Dorothee Soelle
“Dietrich Bonhoeffer is the one German theologian who will lead us into the third millennium.”


Malcolm Muggeridge
“Some words Gorky used about Tolstoy come into my mind: ‘Look what a wonderful man is living on this earth!’”


Book Description
At a time when much of the world was either enticed with or entrapped by fascism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer dared to live the morally responsible Christian life to a most expressive, and in his case, tragic end. His legacy has inspired many, and it demonstrates his life and works to be among the most important of the twentieth century. Forged during his struggle against Nazism, Bonhoeffer's striking notions of “religionless Christianity” (i.e., costly grace, direct religious engagement with political forces, and his own martyrdom) still speak directly to the situations faced by the Christians—and Christianity—of today. His key insights, combined with Floyd’s meditations which address meaning and significance for today, are powerfully presented here in fifty key passages grouped into eight areas of Bonhoeffer's concern: church, world, discipleship, politics, love, Christ, creation, and the future.


From the Publisher
From the Preface: The life and writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer continue to inspire and provoke, comfort and challenge, nurture and unsettle his readers, now into the twenty-first century. This brief book is offered to introduce you to the wisdom and witness of this remarkable human being. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a university professor with a doctorate in theology, a Lutheran pastor, a participant in the early ecumenical movement, a prolific writer, a central figure in the Protestant church struggle against Nazism. His participation in the plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler led to his arrest, imprisonment, and eventual death by hanging at Flossenburg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, at the age of 39. In this volume I have chosen brief excerpts from Bonhoeffer’s writings—books, articles, letters, poems, lectures, and sermons—that reflect the wide range of his work and the depth of the theological themes that absorbed him. The excerpts, printed on left-hand pages, provide the inspiration for short meditations on each text. In my reflections I have attempted to provide clues to what each brief text is about, its context, and most importantly its enduring witness for Bonhoeffer’s contemporary readers. Eight themes provide the focus for these reflections. The first is Church, a reflection of Bonhoeffer’s strong conviction about the social nature of everything about the Christian faith. The second is World, for this is where the church is located, and Bonhoeffer took Jesus’ prayer for God’s reign to come “on earth as it is in heaven” quite seriously. The third is the theme of Discipleship, following Christ, and the ways in which our faith and action in the world are intertwined. The fourth is Politics, for in Bonhoeffer’s day, as in our own, the most difficult sorts of challenges for our discipleship come when the church tries to live out its faith in a world that is decidedly political. Fifth is the theme of Creation, including meditations on the importance of the ways that we understand ourselves as creatures of God. The sixth is Christ, who has been the hidden center of all that has preceded this section. The seventh is Love, which Bonhoeffer saw to be at the heart of Jesus’ life and words and work. And we conclude with a section on the Future—Bonhoeffer’s, our own, and God’s. I hope you will encounter here matters to think and pray about, to argue with friends and family about, thoughts that will sometimes keep you awake at night and sometimes help you to sleep more peacefully. Perhaps they will help you look at your own faith differently. The success of any short book like this is measured by whether it makes you want to search out more of Bonhoeffer’s wisdom from his own writings and to learn more about his witness to God’s grace in a world torn by human folly.


About the Author
Wayne Whitson Floyd is Visiting Professor of Theology and Director of the Bonhoeffer Center, Lutheran Theological Seminary, Philadelphia. He is General Editor of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition, and Canon Theologian at Cathedral Church of St. Stephen, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.


Excerpted from The Wisdom and Witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wayne W. Floyd. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Central to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s own spirituality and theology—indeed the key to the wisdom and witness of his life and writings—was his awareness of the social nature of human beings. We are created, Bonhoeffer believed, to be in relationship with one another in all that we are and do; we were made for community. Our social relationships are grounded in our relationship with God, who is essentially a relationship as well—the relationships of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Our most important experience of such godly relationships for Bonhoeffer was the community of the church, which he understood to be God’s way of continuing to exist throughout history in the midst of human life—the very way that God’s image continues to be manifest most authentically on earth. Yet he is clear about the care with which we must say this. The danger, of course, is that we make an idol of the church—confusing it with God, making God in its image. The wonder of the church, however, is that if we allow ourselves within that community to be formed into the image of God, becoming the body of Christ, we will learn there to see Christ in one another. As members of that body, we will become icons of Christ, revealing the divine image for the sake of the world. Incarnate Worldliness Christ is present in his church today. This church is no ideal church, but a reality in the world, a bit of the world reality. The secularity of the church follows from the incarnation of Christ. The church, like Christ, has become world. It is a denial of the real humanity of Jesus and also heretical to take the concrete church as only a phantom church or an illusion. It is entirely world. This means that it is subjected to all the weakness and suffering of the world. The church can at times, like Christ himself, be without a roof over its head. This must be so. For the sake of real people, the church must be thoroughly worldly. It is a worldly reality for our sakes. Real secularity consists in the church’s being able to renounce all privileges and all its property but never Christ’s word and the forgiveness of sins. With Christ and the forgiveness of sins to fall back on, the church is free to give up everything else. —“The Nature of the Church,” Testament to Freedom, 86–87 One of the happy surprises in Bonhoeffer’s writings is his recovery of the importance of Christianity’s theology of incarnation: the claim that in Jesus of Nazareth we have encountered, as the Nicene Creed puts it, “very God of very God.” God’s own self, the second person of the Trinity, has come to dwell in the midst of God’s good creation. Or as Bonhoeffer puts it quite directly: “Christ has become world.” This theme was to be crucial to Bonhoeffer’s witness of authentic faith in the face of the threats of Nazism. It is just this incarnate Christ who is, Bonhoeffer wrote already in 1932, “present in his church today,” present in a church-community that is itself “a reality in the world, a bit of the world reality.” The church can be faithful precisely because it shares with Christ the reality of the world in which God has chosen to become present and manifest. Because God affirmed the world by choosing to become enfleshed—incarnate—within it, so can the church, as itself wholly a part of this world, become the place where Christ can be encountered as present today. The church, then, is privileged by its very secularity, its worldliness. This does not, however, guarantee the church wealth, security, or privilege. Rather, it guarantees that the church will suffer within the world the same fate that was Christ’s. Yet in its weakness, suffering, and vulnerability, the church can become again and again the place where Christ’s forgiving presence becomes known.

FROM THE PUBLISHER