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.
The Confessing Church was a movement within German Protestantism during Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to unify all Protestant churches into a single pro-Nazi German Evangelical Church.
Hans Paul Oster was a general in the Wehrmacht and a leading figure of the anti-Nazi German resistance from 1938 to 1943. As deputy head of the counter-espionage bureau in the Abwehr, Oster was in a good position to conduct resistance operations under the guise of intelligence work.
Bonhoeffer is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York (UTS) is a private ecumenical Christian liberal seminary in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, affiliated with 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).
Making History (1996) is the third novel by Stephen Fry. Its plot involves the creation of an alternative historical timeline in which Adolf Hitler never existed. While most of the book is written in standard prose, a couple of chapters are written in the format of a screenplay. The book won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.
George Kennedy Allen Bell was an Anglican theologian, Dean of Canterbury, Bishop of Chichester, member of the House of Lords and a pioneer of the ecumenical movement.
Dietrich Richard Alfred von Hildebrand was a German Roman Catholic philosopher and religious writer.
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.
Klaus Bonhoeffer was a German jurist and resistance fighter against the Nazi régime who was executed after the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler.
The Bonhoeffer family is a German family that, though originating in the city of Nijmegen, has been documented in the city of Schwäbisch Hall from 1513 onwards. Among the family's most notable members are Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Klaus Bonhoeffer, both executed in the last days of World War II by Adolf Hitler's government for their different resistance activities against the Nazi régime.
Denise Giardina is an American novelist. Her book Storming Heaven was a Discovery Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and received the 1987 W. D. Weatherford Award for the best published work about the Appalachian South. The Unquiet Earth received an American Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award for fiction. Her 1998 novel Saints and Villains was awarded the Boston Book Review fiction prize and was semifinalist for the International Dublin Literary Award. Giardina is an ordained Episcopal Church deacon, a community activist, and a former candidate for governor of West Virginia.
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.
Life Together is a book by the German Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, written while he taught at an underground seminary. Other works of Bonhoeffer include The Cost of Discipleship and a compilation of letters that he wrote while imprisoned by the Third Reich.
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.
Franz Hildebrandt was a German-born Lutheran, and later Methodist, pastor and theologian, forced into exile during World War II, and subsequently active in the United Kingdom and the USA.
Kirchenkampf is a German term which pertains to the situation of the Christian churches in Germany during the Nazi period (1933–1945). Sometimes used ambiguously, the term may refer to one or more of the following different "church struggles":
- The internal dispute within German Protestantism between the German Christians and the Confessing Church over control of the Protestant churches;
- The tensions between the Nazi regime and the Protestant church bodies; and
- The tensions between the Nazi regime and the Roman Catholic Church.
The Cost of Discipleship is a book by the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, considered to be a classic of Christian thought. The original German title is simply Nachfolge. 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.
Ethics is an unfinished book by Dietrich Bonhoeffer that was edited and published after his death by Eberhard Bethge in 1949. Bonhoeffer worked on the book in the early 1940s and intended it to be his magnum opus. At the time of writing, he was a double agent; he was working for Abwehr, Nazi Germany's military intelligence organization, but was simultaneously involved in the 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The central theme of Ethics is Christlikeness. The arguments in the book are informed by Lutheran Christology and are influenced by Bonhoeffer's participation in the German resistance to Nazism. Ethics is commonly compared to Bonhoeffer's earlier book The Cost of Discipleship, with scholars debating the extent to which Bonhoeffer's views on Christian ethics changed between his writing of the two books. In The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John W. de Gruchy argues that Ethics evinces more nuance than Bonhoeffer's earlier writings. In 2012, David P. Gushee, director of Mercer University's Center for Theology and Public Life, named Ethics one of the five best books about patriotism.
Maria von Wedemeyer-Weller was a American computer scientist, who emigrated to the US from Germany after the Second World War. She was known in the field of computer science for her role in developing emulation capability. She was also notable as the fiancée of the German Protestant theologian and Resistance worker Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
