RT Article
T1 Bonhoeffer on Modernity: Sic et Non
JF Journal of religious ethics
VO 29
IS 3
SP 345
OP 366
A1 Elshtain, Jean Bethke
LA English
PB Wiley-Blackwell
YR 2001
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1822384486
AB Though Bonhoeffer is usually thought to have been one of the architects of modern theology, he was also one of modernity’s most penetrating critics. The author lays out Bonhoeffer’s challenges to certain cherished modern assumptions by examining (1) his linkage of totalitarianism to the political utopianism that arose out of the French Revolution, (2) his fear of the nihilistic implications of the rationalists’ notion of the sovereign self and of the modern tendency to view life as an end in itself, and (3) his suspicion of all forms of moral absolutism, including the Kantian absolutizing of the duty to tell the truth. What emerges is a picture of Bonhoeffer as a theologian who coupled a keen sense of our creatureliness and limitation with a resolute belief in the activity of God in history, and of Bonhoeffer as an ethicist who generated a Christian relational ethics that offers an alternative to both the ethics of abstract principle and the ethics of intuitive situational response.
K1 Utopianism
K1 Truth
K1 Nihilism
K1 Limits
K1 Freedom
K1 Compassion
K1 Bonhoeffer
DO 10.1111/0384-9694.00088