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Bonhoeffer’s New Beginning: Ethics after Devastation

Publisher:
, 2018
ISBN: 9781978701007
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Bonhoeffer’s New Beginning investigates the ethics of making new beginnings after devastating moral rupture. The work argues that new beginnings must be made in order to sustain the fundamental convictions that it is good to exist and that life in the world with others should be loved without exclusion. Bonhoeffer’s ethics of new beginning is set in conversation with the thought of four moral philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Jonathan Glover, and Jonathan Lear. DeCort argues that Bonhoeffer’s ethics of new beginning opens and energizes a more promising, world-affirming moral vision with radical hope for new beginnings vis-à-vis the perceived absence of God in the face of devastation.

Autumn 2019 - This book and its author were featured in a review essay in Wheaton College magazine, about notable Wheaton alumni who had written on Bonhoeffer. Link: https://magazine.wheaton.edu/stories/autumn-2019-dietrich-bonhoeffer-the-good-neighbor

Beginning
Introduction – Our Over-All Take on Human Life: The Problem of Morality and the Ethics of New Beginning
Chapter 1 – The Trial: Universal Entry and The Problem of Morality
Chapter 2 – Four Options: The Problem of Morality and the Ethics of New Beginning in Nietzsche, Arendt, Glover, and Lear
Chapter 3 – “A Rift Irreparable Through Human Initiative”: Devastation and the Human (In)Capacity to Make a New Beginning in Bonhoeffer’s Thought
Chapter 4 – “Only with God Is There A New Way, A New Beginning”: Justification and Guidance For New Beginning In Bonhoeffer’s Thought
Chapter 5 – “The Dawning of The New World, The New Order”: Practices of New Beginning In Bonhoeffer’s Thought
Conclusion – After the Beginning: The Problem of Morality, Divine Absence, and the Ethics of New Beginning after Devastation
Beginning Anew
Appendix – Bonhoeffer’s Last Words: A Personal Testament and Theological Summary?

In mid-century Europe, totalitarians on both the left and the right sought to remake humanity, society, politics, morality, geography, and population. The scope of their hubris was astonishing, as was the body count they left behind. To accomplish their idolatrous, disastrous goals, everything was permissible.

In his important new book, Andrew DeCort demonstrates that Dietrich Bonhoeffer responded theologically in Nazi Germany to this mania for remaking the world through projects of political salvation at the point of a gun. DeCort shows that Bonhoeffer's biblical theology of creation, Christ, and resurrection precluded any human project to serve as our own creators and saviors by engineering a new beginning in human life. Instead, Christians at least, know (or should know) that we are called to respond to God's creative and reconciling action, and that we must do so in love of God and others.

This is a groundbreaking work, ranging exhaustively over the Bonhoeffer corpus and the secondary literature. It reveals a new dimension of Bonhoeffer's thought, and demonstrates once again that Bonhoeffer was always responding to the dangerous political and moral ideas around him with a disciplined theological and ethical response -- a response that took him to his death.

Highly recommended!

Here we have a fresh – indeed groundbreaking – reading of Bonhoeffer’s entire corpus. As he reconstructs Bonhoeffer’s theological ethics of new beginnings, DeCort shows how Bonhoeffer’s final words, “This is for me the end, but also the beginning,” encapsulates a consistent, central theme unifying his life and work: the nature and practice of new beginnings during and after social, political, and moral devastation. This book is rigorously researched, theologically and philosophically astute, and spiritually and practically relevant. In short, it is learned and wise.

Bonhoeffer’s New Beginning addresses one of the deepest challenges of Christian life: how to keep and live our faith in a world of deep suffering and moral trauma, a world that for many people has shattered the notion that faith in God is even possible. After exploring this question through the work of four major philosophers, Andrew DeCort unpacks how Bonhoeffer’s ethical writings offer such a “new beginning,” opening the way for “a radically inclusive, universal vision of moral consciousness." DeCort makes a convincing case that this search for such new beginnings is an undercurrent throughout Bonhoeffer’s work. This is a very fine book: a creative, eloquent, and often moving study of Bonhoeffer’s theology and its continuing relevance.

Bonhoeffer’s New Beginning addresses one of the deepest challenges of Christian life: how to keep and live our faith in a world of deep suffering and moral trauma, a world that for many people has shattered the notion that faith in God is even possible. After exploring this question through the work of four major philosophers, Andrew DeCort unpacks how Bonhoeffer’s ethical writings offer such a “new beginning,” opening the way for “a radically inclusive, universal vision of moral consciousness." DeCort makes a convincing case that this search for such new beginnings is an undercurrent throughout Bonhoeffer’s work. This book is a creative, eloquent, and often moving study of Bonhoeffer’s theology and its continuing relevance.

Andrew DeCort’s Bonhoeffer’s New Beginning takes on the profound and utterly inescapable problem of the “new beginning,” the "beginning again," in the wake of devastation and catastrophe, and suggests that, and then shows how, Bonhoeffer engages in Christian theology in light of this problem. This book is a terrific vision, in my mind especially illuminating on some of the Christocentric elements in Bonhoeffer’s work, and drawing on work in philosophy and political theory as well as Christian theology; it casts new light on our predicaments and the ways that Bonhoeffer may help us identify, understand, and confront them.

DeCort’s treatment of Bonhoeffer is creative. This study of Bonhoeffer, which includes analysis of other major figures like Friedrich Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt, takes an innovative turn to look at the concept of an ethics of beginning again.

DeCort’s book offers a fresh reading of Bonhoeffer, articulating a hermeneutical key that provides insight into important themes for under standing Bonhoeffer in his own context, and also how his theology continues to challenge and encourage the church today. DeCort has an impressive grasp of Bonhoeffer’s theological project and works across his theological writings with skill. This is not an entry-level book, and so those who are unfamiliar with Bonhoeffer may find it challenging, but for those who want to delve deeper into Bonhoeffer’s thought, and who want to understand how his theology engaged the key issues of modernity and how it continues to speak to the challenges we are facing, this is an excellent book.

Andrew DeCort is director of the Institute for Faith and Flourishing.

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