Dietrich Bonhoeffer maintained, is what it means to read the Bible seriously, to prefer its thoughts to our own, and thus to “find ourselves again” (No Rusty Swords, 185–86). Bonhoeffer was speaking—prophetically, one might say—at the Berlin Youth Conference in April 1932. At that time, his was a nearly isolated Christian voice speaking publicly and persistently against the rise of National Socialism. Bonhoeffer’s permanent legacy as a theologian has been to show that in the modern world, as in Josiah’s
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