Customer Reviews

Creation and Fall Temptation: Two Biblical Studies

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you are already familiar with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the wonderfully perceptive German theologian who was killed in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, then this book will serve to deepen your understanding of Bonhoeffer's theology. If this is your introduction to Bonhoeffer, then you are in for a delightful surprise. In his short, but dense, analysis of the Genesis story of humanity's creation and fall, Bonhoeffer asks the reader to view the familiar with new eyes - with our eyes fixed firmly on God, not on traditional readings of Genesis. Creation reveals much about God - our sovereign God of life, who worked and rested, and offered the same blessings of work and rest to us. Creation also reveals much about humanity, our desire to be God, and our guilt about disobeying God. In the course of his delightful book, Bonhoeffer wrestles with the fundamental issues of good and evil, of temptation, of the graceful limits imposed by God, and humanity's "freedom." If you, too, have ever wrestled with such questions, this book will guide you and challenge you in your thinking.

These are two of the most lucid and insightful commentaries I have ever read. Bonhoeffer moves beyond the usually mundane issues often dealt with when discussing the creation and fall. Instead, he places the focus on God and on how the creation and fall effect our lives as human beings.

Temptation is a poignant counterpoint to the story of the fall. It points the way through the darkness of our everyday lives and to the one who is the Way, the Truth and the Life...Jesus Christ.

Bonhoeffer reads like Plato philosophy. Part of this is due it being translated from German, and part is because he's indeed waxing very deeply philosophical about Genesis. It's fairly amazing he can discuss such a small passage for 144 pages, and at times it feels like he's going in circles repeating himself.
His ideas, though, are intriguing. He reads alot into each sentence individually, and then how it fits into the whole. He finds inconsistencies, and then explains them away. I'm not a religious person, but I feel the book gave me a better ability to understand Biblical literature at a deeper level.

I give this book 5 stars for the quality of thought, not the ease of reading. One should start reading Bonheoffer with his great "The Cost of Discipleship." It has been decades since I have read any Bonheoffer when he was all the rage. One must remember that he was first and last a theologian, not a philosopher. He is a wonderful expositor and thinker within a Christian framework, so do not expect him to grapple with fundamental questions without his focus on God and Jesus Christ. His is a creationist approach that explains by elimination of certain questions. "Thus it is impossible to ask why the world was created, about God's plan or about the necessity of creation. These questions are finally answered and disposed of as godless questions by the sentence, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." This type of thinking that will not allow question because they are "godless" does not belittle his arguments, but definitely puts him in the camp of the Christian theologian, and he must be encountered there. Bonhoeffer is a journey every Christian should take at one time or another. O yes, he was a German Lutheran pastor whose life is perhaps more interesting than even his writings. Had he not died in a Nazi concentration camp, he most likely would have expanded his ideas even more. Bonhoeffer was open to new ideas within his Christian framework which makes him intellectually appealing, and his martyrdom makes his life an even more powerful demonstration of his ethics.

Nowadays people generally know Dietrich Bonhoeffer--if they know him at all--as the Lutheran pastor who died in a Nazi concentration camp for his role in the July 20, 1944 plot against Hitler.

But Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as having been some kind of a saint during the Second World War, was a wonderful theologian, and this book contains two of his best works, studies of the biblical book of Genesis which explore what it means to be made in God's image and yet be limited--what is the difference between being "like" God, as the serpent promises, and being made in the image of God, as the Bible asserts we are?

What is the role of our limits in bringing grace, and how does limitlessness, man (and woman) storming Heaven, underlie sin?

This great book with its two small studies brings the reader in contact with Bonhoeffer's mind and spirit, the qualities that illuminated his studies and his practical action both.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian, as well as a participant in the German Resistance movement against Nazism. He was hung for his part in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

"Creation and Fall" is a set of lectures delivered in the winter semester of 1932-1933 at the University of Berlin; "Temptation" is a daily series of Bible studies that Bonhoeffer conducted from April 12-17, 1937, for a reunion of clergy from the Confessing Church (i.e., Protestant church in Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to efforts to "Nazify" the German Protestant church).

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"In the language of the Bible, freedom is not something man has for himself but something he has for others."
"We do not rule because we do not know the world as God's creation, and because we do not receive out dominion as God-given but grasp it for ourselves... There is no dominion without serving God... Without God, without his brother, man loses the earth."
"It will never be possible simply to blame the devil who has led us astray. The devil will always be in the place where I ought to have lived and did not wish to live as God's creature in God's world."
"Thus every temptation is a revelation of sin, and the accuser stands there more righteous than God; for he has uncovered sin. He compels God to judge."
"(T)he child's question: `Why doesn't God simply strike Satan dead?' demands an answer... So must Satan unwillingly serve God's plan of redemption; with Satan rests death and sin, but with God life and righteousness."

Those who think that Bonhoeffer was positive towards the Scriptures should read and analyze this book. He starts from a strictly human perspective that we cannot think the unthinkable, which is God and the creation. This makes the understanding of man dubious at best. God is in a void, the creation is in a void, and man is in a void. The start of Calvin is much better: we know man because we know God. That knowledge is immediate, instinctive and intuitive. There is no separating the knowledge of God and man, and we need salvation by Christ as found in the Scriptures. The Bonhoeffer book is not lightweight, to say the least. It is extremely hard reading. One does not approach the neo-orthodox theologians without a background in philosophy--including the Greeks and Kant, theology, the Bible, and the history of higher criticism in Germany. Unfortunately, most American evangelicals do not have even the beginnings of this knowledge. I cannot speak as an expert, skilled, or intelligent. But Bonhoeffer would seem to be using "contingency thinking." That is, all is essentially accidental, and no sure, objective standard for thought can be found. That he was a "Christian," cannot obviate the questions about his starting point in natural reason, his seeming abuse of simple Scriptural meanings that everyday Christians employ, or his reluctance to define the Scriptures themselves. I have read only briefly, but feel I should warn those who idolize Bonhoeffer for his noble life to consider reading what he actually wrote.