# Bonhoeffer's Seminary Vision  ## Metadata - Author: [[Paul R. House]] - Full Title: Bonhoeffer's Seminary Vision - Category: #books ## Highlights - I recall St. Amant asking me to please figure out what “religionless Christianity” meant. ([Location 112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=112)) - I learned from another professor that the St. Amants were indeed moneyed people. He taught because he felt called to and liked doing so, and because he enjoyed spending time with interested students. Like Padgett, he was an educator in the incarnational mold. ([Location 117](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=117)) - Yet it was also at that institution that I first encountered nonembodied, impersonal extension work and the largely financial arguments for offering it. ([Location 122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=122)) - Over the past twenty years all of us in seminary education have increasingly encountered new technology delivery systems. At first the goal was to use these to enhance courses offered on campus. Then classes began to be offered online, as they had been in old-style correspondence courses. I have seen the tide gradually shift from seminaries having to give a reason to administrators, constituents, and accrediting agencies for offering online courses to giving a reason for not doing so. As church contributions have waned and costs risen, I have seen seminaries look longingly to the web to solve their financial troubles. However, when I have queried others about the theological basis for online education, I have usually gotten blank stares or some statement about how technology is the future and will help seminaries balance their budgets. Once or twice someone has used the Bible’s epistles or a rather broad definition of “missions” as a theological rationale for various forms of electronic courses for credit. Speaking to me confidentially, some academic deans have said that they and their seminaries’ teachers do not prefer online classes to in-person ones, yet have come to accept online courses as a necessary evil of sorts. Several professors have conveyed the same sentiments to me. However, I have also met many administrators and teachers who take on this task with goodwill and hopefulness. It did not surprise me, then, when a few years ago degrees offered completely through electronic means were accredited. Our seminary has not offered online courses and currently does not plan to do so, which has made us somewhat unusual in our guild. I have taken this changing situation in seminary education as more incentive to continue working toward a clearer theology of seminary education. I have sought to discern what makes education offered face-to-face, electronically, or through a blended version of the two more or less biblical, and I have continued to seek the best way to express a theological basis for the sort of personal education that impacted me. ([Location 146](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=146)) - I am quite certain he would think I am right about one thing: we must think theologically, not just pragmatically, about the training of pastors, a task he described in 1942 as “worthy of our ultimate commitment.” ([Location 177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=177)) - The matter of the proper education of preachers of the gospel is worthy of our ultimate commitment. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1942) ([Location 234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=234)) - Bonhoeffer was not a hero in Germany immediately after World War II, even in some church circles. Many Germans thought he died as a political prisoner, perhaps even a treasonous one, not as a martyr of the faith.2 ([Location 244](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=244)) - Bethge could not have predicted how unusual Bonhoeffer’s approach to personal theological education would become. ([Location 272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=272)) - In setting up the seminary at Finkenwalde, Bonhoeffer trained students . . . to learn to do what they could do for themselves.”11 ([Location 290](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=290)) - He had told his former students in the messages on temptation, in circular letters, and in a public lecture that they should continue to follow God’s call in the Confessing Church.15 How could he do less? ([Location 305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=305)) - To be even more frank, in my opinion seminary educators desperately need these theological underpinnings and this example of determined personal education today. Financial concerns that have been building for decades have recently been made more acute by dwindling church support for seminary education and by worldwide economic troubles. At the same time, electronic devices have made online credits and degrees that require little or no personal time with teachers or other students feasible. ([Location 333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=333)) - To fuel interest, seminary advertising campaigns use terms like “online community” as if one may have communion without actual physical presence. ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=339)) - It is likely that seminary education has entered a new phase in the United States and elsewhere. The phase of proving that theological traditions of various types can produce a viable academic setting through good faculty credentials and an enduring physical plant has passed. ([Location 342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=342)) - The biblically based, centuries-old belief that theological education should occur in person through mentors with peers in communities in communal places is no longer necessary for every seminary degree’s accreditation. ([Location 346](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=346)) - Also, I believe that new forms of personal seminaries and related ministries will arise in response to impersonal approaches. ([Location 351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=351)) - His writings remind us that like all Christian work theological education needs grounding in theology. We cannot simply accept nontheological means of education as our norm. ([Location 357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=357)) - During these years much of the world was gripped by an economic depression. Germany faced extreme unemployment and rampant inflation. Political upheaval was a constant threat. Bonhoeffer felt that the church, the body of Christ, was not adequately addressing the world’s great needs through the power of the gospel. Therefore, people could not see Christ because they could not see the church. ([Location 447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=447)) - Together they began to conceive of a visible community of committed followers of Christ that would seek God’s will for their lives and ministries through Bible reading, prayer, common worship, and concerted action.12 They believed new forms of Christian community building up one another through such practices could aid church renewal. ([Location 453](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=453)) - Jews had already been barred from civil service and education offices by April 1933. The language that excluded them stated that only persons of Aryan descent could serve. Thus, this exclusionary language was known as an “Aryan paragraph.” ([Location 462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=462)) - Many pastors and churches did not share the German Christians’ Nazified theology, but viewed the movement as a splinter group, not as a threat to Christian faith. ([Location 467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=467)) - On August 15, 1933, at Bethel, the group began its work on what would become known as the Bethel Confession. ([Location 483](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=483)) - At the end of August the committee chair sent the document to several theologians for critique. They suggested several changes based on their desire to find common ground with the German Christians and avoid schism. To them this seemed a reasonable approach that could preserve the church in uncertain days. ([Location 494](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=494)) - The issue is really Germanism or Christianity, and the sooner the conflict comes out in the open, the better. The greatest danger of all would be in trying to conceal this.25 ([Location 500](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=500)) - The final version appeared in November. Bonhoeffer was so disappointed with the changes that he refused to sign it.26 ([Location 503](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=503)) - in early September 1933 the German Christians “passed a new church law that included an ‘Aryan paragraph,’ modeled on the Nazi civil service laws, banning those of Jewish descent from the ranks of the clergy, theological faculties, and religious educators.”28 ([Location 508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=508)) - Bonhoeffer wanted quick and decisive action, for he had concluded that the church was in a situation of status confessionis. This term “went back to the Reformation and meant that a situation had arisen in the Church that threatened to destroy the integrity of its confession of faith.”32 ([Location 516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=516)) - The Pastors’ Emergency League decided that their church was indeed in a status confessionis. This situation demanded “a restatement of the faith that would inevitably have to distinguish between the ‘true’ and ‘false’ Church.”37 The German Christian position was not one acceptable option among many in the Christian church. Separation was necessary. Pastors and churches that acted on this belief became the Confessing Church. ([Location 537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=537)) - at the Dahlem Synod in October 1934 the Confessing Church refused to accept the oversight of Ludwig Müller, the Reich bishop. For many, including Bonhoeffer, this meant that in effect the Confessing Church now represented the true church in Germany. ([Location 543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U9MQUX0&location=543))