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The Bonhoeffers had immigrated from Holland (van den Boenhoff from Nimwegen) in 1513 and settled as goldsmiths in Schwäbisch Hall. After the seventeenth century they became pastors, doctors, city council members and mayors.
~ Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography (Revised Edition); Chapter 1: Childhood and Youth: 1906-1923, 9.
by BWW News Desk Apr. 13, 2017
Jeff Davis, Director of Agape Theatre’s upcoming Texas Premiere of the WWII-set BONHOEFFER’S COST, blasted White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer for his recent remarks regarding Hitler and the Holocaust.On Tuesday, April 11th, when speaking on President Trump’s recent air strikes against Syria, Spicer said, “We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II. You know, you had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.” When reminded that Hitler used gas chambers to execute millions, Spicer replied, “[Hitler] was not using the gas on his own people the way that Assad is doing,” before referring to Concentration Camps as “Holocaust Centers.”
In response to Spicer’s outlandish and false statements, Davis writes “It baffles, saddens, angers, and greatly concerns me-both as someone who identifies as half-Jewish and simply as a human being-that a key White House representative ignores the atrocities of the Holocaust and then, when reminded of history, downplays its significance and importance. […] But Spicer is a microcosm of a bigger issue. There are thousands of people worldwide who deny the Holocaust ever happened, as if 6 million people just mysteriously disappeared. There are millions more, particularly among the younger generations, who live in ignorance of the Holocaust because they’ve yet to hear about the horrors perpetrated during World War II. And I’d wager there are billions worldwide who are oblivious that a new Holocaust is currently happening in Chechnya as homosexuals are being sent to Concentration Camps. It’s for these reasons and more that Agape Theatre has chosen to tell the story of Bonhoeffer’s Cost. […] As the final Holocaust survivors die off, it becomes the responsibility of artists and storytellers to tell the stories of those who are no longer with us.”
You can read Mr. Davis‘s full response to Spicer’s statements here.
But it has been replaced and I am up and running again!
Note: What do you think? I believe we need to be careful what statements we put on church signs. ~ Bryan
April 15, 2017 by
The other day, I posted this picture of a church sign created by someone who clearly lacked self-awareness.
I had so many questions for the pastor who signed off on this…
Did he think the torture of Jesus was funny?
Was he trying to be cool and hip? (Because he was neither.)
Who was he trying to impress?
I had no clue. But the only thing the sign seemed good for was giving atheists a good laugh.
My Patheos colleague Jonathan Aigner, an evangelical Christian, didn’t get it either. He thought it was in bad taste, at the very least, so he left a message saying as much on the Facebook page for . This isn’t what he sent them, but it summarized his concerns:
It’s an obvious pun, when humor is clearly inappropriate. We’re talking about murder, and not just any murder, we’re talking about the violent, grotesque crucifixion of our beautiful Savior. While these good Baptists may have meant it well, there’s an inescapable glibness in the words.
The church definitely saw his message because this happened not long after he pressed “Send”:
About 20 minutes later, the phone in my office rang. “Hello, this is Jonathan,” I answered as usual, expecting to hear a choir member with a question, or perhaps a return call from that publisher I’d recently contacted.
Nope. It was none other than Living Hope’s pastor, whom I do not know. He had apparently found my name, looked me up, and called me at my office. I was dumbfounded.
He didn’t really seem angry. He was confused. Incredulous, even. “This is straight from Scripture. I can’t believe someone would think this was in bad taste.”
It gets even more interesting from there, and I would urge you to read about their conversation here.
When it comes down to it, though, it looks like the church tried to “sell” the story of Jesus to an otherwise uninterested audience and chose an awful way to get the message across.
They also issued a statement on Facebook Thursday night. There’s no apology or even any acknowledgement that it came across the wrong way. They basically said that Jesus getting nailed to the cross is in the Bible (get it? GET IT?) as if that’s supposed to clear everything up.
April 10, 2017 by
Between my own blog, this one, and a couple others, I’ve written about 1,500 posts in the last six years. I try to do it well, with a less formal tone and much greater pace than typical academic writing but still reflecting a reasonably careful degree of prior research. But I’m afraid that my haste sometimes leads me to sloppiness — worse yet, sloppiness on topics where I’m writing outside of my fields of direct expertise and already at risk of stepping heedlessly into scholarly minefields.
As in the case of something I wrote over the weekend…
On Saturday I encouraged readers to seek out Come Before Winter, a new movie about the last days of the German pastor, theologian, and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I mentioned that it featured clips of an interview with Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, a German scholar whose 2006 biography of Bonhoeffer was published in English in 2010. At least among American readers, I noted, that work “was overshadowed by those written by Charles Marsh and Eric Metaxas….”
But then I went on (unnecessarily, I fear) to point out that Schlingensiepen has criticized both Metaxas and Marsh “for wrenching the German martyr out of his historical and theological context.” I quoted the following passage from Schlingensiepen’s dual review of Marsh’s Strange Glory and Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer:
Marsh and Metaxas have dragged Bonhoeffer into cultural and political disputes that belong in a U.S. context. The issues did not present themselves in the same way in Germany in Bonhoeffer’s time, and the way they are debated in Germany today differs greatly from that in the States. Metaxas has focused on the fight between right and left in the United States and has made Bonhoeffer into a likeable arch-conservative without theological insights and convictions of his own; Marsh concentrates on the conflict between the Conservatives and the gay rights’ movement. Both approaches are equally misguided and are used to make Bonhoeffer interesting and relevant to American society. Bonhoeffer does not need this and it certainly distorts the facts.
In retrospect, I think I did wrong to include this quotation — or, at least, to include it without adding any kind of critical comment. Here’s why:
For Bonhoeffer, fact, fiction remain tangled
by KARRIS GOLDEN; Apr 7, 2017
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was many things — poet, scholar, teacher, spy and more.
The German Lutheran pastor was hanged at Sachsenhausen concentration camp April 9, 1945. At just 39, he had published a considerable and diverse body of work.
Many have learned Bonhoeffer was a conspirator who plotted to kill Adolph Hitler in July 1944.
That’s untrue, according to “Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking,” by Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony G. Siegrist and Daniel P. Umbel.
“There is not a shred of evidence that Bonhoeffer was linked in any way to … attempts on Hitler’s life,” they write.
It’s a persistent fiction nonetheless.
Bonhoeffer could have been fodder for Nazi propaganda: He was attractive, smart, hardworking, personable and came from an influential, well-known family. Instead, he believed the Aryan nationalism that swept through post World War I Germany was offensive.
I think I know what DB means. As we are prayerfully intimate with Jesus, then his heart and will becomes ours.
“When our will wholeheartedly enters into the prayer of Christ, then we pray correctly.”
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