The Place of Bonhoeffer: Essays on the Problems and Possiblities in His Thought

With essays by Peter Berger, George Forell, Reginald Fuller, Walter Harrelson, Franklin Littell, Jaroslav Pelikan, Franklin Sherman, all under the editorship of Martin Marty. Less than two decades since Bonhoeffer's execution in 1945, a symposium of scholars was held to rescue the real Bonhoeffer from the so-called ""Bonhoeffer mystique"" that was popular in the 1960's. Martin Marty, who planned and edited this symposium, writes in his Introduction: ""Here, for the first time in the U.S., a number of Christian thinkers gather to analyze Bonhoeffer's theological achievement. . . . The eight writers of this book try to locate his methods and emphases in the various disciplines of theological study."" These disciplines include biblical studies, church history, systematic theology, ethics, sociology, philosophy, and liturgy and devotion. Altogether, these seminal essays serve to reinstate the central question, continually reiterated by Bonhoeffer, ""Who is Christ for us today?""

Martin E. Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where for 35 years he taught religious history in three faculties. Since 1956 he has been on the masthead of the Christian Century and is editor of Context. He specializes in American religious history and headed the six-year ""Fundamentalism Project"" of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds the National Medal of Humanities and the medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was honored with the National Book Award for Righteous Empire in 1971. An ordained Lutheran minister, he frequently also writes on theological themes.