[127.2] MORE LIGHT ON BONHOEFFER

While looking at the Anabaptist Network site, on which Tim Nafziger is doing wonders, I discovered that my article on Anabaptists, Anglicans and disestablishment is online there. Much more importantly, there is a good pastoral assesment of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by a Baptist minister, Bob Allaway. It is called Christ for the Irreligious.

I am delighted to be working with Keith Clements on the bringing into print of a new book, Bonhoeffer in Britain, which will appear later this year under the imprint of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. Keith is just about to retire as General Secretary of the Conference of European Churches. He is an acknowledged international authority on Bonhoeffer, and this title will feature fresh material (including a substantial number of photos) on the German theologian' and activist's time in England, and briefly in Scotland. Watch this space.

My own episodic reflections on Bonhoeffer include a piece on Life Together, God and the world re-understood in Christ. It is derived from a contribution to a seminar at the London Mennonite Centre, and a past lecture in Birmingham. This year was the 6oth anniversary of his death, by the way.

Among the many things for which I am grateful in Bonhoeffer's life and work was his ability to combine deep intellectual questioning, prayer and a life of discipleship. Though his later prison writings were mistreated by 'death of God' theologians in the 1960s, and not well accounted for by John Robinson's well-meant but flawed Honest to God, he was quite right to question the adequacy of traditional Western metaphysics as a means of conveying the God worshipped in and through Jesus Christ.

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