Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian and anti-Nazi dissident who was a key founding member of the Confessing Church. His writings on Christianity's role in the secular world have become widely influential; his 1937 book The Cost of Discipleship is described as a modern classic. Apart from his theological writings, Bonhoeffer was known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, including vocal opposition to Adolf Hitler's euthanasia program and genocidal persecution of the Jews. He was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Tegel Prison for one-and-a-half years. Later, he was transferred to Flossenbürg concentration camp.
Karl Barth was a Swiss Reformed theologian. Barth is best known for his commentary The Epistle to the Romans, his involvement in the Confessing Church, including his authorship of the Barmen Declaration, and especially his unfinished multi-volume theological summa the Church Dogmatics. Barth's influence expanded well beyond the academic realm to mainstream culture, leading him to be featured on the cover of Time on 20 April 1962.
The oldest surviving Hebrew Bible manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, date to c. the 2nd century BCE. Some of these scrolls are presently stored at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. The oldest text of the entire Bible, including the New Testament, is the Codex Sinaiticus dating from the 4th century CE, with its Old Testament a copy of a Greek translation known as the Septuagint. The oldest extant manuscripts of the vocalized Masoretic Text date to the 9th century CE. With the exception of a few biblical sections in the Nevi'im, virtually no biblical text is contemporaneous with the events it describes.
Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York (UTS) is a private ecumenical Christian liberal seminary in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, affiliated in Columbia University. Since 1928, the seminary has served as Columbia's constituent faculty of theology. In 1964, UTS also established an affiliation with the neighboring Jewish Theological Seminary of America. UTS confers the following degrees: Master of Divinity (MDiv), Master of Divinity & Social Work dual degree (MDSW), Master of Arts in religion (MAR), Master of Arts in Social Justice (MASJ), Master of Sacred Theology (STM), and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).
Eberhard Bethge was a German theologian and pastor, best known for being the close friend and biographer of the theologian and anti-Nazi Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Nancey Murphy is an American philosopher and theologian who is Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA. She received the B.A. from Creighton University in 1973, the Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 1980, and the Th.D. from the Graduate Theological Union (theology) in 1987.
Richard Weikart is a professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus, advocate of intelligent design and senior fellow for the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute. In 1997 he joined the editorial board of the Access Research Network's Origins & Design Journal. Weikart's work focuses on claims about the impact of evolution on social thought, ethics and morality.
Christopher Ludwig Morse is an American Christian theologian. He is Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Theology and Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
David P. Gushee is a Christian ethicist, Baptist pastor, author, professor, and public intellectual. Growing up, Gushee attended and completed his college years at College of William and Mary in 1984. After college, he received his Ph.D. in Christian ethics from Union Theological Seminary in 1993. Among the titles listed, Gushee has shown hard work and dedication in different parts of his job and was awarded for his achievements. Gushee is most known for his activism in climate change, Torture, LGBT inclusion, and Post-evangelicalism.
Adolf Schlatter was a well-known Swiss-born German Protestant theologian and professor specialising in the New Testament and systematics at Greifswald, Berlin and Tübingen. Schlatter has published more than 400 scholarly and popular pieces during his academic career. In his work "The Nature of New Testament Theology. The Contribution of William Wrede and Adolf Schlatter", Robert Morgan writes: "Schlatter ... was considered a conservative, and is perhaps the only 'conservative' New Testament scholar since Bengel who can be rated in the same class as Baur, Wrede, Bousset and Bultmann". There has been a Schlatter Renaissance in the English-speaking world since the second half of the 20th century with scholars like Andreas Köstenberger and Robert Yarbrough taking the lead. Yarbrough rediscovered Schlatter, the latter being one of the leading evangelical voices in Germany, at a time when classical liberalism swept through large section of the Lutheran theological faculties of Germany.
The Cost of Discipleship is a 1937 book by German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, considered to be a classic of Christian thought. It is centered on an exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, in which Bonhoeffer spells out what he believes it means to follow Christ. The book was first published in 1937, when the rise of the Nazi regime was underway in Germany. It was against this background that Bonhoeffer's theology of costly discipleship developed, which ultimately led to his death.
Orders of creation refer to a doctrine of theology asserting God's hand in establishing social domains such as the family, the church, the state, and the economy. Although it is commonly traced back to early Lutheranism, the doctrine is also discussed within Reformed Christianity as well as modern Judaism. During the 1930s–1940s rise of European neo-orthodoxy, the meaning of this doctrine in regard to the foundations of church and state came into dispute amongst such famed theologians as Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Though a specific 1934 controversy between Brunner and Barth over the interpretations of the doctrines of natural law and the orders of creation was not inherently political, Barth alleged that Brunner's position gave credibility to pro-Nazi "German Christians".
Nancy J. Duff is an American professor of theology. Duff worked as the Stephen Colwell Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary, where she taught from 1990 until 2020. Duff is also a Presbyterian minister in the PCUSA denomination. She is married to United Methodist Minister David Mertz. She has taught courses on the Decalogue, Biomedical ethics, human sexuality, liturgy and the Christian life, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, James Cone, types of Christian ethics, and vocation in Christian tradition and contemporary life.
Eric Metaxas is an American author, speaker, and conservative radio host. He has written three biographies, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery about William Wilberforce (2007), Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy about Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2011), Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (2017), If You Can Keep it (2017), Fish Out of Water: A Search for the Meaning of Life (2021) and Letter to the American Church (2022). He has also written humor, children's books and scripts for VeggieTales.
Dr. Jens Michael Zimmermann is a German-Canadian Christian philosopher, theologian, and professor who specializes in hermeneutics and the philosophical and theological roots of humanism.
John W. de Gruchy is a Christian theologian known for his work resisting apartheid. He is presently Emeritus Professor at the University of Cape Town and Extraordinary Professor at the University of Stellenbosch.
Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics is a 1932 book by Reinhold Niebuhr, an American Protestant theologian at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York City. The thesis of the book is that people are more likely to sin as members of groups than as individuals. Niebuhr wrote the book in a single summer. He drew the book's contents from his experiences as a pastor in Detroit, Michigan prior to his professorship at UTS. The book attacks liberalism, both secular and religious, and is particularly critical of John Dewey and the Social Gospel. Moral Man and Immoral Society generated much controversy and raised Niebuhr's public profile significantly. Initial reception of the book by liberal Christian critics was negative, but its reputation soon improved as the rise of fascism throughout the 1930s was seen as having been predicted in the book. Soon after the book's publication, Paul Lehmann gave a copy to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who read it and was impressed by the book's thesis but disliked the book's critique of pacifism. The book eventually gained significant readership among American Jews because, after a period of considerable anti-theological sentiment among Jews in the United States, many Jews began to return to the study of theology and, having no Jewish works of theology to read, turned to Protestant theological works.
Reconciliation theology or the theology of reconciliation raises crucial theological questions about how reconciliation can be brought into regions of political conflict. The term differs from the conventional theological understanding of reconciliation, but likewise emphasises themes of justice, truth, forgiveness and repentance.
"Von guten Mächten" is a Christian poem which Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in 1944 when he was imprisoned in the basement prison of the Reich Security Main Office because of his resistance to the Nazis. It is his last theological text before he was executed on 9 April 1945. It became a frequently sung hymn, with different melodies, which has appeared in current German hymnals. The incipit is: "Von guten Mächten treu und still umgeben", which can be translated word by word as: "By good forces devotedly and quietly surrounded", or, in a more poetic, singable, widely used version: "By loving forces silently surrounded, ...". The seventh and last stanza "Von guten Mächten wunderbar geborgen" respectively "By loving forces wonderfully sheltered" is used as a refrain in this popular rendition.
Philip G. Ziegler is a Canadian-born theologian who holds a personal chair as Professor in Christian Dogmatics at the University of Aberdeen. He is author of numerous scholarly articles, books, and has led various research projects within contemporary dogmatics, the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as theological reflection on New Testament apocalyptic. He maintains a personal website: Theologia Borealis.
