most confident when speaking of the gospel as if telling children “a fairy tale about a foreign country.”16 During his foreign sojourn, Bonhoeffer exercised his academic muscles by revising his dissertation for publication and writing a series of lectures such as “The Tragedy of Prophecy and Its Lasting Meaning” and “Jesus Christ and the Essence of Christianity.” These evening talks contained seeds that would come to fruition in Bonhoeffer’s mature theology, such as “Christ is not the bringer of
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