Book Review
by Neal D. Presa
The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Volume One by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Edited by Isabel Best. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012. 240 pages. $25.46.
Karl Barth urged his students to read both newspapers and the Bible, but to interpret the newspapers through the Bible. Barth’s contemporary, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, put that exhortation into practice in his sermons that prophetically addressed the pastoral and political contexts of the late 1920s and 1930s before and during the rise of the Nazi regime, and as he attended to congregational matters. Editor and translator Isabel Best organized these sets of sermons in this first volume of two as part of the larger English translation of “The Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works.”
This first volume exposes us modern readers to the theology, pastoral care, and prophetic insight of Bonhoeffer as he deftly interprets the Scriptures, grounded in the liturgical calendrical year, and engages the Scriptural text with the pastoral or political issue at the moment. Whether it be exhorting young confirmands on their lifelong journey of faith, to urging his congregants to place their loyalty with Jesus Christ only in the midst of Hitler’s rise to power and the betrayal of many within the German Evangelical Church towards the Gospel, Bonhoeffer knows the Bible, knows Christ, knows the Church, knows his flock, and knows Germany. His eventual imprisonment and martyrdom give even more force to what he proclaimed from the pulpit: that the Church’s duty and responsibility was to bear witness to the Lord Christ for it is Christ who is speaking through the sermon and shaping and shaking the hearts of the hearers.
We who are pastors, preachers, and students/teachers of preaching need to be reminded of our commitment to know the text of Scripture, the context of our times, and the subtexts of the hearts of our congregations and people. Particularly in our present time in the United States context, and in all nations where nationalism is confused or commingled with one’s utmost allegiance to the Gospel, and where the Gospel of the Lord must critique those values of nation/empire that contradict or contravene the lordship of Christ and the mandates of the Gospel to love God and love neighbor, we need Bonhoeffer and his sermons as clarion calls for prophetic preaching and for prophets and prophetesses to stand up against powers and principalities.
Volume 1 of Bonhoeffer’s Sermons is a must read for the serious pastor and preacher who desire to awaken congregants to the power and promise of the Gospel, in how to live out the faith in transformative ways, and in being transformed in the process.
