Customer Reviews

Who Is Christ for Us? (Facets (Fortress Press).)

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This book contains excerpts from Bonhoeffer's Christology lectures in 1933. The translation by Craig Nessan is very good BUT these are just excerpts! The Christology lectures by Bonhoeffer are much too dense and complex to understand without the full text and the best notes. You are much better off reading the full version and not just excerpts in the 1978 translation Christ the Center. Better yet, get the critical authoritative version Berlin: 1932-1933 (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 12) which will be released September 1, 2009.

If however you are doing an academic paper on the Christology lectures by Bonhoeffer, you may want to read the two essays about this material that begin this book.
- Renate Wind, "Church Struggle and Contemplation: A Rediscovery of Bonhoeffer's Political Christology," pp. 5-19.
- Craig L. Nessan, "The American Reception: Introduction to Bonhoeffer's Christ the Center," pp. 20-30.

This volume also contains a few excerpts from Letters and Papers in Prison, the Barmen Theological Declaration, and an assortment of other quotes about Christology from other authors (Kurt Marti, Bertolt Brecht,Rose Auslaender, Martin Buber, Shalom Ben-Chorin, Hildegard of Bingen and Martin Luther) without dates or explanation of their significance. This does not help you understand Bonhoeffer.

Do we ever ask the question about who Christ really is for us? Dietrich Bonhoeffer constantly asked this question through out his life. In John 21, Jesus tells Peter how later on in his life he will go places where he would not want to be. The circumstances of Bonhoeffer's life during the Nazi era lead him to experience this most fully. Christ was guiding him to speak the truth to a world caught up in a big lie.