No need to enthuse, explain or review this classic of Christian faith as lived in the mid 20th Century. This is engaged theology, hammered out in the context of imprisonment and paradoxically composed out of a mind and soul insistent on freedom under the God revealed in Jesus Christ crucified and risen. Consequently, the academic and scholarly study of Bonhoeffer and its application to the ongoing experience of the Church into the 21st Century, continues to interrogate lesser theologies. Bonhoeffer's thought disturbs settled minds, contradicts received arguments, subverts easy or even hard won assumptions, and simply will not fit comfortably into categories of intellectual control.
Phrases like "world come of age" "religionless Christianity", "the church for others", "worldly transcendence", "who Jesus Christ actually is for us today", act like theological detonators setting off chain reactions of thought and energy that lead to surprising and often disconcerting reconfigurations of theological reflection. As De Gruchy says, these papers contain "theological explorations in a new key…". The new Fortress Edition, volume 8, is complete with Introduction and Afterword, Bibliography and Notes, and provides over 500 pages of Bonhoeffers letters and papers. It is a miracle of production, from the first lonely but determined writing out of a mind soaked in Scripture and prayed theology, to the process of smuggling and accumulating and later editing and publishing after Bonhoeffer's death, till now 60 years later, we have this definitive translation, edition and presentation of the distilled essence of a martyr theology, a theology of witness.
This will be a slow, reverential, and I don't doubt deeply affecting re-reading of one of those treasures of the church, the lasting impact of which we will only finally know when all the broken world is gathered again to the wholeness and hopefulness that Bonhoeffer himself did not live to see, but lived, and died, to point towards. One of the most important parts of the volume is the new translation of the prison poems. These are distilled essence of spiritual search, the legacy of Bonhoeffer's own wrestling in the night at the brook Jabbok. Reading them you can sense, even glimpse the lone figure of Bonhoeffer limping towards the sunrise. Some of these poems should only be read, perhaps, when we have learned the meaning of our own tears, accepted the cost of our own faithfulness in following after Christ, recognised in the deep places of the heart where trust is born, the quiet voice of the God who knows us, and enables us to say, "Whoever I am, thou knowest me: O God, I am thine!"
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