Peace and Violence in the Ethics of Dietrich Bonhoeffer PDF Download

Author: Trey Palmisano
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498287735
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
Not many theologians have had as great an impact on the study of peace and violence as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was labeled an Enemy of the State and eventually executed in April 1945. In this book, Trey Palmisano examines the theological connection between peace and violence across a range of Bonhoeffer's writings, sermons, and letters. Despite the challenges Bonhoeffer experienced in his personal life and in the life of his country, Palmisano asserts that a strong consistency emerges in Bonhoeffer's approach to ethics that resonates in the positing of Christ as the center of all ethical discourse and orients one to the ever-present challenges of a changing world. Palmisano creates distance from former studies that sought to define Bonhoeffer as a committed pacifist, a situational pacifist, or one who compromised his values to accommodate an exception for violence. By prioritizing methodology as the key to interpreting Bonhoeffer's thought, Palmisano argues that the ethical dilemma thought to be caused by Bonhoeffer's actions is avoided. The result is one that creates an authentic ethical openness by responsiveness to Christ rather than Christian virtue, and frees the individual from redundancies of action derived from deeply embedded patterns of theological engagement.

Author: Stanley Hauerwas
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 149822296X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
""Folksy, eclectic, disarmingly humble, and astonishingly wide-ranging, Hauerwas offers us a provocative reading of Bonhoeffer that, not surprisingly, assimilates him closely to John Howard Yoder. At the same time, Hauerwas replies to recent criticisms of his work by Jeffrey Stout. Contending that truth depends on performance far more than on theory, Hauerwas steps forward as a pacifist gadfly for a more truly faithful church and a more recognizably democratic society."" --George Hunsinger, Princeton Theological Seminary ""This book shows how lively and fecund Hauerwas's thought remains. A dazzling performance, capable of entertaining and instructing professional theologians as much as those who think the world might be a better place without theologians in it."" --Paul J. Griffiths, University of Illinois at Chicago ""Stan Hauerwas has done it again! He is able skillfully to blend into his book the passion for truth and justice of two of his greatest influences, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Howard Yoder. He takes these heroic advocates for peace into his own present-day struggle for the soul of the American nation. Hauerwas, an admirable Christian pacifist himself, dares Christians to be the 'Jesus people' they claim to be and to follow Jesus into the gospel path of nonviolence."" --Geffrey B. Kelly, author of Liberating Faith: Bonhoeffer's Message for Today ""Never totally predictable. Always a fresh perspective. And yet once again in these essays--on narrative, politics, Bonhoeffer, and the church--we hear the engaging, discerning, and brilliant voice we have come to know as Stanley Hauerwas."" --Mark Thiessen Nation, Eastern Mennonite Seminary ""Contending with and learning from the witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose life is often thought to provide a Christian alternative to pacifism, Hauerwas deepens the account of Christian nonviolence he has been articulating for decades. His theology is strengthened and clarified by his encounter with the exemplary figure of Bonhoeffer."" --Alan Jacobs, Wheaton College ""Without loss of the provocative edge that has made him a vital and distinctive Christian voice, Hauerwas's Performing the Faith allows him to cast a retrospective eye on his work. At the same time, in a brilliant essay under the title of the book, he develops a profoundly important description of faithfulness."" --Dennis O'Brien, University of Rochester Stanley Hauerwas is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School, Duke University.

Author: Kevin O’Farrell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 056770940X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Engaging with the many debates about the meaning and character of Bonhoeffer's late resistance theology and action, particularly as it relates to his participation in the attempted coup d'état against Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a Theology of the Exception attends to Bonhoeffer's understanding of the exception. Resisting the common reduction of the exception to a political or ethical concept, O'Farrell argues that the exception for Bonhoeffer is an extraordinary moment in history that disarms persons, impinging on one's understanding of politics and ethics. Through a wide engagement with the Bonhoeffer corpus, this book claims that this leads to distinctive narrations of key concepts in Bonhoeffer's corpus: responsibility, the free venture, simple obedience, and action beyond the law. It also offers a different portrait of Bonhoeffer to contemporary narrations. The Bonhoeffer that emerges is neither a Niebuhrian realist, a pacifist, or a religious fanatic, but one who is impelled to act apart from the law without this action becoming arbitrary. This Bonhoeffer provides a hopeful political witness that seeks a world beyond the conflicts and divisions of this age.

Author: Mark Thiessen Nation
Publisher: Baker Academic
ISBN: 9780801039614
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Most of us think we know the moving story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life--a pacifist pastor turns anti-Hitler conspirator due to horrors encountered during World War II--but does the evidence really support this prevailing view? This pioneering work carefully examines the biographical and textual evidence and finds no support for the theory that Bonhoeffer abandoned his ethic of discipleship and was involved in plots to assassinate Hitler. In fact, Bonhoeffer consistently affirmed a strong stance of peacemaking from 1932 to the end of his life, and his commitment to peace was integrated with his theology as a whole. The book includes a foreword by Stanley Hauerwas.

Author: REGGIE L. WILLIAMS
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781481315852
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer publicly confronted Nazism and anti-Semitic racism in Hitler's Germany. The Reich's political ideology, when mixed with theology of the German Christian movement, turned Jesus into a divine representation of the ideal, racially pure Aryan and allowed race-hate to become part of Germany's religious life. Bonhoeffer provided a Christian response to Nazi atrocities. In this book author Reggie L. Williams follows Dietrich Bonhoeffer as he encounters Harlem's black Jesus. The Christology Bonhoeffer learned in Harlem's churches featured a black Christ who suffered with African Americans in their struggle against systemic injustice and racial violence--and then resisted. In the pews of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, under the leadership of Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Bonhoeffer was captivated by Christianity in the Harlem Renaissance. This Christianity included a Jesus who stands with the oppressed, against oppressors, and a theology that challenges the way God is often used to underwrite harmful unions of race and religion. Now featuring a foreword from world-renowned Bonhoeffer scholar Ferdinand Schlingensiepen as well as multiple updates and additions, Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus argues that Dietrich Bonhoeffer's immersion within the black American narrative was a turning point for him, causing him to see anew the meaning of his claim that obedience to Jesus requires concrete historical action. This ethic of resistance not only indicted the church of the German Volk, but also continues to shape the nature of Christian discipleship today.

Author: Petra Brown
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030056988
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Theologian. Conspirator. Martyr. Saint. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was killed in the waning days of World War II, having been implicated in the July 20th assassination attempt on Hitler. Since his death, Bonhoeffer’s life and writings have inspired contradictory responses. He is often seen as a model for Christian pacifist resistance, and more recently for violent direct political action. Bonhoeffer’s name has been invoked by violent anti-abortion protestors as well as political leaders calling for support on a ‘war on terror’ in the aftermath of 9/11. Petra Brown critically analyses Bonhoeffer’s writing preceding and during his conspiracy involvement, particularly his recurring concept of the ‘extraordinary.’ Brown examines this idea in light of ‘the state of exception,’ a concept coined by the one-time Nazi jurist and political theorist, Carl Schmitt. She also draws on the existentialist philosopher Sören Kierkegaard to consider what happens when discipleship is understood as obedience to a divine command. This book aims to complicate an unreflective admiration of Bonhoeffer’s decision for conspiracy, and draws attention to the potentially dangerous implications of his emerging political theology.

Author: Traugott Jähnichen
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643911068
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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This volume is the documentation of a workshop at the "Dietrich Bonhoeffer Centre for Public Theology" in Kigali, that took place in February 2018 and discussed what can be gained from Bonhoeffer's theology for contextual theologies in Africa as well as in Europe. The core feature of the workshop in February 2018 was a competition in which students from Butare/Huye presented the findings of their examination of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life and work. The prize-winning contributions are documented in this volume. Papers from the European perspective were contributed by doctoral candidates and students of the Ruhr University Bochum, and the chairing and commentary of the event was shared amongst Dr Clemens Wustmans (Berlin), Dr Christine Schliesser (Bern), the President of the Presbyterian Church in Rwanda, Dr Pascal Bataringaya (Kigali), the Dean of the Theological Faculty of the Protestant Institut of Arts and Social Sciences, Olivier Munyansanga, Ph.D. (Huye/Rwanda), and Prof. Dr Traugott Jähnichen (Bochum).

Author: Mark Thiessen Nation
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725295083
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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“Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself.” These are words Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke to his brother a few months before he began training future pastors in the ways of discipleship. For several years he had been speaking out against war. Near the beginning of the anti-Semitic Nazi regime, he called on his fellow Christians to speak out against a state that was engaging in oppressive measures, to respond to victims of oppression, and to be willing to suffer, as a church, if it was required to stop such oppression. His vision for training disciples was rooted in pure doctrine, serious worship, a new kind of monasticism, and the Sermon on the Mount. Bonhoeffer was convinced that through the living presence of Jesus and the explosive teachings of the Sermon on the Mount “lies the force that can blow all this hocus-pocus sky-high—like fireworks, leaving only a few burnt-out shells behind.” This is the legacy of this extraordinary theologian that this book seeks to recover—exploring how this was lived out in a world full of Nazis.

Author: Lisa Sowle Cahill
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 1506457797
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
This book is a contribution to the Christian ethics of war and peace. It advances peacebuilding as a needed challenge to and expansion of the traditional framework of just-war theory and pacifism. It builds on a critical reading of historical landmarks from the Bible through Augustine, Aquinas, the Reformers, Christian peace movements, and key modern figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, and recent popes. Similar to just-war theory, peacebuilding is committed to social change and social justice but includes some theorists and practitioners who accept the use of force in extreme cases of self-defense or humanitarian intervention. Unlike just-war theorists, they do not see the justification of war as part of the Christian mission. Unlike traditional pacifists, they do see social change as necessary and possible and, as such, requiring Christian participation in public efforts. Cahill argues that transformative Christian social participation is demanded by the gospel and the example of Jesus, and can produce the avoidance, resolution, or reduction of conflicts. And yet obstacles are significant, and expectations must be realistic. Decisions to use armed force against injustice, even when they meet the criteria of just war, will be ambiguous and tragic from a Christian perspective. Regarding war and peace, the focus of Christian theology, ethics, and practice should not be on justifying war but on practical and hopeful interreligious peacebuilding.

Author: Robert W. Brimlow
Publisher: Brazos Press
ISBN: 1587430657
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Philosopher Robert Brimlow struggles with questions like Must Christians always turn the other cheek and resist violence? and Is it ever justifiable for Christians to retaliate in the face of evil?