VIDEO @EricMetaxas on what’s important

7 Comments

1. Pius Admirabilis says:

   26 April 2019 at 8:14 AM

   Pater reverende, you might want to reconsider which books you recommend. Bonhoeffer was a heretic theologian (being a Calvinist), and he openly denied the Godhood of Christ, being a prominent member of the “Historic Jesus” movement, which is associated with Modernism. No Catholic should admire this man. Although he opposed the Nazi regime, he was not a faithful servant of God.

   [I’ll allow your comment to speak for itself.]
2. JustaSinner says:

   26 April 2019 at 8:19 AM

   Laura Ingraham needs to start working in Tucker to convert to Catholicism…just sayin’.
3. PM says:

   26 April 2019 at 6:56 PM

   It’s interesting, though. Bonhoeffer’s. writings featured prominently, aeons ago (c. 1965-1969) in the death of God, “new theology’ chatter of the times. I think it came from his commitment to Barthian ultra-fideism and the rejection of “religion” as an idolatrous attempt to make us a God in our own image (provoked by the capitulation of the established churches to the Spirit of the Age, with no value added). I’m not sure Metaxes’s excellent biography adequately handles this complication. Anyway, Bonhoeffer, Lutheran though he may have been, was a courageous, interesting, learned, prayerful man–utterly admirable.
4. Fr_Sotelo says:

   27 April 2019 at 4:04 AM

   Pius Admirabilis,

   It has been many years since I read Bonhooeffer, but it is grossly inaccurate to describe the pursuit of the “historical Jesus” by German biblicists as a denial of the “Godhood” or divinity of Our Lord.

   For some scholars, such as Fr. M.J. Lagrange OP, the search for the historical Jesus was an attempt to see which passages of the Gospels were closer to the life of Our Lord, and which details might have been more embellished narrative that were part of the later redactions of the sacred text during the Apostolic preaching.

   Modernism was a specific outgrowth of some biblicists, who used this search for the historical Jesus as a way to deny that Jesus was the Messiah, or that He knew He was the Messiah. Bonhoeffer himself did not accept the central tenet of Modernism (of denying the Messianic consciousness of Christ), which was a denial of divine Revelation to the Church.

   If some of Bonhoeffer’s statements seem hyper-critical of religion, it was not to deny the need for the existence of a Church founded by Jesus.

   Rather, he was disillusioned and incredulous that the Nazi plan for extermination of the Jews was moving forward in Germany, under Hitler, with almost no resistance from the Lutheran church. As a Lutheran pastor, that was somewhat of a crisis of faith for him. But at no time did it entail a denial of the Incarnation, or the dogma of the indwelling of the Divinity in Jesus of Nazareth.

   If we were living in Germany, in the time of the Nazi tyranny and final solution, how many of us would have publicly spoken out against Hitler, as did Bonhoeffer? How many of us would have risked the perils of traveling around secretly, to form and teach seminarians who would resist Nazism, as he did? How many of us, having an offer by close friends to flee Germany, would remain, knowing that we would be arrested, sent to a concentration camp, and tortured to death, as he was?

   First, show me the torture marks on your body, or scars where you were burned, or cut, or the mangled limbs that you have, suffered for your faith in Christ? Then, when I see the proof that you are a modern day Confessor of Christ, I will regard you as credible and worthy to criticize and demean the contribution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
5. un-ionized says:

   27 April 2019 at 11:06 AM

   Fr. Sotelo, I think every Christian should read his prison letters.
6. un-ionized says:

   27 April 2019 at 11:09 AM

   And of course to read The Cost of Discipleship is necessary too.
7. SKAY says:

   27 April 2019 at 12:26 PM

   I read the book about Bonhoeffer that you recommended Father Z. I love books about history
   and this book answered some of my questions about that time that I have always had.
   I would certainly recommend it to others. There is always something new to learn.

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