In the summer of 1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer delivered powerful lectures that insisted Christians encounter Jesus Christ as a living person today, as well as in history and church life. Formulated in the face of the new Nazi regime, a decisive moment in Bonhoeffer's own commitment to the Confessing Church, his words drew attention to the living Christ as always the humiliated man for others, the lodestar of Christian commitment and service. This volume, well introduced and contextualized by Nessan and Wind, consists in excerpts from the 1933 lecturesstrikingly relevant todayalong with other, contemporary writings from him and about him.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian. He was also a participant in the German Resistance movement against Nazism, a founding member of the Confessing Church. His involvement in plans by members of the Abwehr (the German Military Intelligence Office) to assassinate Adolf Hitler resulted in his arrest in April 1943 and his subsequent execution by hanging in April 1945, shortly before the war's end.
Overshadowed by his life and death, his theology and his view of Christianity's role in the secular world has nevertheless remained very influential.
He seems to have undergone something of a personal conversion from a theologian primarily attracted to the intellectual side of Christianity to a dedicated man of faith, resolved to carry out the teaching of Christ as he found it revealed in the Gospels.
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