DESCRIPTION:

The aim of this course is for students to understand key motifs of Bonhoeffer's theology and ethics and be able to explain and evaluate them. We will seek to understand how Bonhoeffer's ethics and his theology are Christ-centered and mutually interwoven, and how they relate to the struggle of the church with cultural accommodation in his time and our time. We will also seek to appreciate Bonhoeffer's spirituality in pursuit of deepening our own spirituality and identity as Christians.

Many are finding Bonhoeffer deeply helpful for developing their identity in a time of scattered and fragmented identity. They believe that by letting Christ be the center, we find key dimensions of the clarification of church identity personal identity sought by Christians in our time.

The course will meet twice weekly for ninety-minute sessions. Lecture and dialogue will be combined with some small-group discussion.

The instructor will indicate some portions of the reading as centrally important, some as medium in importance, and some as less important, in order to help students allocate their time wisely.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Discipleship. Fortress, 2001.

________. Ethics. Simon Schuster Touchstone Book, 1995.

________. Letters and Papers from Prison. Macmillan, 1972.

De Gruchy, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Kelly, Geffrey and Burton Nelson. The Cost of Moral Leadership: The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Eerdmans, 2002.

Students may choose to write a journal in dialogue with reading, or to write a paper in dialogue with Bonhoeffer, in either case not longer than twenty pages in length. There will be an in-class open-book essay on each Bonhoeffer book that we read.

None.

Elective.

None.