context. So as the book progresses you get a better and deeper idea of what happened as he zeros in on events and writings in B.'s life, both how they related to the times and how they related to what he wrote earlier. It works out well, i'm not sure how a strictly topical organization would work since B. was primarily a doer not a thinker, everything he did was a thoughtful response to the crisises of his time and how the world was effecting his church. I think that the primary purpose of the book is two fold: the first is to show that Bonhoeffer is a conservative, an evangelical in today's vocabulary, not a theological liberal, especially not the radical situtational ethicist that some propose he was. This is in order to speak to evangelicals, to social conservatives with the ideas that B. worked out in his short life, essentially trying to reclaim him from the liberals who make him out to be a martyr to liberal values. The second big idea is to present the thought of Christ-mystic and not only to explain it as a foundational element of B's thought but to ask how it will help the theology of the modern evangelical Church as