Bonhoeffer’s Theology through His Poetry
Edited by
Bernd Wannenwetsch
A Continuum imprint | |
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Copyright © Bernd Wannenwetsch and contributors, 2009
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-10: HB: 0-567-03222-1
ISBN-13: HB: 978-0-567-03222-5
1. Introduction: Who is Dietrich Bonhoeffer for Us Today?
Bernd Wannenwetsch
2. ‘Who Am I?’: Human Identity and the Spiritual Disciplines in the Witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Michael Northcott
3. ‘Past’: Bonhoeffer’s ‘Past’
Oliver O’Donovan
4. ‘Success and Failure’: Public Disasters, Works of Love, and the Inwardness of Faithfulness
Brian Brock
5. ‘By Powers of Good’: Bonhoeffer’s Last Poem: Texts and Contexts
Nancy Lukens and Renate Bethge
6. ‘The Friend’: Reflections on Friendship and Freedom
Stanley Hauerwas
7. ‘Voices in the Night’: Human Solidarity and Eschatological Hope
Philip G. Ziegler
8. ‘Stations on the Way to Freedom’: The Presence of God—The Freedom of Disciples
Hans G. Ulrich
9. ‘Christians and Pagans’: Towards a Trans-Religious Second Naïveté or How to Be a Christological Creature
Bernd Wannenwetsch
10. ‘Jonah’: Guilt and Promise
Stephen Plant
11. ‘The Death of Moses’: Why Moses?
Craig J. Slane
Translations taken from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s poetry are from
— Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 8 (ed. John W. de Gruchy; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, in preparation); copyright © Fortress Press. Used by permission of Augsburg Fortress Publishers.
— Letters and Papers from Prison (ed. Eberhard Bethge; London: SCM Press, enlarged edn, 1971); copyright © SCM Press and Simon & Schuster Press. Used by permission of SCM Press and Simon & Schuster Press.
— The Prison Poems of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (ed. and trans. Edwin Robertson; Guildford, Surrey: Eagle Press, 1998); copyright © Eagle Publishing Ltd. Used by permission of Eagle Publishing Ltd.
— Widerstand und Ergebung (eds Christian Gremmels, Eberhard Bethge, Renate Bethge, with Ilse Tödt; Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998); copyright © Chr. Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Used by permission of Gütersloher Verlagshaus.
Other quotations from Letters and Papers from Prison (ed. Eberhard Bethge; London: SCM Press, enlarged edn, 1971); copyright © SCM Press and Simon & Schuster Press. Used by permission of SCM Press and Simon & Schuster Press.
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About Who Am I?: Bonhoeffer’s Theology through His PoetryPoetry is often noted as a particularly suitable medium for understanding the connection between theology and biography. This is particularly exciting in the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the poems he wrote during his imprisonment by the Nazis. Although any one of his 10 poems should be read within their respective historical and biographical context, they are also robust, self-sufficient pieces of work that cannot be “explained” by the biographical and theological prose that surrounds them. They rather serve as a creative, and perhaps sometimes even critical, interlocutor to these contexts. This is why the contributors to this volume have not been asked to explain the poems but to facilitate this conversation: the conversation between the individual poems themselves, between the reader and the poems, and between the poems and Bonhoeffer’s life and theology. These poems lend themselves as an entry point into Bonhoeffer’s theology, in that each one resonates with a particular central theological concept that Bonhoeffer was developing during his prison years. Themes and concepts such as “friendship,” “religion,” “identity,” “freedom,” “representative action” and others are not only represented in these poems but often expressed in the dense and compelling fashion that only poetic language affords. As such, they deserve the thorough and imaginative engagement of the international lineup of first-class theological authors gathered in this book. |
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