Why Bonhoeffer’s vision for seminary life is so timely

Why Bonhoeffer’s vision for seminary life is so timely August 3, 2015

Paul House has published a new book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s underground seminary that could hardly be more relevant today.

It is Bonhoeffer’s Seminary Vision: A Case for Costly Discipleship and Life Together (Crossway).  This week I will be sharing highlights from it.  Here are a few.

1. In 1933 the government of Germany published a statement, known as the “Aryan paragraph,” that banned non-Aryans from government service.  The leadership of the German Protestant churches did not repudiate this, and in fact just months after published their own “Aryan Paragraph” banning those of Jewish descent from the ranks of clergy, theological faculties, and religious educators.

Bonhoeffer was horrified, and urged his fellow Christians to depart from this state church.  He said this was no longer Christianity, and theologians should publicly denounce this heresy.  “The sooner the conflict comes out into the open, the better.  The greatest danger of all would be in trying to conceal this” (p. 37).

Most church leaders did not want to make such a break.  But Bonhoeffer said the Aryan paragraph meant the German church ceased to be a church.

Bonhoeffer wrote Karl Barth, “I know that most think you will counsel us to wait until we are thrown out [of the state church].  However, some of us have already been thrown out, namely, the Jewish Christians, and the same will soon happen to others, on the pretext of reasons that have nothing to do with the church.” (39)

Bonhoeffer urged his fellow church leaders to make a restatement of the faith that would “distinguish between the ‘true’ and ‘false’ Church” (39).  He capitalized that last word, perhaps to suggest the difference between heretical churches and the orthodox universal Church of the ages.

2. Bonhoeffer lost faith in the German university.  He came, quite early on, to recognize that the university system undermined Christian faith and encouraged an intellectual autonomy at war with all tradition.  In 1934 he wrote Barth, “I no longer believe in the university; in fact I never really have believed in it–to your chagrin!  The next generation of pastors, these days, ought to be trained entirely in church-monastic schools, where the pure doctrine, the Sermon on the Mount, and worship are taken seriously–which for all of these things is simply n9ot the case at the university and under the present circumstances is impossible.”

More anon.


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