Religionless Christianity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer in troubled times - By Jeffrey C. Pugh

The departure point of the analysis presented in this article is a poem written by Tadeusz Różewicz learning to walk (nauka chodzenia). The protagonist of the poem is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who created the theory of “religionless Christianity”. According to Bonhoeffer, a modern Christian has to immerse himself/herself in the “godless” world so that – in tandem with the Saviour – he/she can be experience the final abandonment. The author of this article tries to prove that the theology of Bonhoeffer had a great impact on Różewicz, making him reconsider his viewpoint on faith. Due to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the poet also found a solution for a basic contradiction that was explicated in the famous poem entitled Bez (Without): “life without god is possible / life without god is impossible”.

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The Sky Is Not the Limit

Creation and Religious Pluralism ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198856665.003.0004 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 60-75

Author(s):

David Cheetham

Keyword(s):

Dietrich Bonhoeffer ◽

Cognitive Faculties ◽

Religionless Christianity ◽

Doctrine Of Creation ◽

Religious Other ◽

Natural Life

In this chapter, we engage with the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We seek to build on Bonhoeffer’s comment that ‘God’s “beyond” is not the beyond of our cognitive faculties. The transcendence of epistemological theory has nothing to do with the transcendence of God. God is beyond in the midst of our life.’ The chapter addresses the early faultlines in Bonhoeffer’s thought, especially the themes of Mündigkeit, Sicut Deus, penultimacy, ‘natural life’ and creaturehood, evidenced in his Ethics as well as Creation and Fall. The affirmation of this-worldliness and religionless Christianity finds a more profound rendition in the doctrine of creation and creaturehood. The invitation to the religious other is a ‘call to creaturehood’ and to live etsi deus non daretur.

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Bonhoeffer, Dietrich (1906–45)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy ◽

10.4324/9780415249126-k006-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Jean-Loup Seban

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Political Action ◽

Modern World ◽

Christian Belief ◽

Dietrich Bonhoeffer ◽

National Socialist ◽

Confessing Church ◽

Imitation Of Christ ◽

The World ◽

Religionless Christianity

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a twentieth-century Lutheran theologian who associated Christian belief and political action in an exemplary fashion. His part in the struggle of the Confessing Church and of the German resistance against the National-Socialist dictatorship cost him his life. Christocentric and ecclesiocentric, he stressed personal and collective piety and revived the idea of the imitation of Christ; the concepts of obedience and of the suffering God are central to his view. His Ethik (1949) was widely influential; in it, he argued that Christians should not retreat from the world, but have a duty to act within it. His answer to the secularization of the modern world was a ‘religionless Christianity’, a communocentric, pietistic, personal discipline.

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