Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works

Volume 11 in the sixteen-volume Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, Ecumenical, Academic, and Pastoral Work: 1931-1932, provides a comprehensive translation of Bonhoeffer's important writings from 1931 to 1932, with extensive commentary about their historical context and theological significance. This volume covers the significant period of Bonhoeffer's entry into the international ecumenical world and the final months, before the beginning of the National Socialist dictatorship.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the most influential Christian martyrs in history, bequeathed to humanity a legacy of theological creativity and spirituality that continues to intrigue people from a variety of backgrounds. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, a sixteen volume series, offers a fresh, critical translation of Bonhoeffer's writings, with introductions, annotations, and interpretations. The stimulus for the writing of Life Together was the closing of the preacher's seminary at Finkenwalde. The treatise contains Bonhoeffer's thoughts about the nature of Christian community based on the common life that he and his seminarians experienced at the seminary and in the "Brother's House" there. Bonhoeffer completed the writing of Life Together in 1938.

This book discloses a great deal of Bonhoeffer's family context, social world, and cultural milieu. Events from his life are, recounted in a way that embodies and illuminates his theology. Characters and situations that represent Nazi types and attitudes are a form of social criticism and help to explain Bonhoeffer's participation in the resistance movement and the plot to kill Adolf Hitler, for which he was, hanged.

The crown jewel of Bonhoeffer's body of work, Ethicsis the culmination of his theological and personal odyssey. Based on careful reconstruction of the manuscripts, freshly and expertly translated and annotated, this new critical edition features an insightful Introduction by Clifford Green and an Afterword from the German edition's editors. Though caught up in the vortex of momentous forces in the Nazi period, Bonhoeffer systematically envisioned a radically Christocentric, incarnational ethic for a post-war world, purposefully recasting Christians' relation to history, politics, and public life. This edition allows scholars, theologians, ethicists, and serious Christians to appreciate the cogency and relevance of Bonhoeffer's vision.

Freshly translated from the German critical edition, Discipleship provides a more accurate rendering of the text and extensive aids and commentary to clarify the meaning, context, and reception of this work and its attempt to resist the Nazi ideology, then infecting German Christian churches.

Despite Dietrich Bonhoeffer's prior theological achievements and writings, it was his correspondence and notes from prison that electrified the postwar world six years after his death in 1945. The materials gathered and selected by his friend Eberhard Bethge in Letters and Papers from Prison not only brought Bonhoeffer to a wide and appreciative readership, especially, in North America, they also introduced to a broad readership his novel and exciting ideas of, religionless Christianity, his open and honest theological appraisal of Christian doctrines, and his sturdy faith in face of uncertainty and doubt.

Nearly all in translation for the first time, these documents shed special light on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's work from the time of his underground seminary teaching, through his sojourn at New York City, and his return to the church struggle in Germany.