I know what you’re thinking: for a full time scholar this guy sure doesn’t read much. Well, yeah, I see your point, one proper book in almost two months is way sub-standard. I my defence I have to say I have read 250 pages of the Summa, and this book, more than 1000 pages of every single detail of Bonhoeffer’s short life. It’s a great biography, You get a good sense of the context and Bethge tracks Bonhoeffer’s theological and political in a clear and convincing fashion. Them most interesting part for me was the chapter where Bethge tries to reconstruct the final development in Bonhoeffer’s theology, based on the letters from prison. I am somewhat surprised by this, I thought the Discipleship era would be more interesting, the hight of the Church struggle and so on. I was struck by the ambibvalent stand towards the Confessing Church, both on the part of Bonhoeffer and Bethge. The fact that most pastors in the Confessing Church remained so strongly nationalist, welcoming the draft and so on was a complete surprise to me. The only part I would like to have seen developed a bit more (though the book is long enough as it is) is the part discussing Ethics.
I’ll be reading Discipleship soon, I haven’t read it before, but it now seems that the later developments are actually more useful for my project on Finnish folk church ecclesiology than I thought before.
