Bonhoeffer agrees with Barth that there is a contingency in revelation, and that it encounters one ‘from outside.’ But he rejects the formal understanding of God’s freedom in revelation. He deliberately replaces dialectical theology’s purely actualistic view of revelation with an ontological or, more precisely, socio-ontological interpretation. The theological presupposition for this is his understanding of the divine freedom. In the Word, God discloses that divine freedom is precisely freedom for