In this volume, an international group of scholars present Bonhoeffer's thought as a model of Christian thinking that can help shape a distinctly religious philosophy. They examine the philosophical influences on Bonhoeffer and explore the new perspectives his work brings to the perennial challenges of faith and reason, philosophy and theology, and the problem of evil. --from publisher's description.

What does it mean to be human? The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer thought deeply about this questions out of a desire to understand the importance of Christ and the incarnation for modern culture. His conviction that Christ died for a new humanity is at the core of his theological anthropology. This collection assembles a distinguished and international group of scholars to examine Bonhoeffer's understanding of human sociality. From the introduction of his dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, where he notes 'the social intention of all the basic Christian concepts', to his final writings in prison, where he describes Christian faith as being for others, the theme of human sociality runs throughout Bonhoeffer's works. This volume examines Bonhoeffer's rich resources for thinking about what it means to be human, to be the church, to be a disciple, and to be ethically responsible in our contemporary world. Being Human, Becoming Human is vital reading for Bonhoeffer scholars as well as for those invested in theological debates regarding the social nature of human beings.

What does the cross, both as a historical event and a symbol of religious discourse, tell us about human beings? In this provocative book, Brian Gregor draws together a hermeneutics of the self—through Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Taylor—and a theology of the cross—through Luther, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and Jüngel—to envision a phenomenology of the cruciform self. The result is a bold and original view of what philosophical anthropology could look like if it took the scandal of the cross seriously instead of reducing it into general philosophical concepts.

"The authors of this volume discuss specific philosophical and theological ideas in view of Bonhoeffer's intellectual formation. As such, all the studies converge on the thought of Bonhoeffer as a whole in order to illuminate the growth and maturation of his theology."--BOOK JACKET.

Koert Verhagen not only provides the first in-depth treatment of how the doctrine of justification crucially frames Bonhoeffer's approach to questions surrounding human being and action, he also addresses the ethical implications of retrieving this perspective for the Church today. Drawing on his early academic theology and his later ethics of discipleship, Verhagen argues that Bonhoeffer's emphasis on the social implications of justification leads to an understanding of human existence that is fundamentally relational. Along the way, he draws Bonhoeffer's thinking on this front into conversation with Luther, German idealism, the Nazi Weltanschauung, and contemporary Pauline scholarship. With an eye to the contemporary, practical value of Bonhoeffer's theology, Verhagen concludes by making the case that the retrieval of justification's social implications provides a critical corrective to ecclesial responses to white supremacy.

In the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer came to Union Theological Seminary looking for a cloud of witnesses. What he found instead disturbed, angered, and perplexed him. There is no theology here, he wrote to a German colleague. The New York churches, if possible, were even worse: They preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed... namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life. Bonhoeffer acts for American Protestantism as an Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America, a cultural and political analysis of the new republic, appeared a century prior. But what the Berlin theologian found was, if possible, more significant than the observations of the French aristocrat: Protestantism in America was a Protestantism without Reformation. Bonhoeffer's America explicates these criticisms, then turns to consider what they tell us about Bonhoeffer's own theological commitments and whether, in fact, his judgments about America were accurate. Joel Looper first brings Bonhoeffer's reformational and Barthian commitments into relief against the work of several Union theologians and the broader American theological milieu. He then turns to Bonhoeffer's own genealogy of American Protestantism to explore why it developed as it did: steeped in dissenting influences, the American church became one that resisted critique by the word of God. American Protestantism is not Protestant, Bonhoeffer shows us, not like the churches that emerged from the Continental Reformation. This difference gave rise to the secularization of the American church. Bonhoeffer's claims against the church in the United States, Looper contends, hold strong, even after considering objections to this narrative--Bonhoeffer's experience with Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and the possibility that Bonhoeffer, during his time in Tegel Prison, abandoned the theological commitments that undergirded his critique. Bonhoeffer's America concludes that what Bonhoeffer saw in America, the twenty-first-century American church should strive to see for itself.

The fresh, critical translation of the volume is now available in paper. Act and Being, written in 1929-1930 as Bonhoeffer's second dissertation, deals with the questions of consciousness and conscience in theology from the perspective of the Reformation insight about the origin of human sinfulness in the "heart turned in upon itself and thus open neither to the revelation of God nor to the encounter with the neighbor.