Bonhoeffer – Act and Being

The entire situation raises the question whether the formalisticactualistic understanding of the freedom and contingency of God in revelation is to be made the foundation of theological thought. In revelation it is not so much a question of the freedom of God—eternally remaining within the divine self, aseity—on the other side of revelation, as it is of God’s coming out of God’s own self in revelation. It is a matter of God’s given Word, the covenant in which God is bound by God’s own action. It is a question of the freedom of God, which finds its strongest evidence precisely in that God freely chose to be bound to historical human beings and to be placed at the disposal of human beings. God is free not from human beings but for them. Christ is the word of God’s freedom. God is present, that is, not in eternal nonobjectivity but—to put it quite provisionally for now—’haveable’, graspable in the Word within the church.

“THE PROBLEM: B. THE PROBLEM OF ACT AND BEING IN THE INTERPRETATION OF REVELATION AND THE CHURCH AS THE SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM.” In Act and Being, edited by Wayne Whitson Floyd, 95-149. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1931. https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cdocument%7C4747484. 

 

Bonhoeffer on God sees the world as good

God’s seeing protects the world from falling back into the void, protects it from total destruction. God sees the world as good, as created – even where it is the fallen world – and because of the way God sees his work and embraces it and does not forsake it, we live.

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

Source: Davis, Ellen F. Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture : An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 42