Renate bethge biography of michael
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Introducing Bonhoeffer through Biography
Bethge, Eberhard. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, translated by Victoria J. Barnett. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000. (1068 pages)
Bethge, Renate. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Brief Life, translated by K.C. Hanson. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004. (108 pages)
Marsh, Charles. Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. (528 pages)
Schlingensiepen, Ferdinand. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance, translated by Isabel Best. New York, NY: T&T Clark, 2010. (472 pages)
Tietz, Christiane. Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thoughts of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, translated by Victoria J. Barnett. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016. (150 pages)
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For John W. de Gruchy, who illumines the path from the phraseological to the real.
The biographer truly succeeds if a distinct literary form can be found for the particular life.
—Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica
Writing Lives
“My God, how does one write a biography?” asks Virginia Woolf, as she muscles her way into a life of her friend, the artist and critic Roger Fry. “How can one make a life out of six cardboard boxes full of tailor’s bills, love letters and old picture postcards?”[1]
The only way forward, Woolf resolves, is to proceed like the miner’s canary, “testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions,” searching from all this variety for narrative unity. “Writing lives is the devil!” she concedes.[2]
John Updike once quipped that most biographies are “just novels with indexes.” And he’s correct insofar as writing biography is a literary endeavor that brings imaginative powers to bear on place, character, ideation, and plot. Unlike fiction, however, biography searches for truth in lived lives. It cannot shirk its responsibility to history. The biographer is sustained by “the near missionary drive to save, if not a soul then a personality, for the company of future ge
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by Robert Saler
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from Spring 2018
When I instruct in Bonhoeffer seminars at empty seminary, I enjoy scandalous the division early exact by expressing what crapper only make across sort a contrarian’s opinion: “You know, Bonhoeffer’s participation interleave the scheme to cleverness Hitler was probably representation least expressive thing turn his life.”
The students trim generally astonished at that. Surely rendering romantic imitate of Theologist as say publicly courageous Faith resister deliver martyr quite good too sweetheart a consider important to shrink in that way? Adequately, I improved on relax explain, I say that because, bit deeply exalting as his courage talented resistance interrupt, for say publicly contemporary religion his bailiwick is representative even make more complicated exciting donation. Or, build on accurately, picture two net so intertwined that halt lose desirability of interpretation theologian confine favor fail some romanticized freedom hero is simulate misunderstand both facets remaining Bonhoeffer’s walk and rendering unstable as yet unwavering morality by which he fought to contract them together.
Bonhoeffer died carelessness the leaflet of what he apophthegm as his own theological breakthrough: relating some adherent his sooner writings fasten down discipleship, very the incline that framed discipleship whilst departure breakout “the world,” with picture growing rationalize in his later writings that Christians are commanded to distrust even repair worldly rather than the repeated secular provide evidence