Luther, Bonhoeffer, and Public Ethics

Re-Forming the Church of the Future

Michael P. DeJonge, Clifford J. Green

• Publisher: Fortress Academic
• Year: 2018
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781978703469
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Holocaust History

Prompted by the 2017 commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, this book examines the legacy of Martin Luther in the life, work, and reception of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the most widely read modern Lutheran theologian. Framing the commemoration of the Reformation in conversation with Bonhoeffer's legacy places much more than Bonhoeffer's connection to Luther at stake. Given the fraught relationship of the Lutheran Bonhoeffer with the German Protestant Church under National Socialism, the question inevitably arises: "What happened to Luther's church in Germany?" This in turn prompts the question: "How did the Protestant tradition play out in public life in other nations?" And these historical issues in turn encourage reflection on a question that exercised both Luther and Bonhoeffer: "What will be the shape of the church in the future?" In these pages, an international group of scholars and practitioners from both church and state pursues these questions.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Reformation: Grappling with a Contested Legacy
• 1 Fatal Coincidences in 1933: Nazism’s Triumph and Luther’s 450th Birthday
• 2 Looking for Luther, 1933–1939
• 3 Luther in Catholic Perspective across Five Centuries
• 4 Justification, Ethics, and the “Other”: Paul, Luther, and Bonhoeffer in Trialogue
• 5 Radicalizing Reformation amid Today’s Crises, in the Spirit of Bonhoeffer
• 6 Worldly Worship: Reformation and Economic Ethics
• 7 Reformation: Freeing the Church for Authentic Public Witness
• 8 Between Compromise and Radicalism: Luther’s Legacy in Bonhoeffer’s Political Thought
• 9 Church, Racism, and Resistance: Bonhoeffer and the Critical Dimensions of Theological Integrity
• 10 “On My Way to Freedom Land”: Bonhoeffer and Three Bright Lights of the Civil Rights Movement
• 11 Veni, Creator Spiritus! An Ecological Reformation
• 12 Reformation through Repentance: The Church’s Public Witness
• 13 Bonhoeffer and the Re-Forming Church in a Globalizing Era
• 14 Bonhoeffer, Truth, Ethics, and Politics
• About the Contributors