After my recent foray into the world of modern emerging church movements in “Confessions of a Reformission Rev.” and “Organic Church“, I thought I would go back to the classics, to some dead theologians whose lives we know we can respect, while the Jury is still out on Neil Cole and Mark Driscoll (both through whom it seems God is doing amazing things…). I’m starting out, guns blazing, in to Bonhoeffer. I read this book before, and I didn’t get it. Now, it is blowing my mind, and I’m only through the introduction.

Right now, the main thing that is astounding me is the historical, theological, and political significance of this particular work. The book is a collected set of notes of Bonhoeffer’s students from lectures he gave them in a particularly significant semester. Hitler had just been elected Chancellor of Germany and was currently making moves that would give the Nazi party control of the German church, and thus a foothold into much of the European church. This work provided a theological basis for refuting this new church “movement”, and set Bonhoeffer up as an enemy of the German Church (read: the Nazi church), which would ultimately lead to his death. This work served in uniting the “Confessing Church” (the non-Nazi church) and providing them with “many of it’s weapons to defeat the German Christians and thus prevent the poison of Nazism from destroying the Church.”

Theologically, it is also excellent (so far). In tackling the question of Christology…

Bonhoeffer refused to begin his lectures on christology with what he called the ‘alchemy of the incarnation’. Much discussion of the two natures seemed to him impertinent and certainly concerned with the wrong questions. The discussion which set out to ask, ‘What?’ had been led into asking, ‘How?’ and that was no question for man to ask. Equally he saw how the evasion of christology in the preadhing o fhte cross led to a concentration upon the works of Christ to the exclusion of the real questions. The theologian must be able to speak of Jesu Christ as one in whom ‘act’ and ‘being’ are one. He is not requred to answer the question ‘How?’, but is required to look seriously at the questions ‘What?’ and “Where?

… It is because I am separate from my true being that Christ thus stands between me as I am and me as I should be… … We discover our humanity in him.

More to come.