Devotional thoughts tagged as: 'Dietrich Bonhoeffer'
Thoughts on Gossip by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
From the book "Letters and Papers From Prison"
February 13, 1944
"... It sometimes makes me ashamed here to see how people lower themselves in their need to gossip, how they talk incessantly about their own affairs to others who are hardly worth wasting their breath on and who hardly ever listen; and the strange thing is that these people do not even feel that they have to speak the truth, but simply want to talk about themselves, whether they tell the truth or not."
"The wish for a good conversation, a meeting of the minds, is quite another matter; but there are very few people here you can carry on a conversation that goes beyond their own personal concerns. ... I think its infrequent here, because people are not ... concerned either subjectively or objectively about sin."
Is gossiping a sign of sin? What are your thoughts?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Interpretation of the New Testament
From the book "Letters and Papers From Prison"
August 23, 1935
One crucial aspect of the struggle with the Confessing Church with the Reich Church and Nazi theologians at the time was over the correct interpretation of Scripture. Representatives of the Reich Church were not above distorting the Bible texts in order to justify the racial policies then in place or to reinforce from a seemingly spiritual point of view for the discriminatory laws against the Jews. Bonhoeffer took issue with the German Christians accusing them of sacrificing the to a pagan ideology. The German Christians sought to make Christianity justify itself before the present age rather than the present age which must be asked to justify itself before the Christian message.
Here is what Bonhoeffer states:
"... The relevant is and begins where God himself is in his Word. The Holy Ghost is the relevant subject not we ourselves, so the Holy Ghost is also the subject of the interpretation. ..."