Untitled

Tripp Fuller

In Episode 02 of The Rise of Bonhoeffer, we journey with Dietrich to New York City for a year as a Postdoctoral post at Union Theological Seminary. This school year in New York radically changed him, but the spark that lit his theological imagination was outside the classroom. When he arrived in NYC, he brought an overtly intellectual faith he had used to justify a nationalist and militaristic faith.

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EPISODE OVERVIEW: Through his encounter with the Harlem Renaissance, Abyssinian Baptist Church, and a road trip through the South, along with power friendships with people like Frank Fisher and Jean Lasserre, his vision of just what a disciple was called to be was transformed. This German who came contemplating the possibility of killing for blood and soil came to see himself anew as a disciple of Jesus. Jesus called his followers to bear a cross and not build one, to love their enemies and not kill them, and to practice solidarity with the suffering and exploited and not race, creed, or nation. Bonhoeffer came to discover that Jesus can always be found in the face of the Other. Without his time in New York and these transformative experiences, we would never have the Bonhoeffer we discover in Discipleship, who says:

“It is the great mistake of a false Protestant ethic to assume loving Christ can be the same as loving one’s native country, or friendship or profession, that the better righteousness and things internal are the same… It is the shining light, the city on a hill. It is the way of self-denial, perfect love, perfect purity, perfect truthfulness, perfect nonviolence. Here is undivided love for one’s enemies, loving those who love no one and who no one loves. It is love for one’s religious, political, or personal enemy. In all of this it is the way which found its fulfillment in the cross of Jesus Christ… What is unique in Christianity is the cross, which allows Christians to step beyond the world in order to receive victory over the world.”

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