Bonhoeffers New Beginning: Ethics after Devastation [Paperback]

Bonhoeffers New Beginning investigates the ethics of making new beginnings after devastating moral rupture. The work argues that new beginnings must be made in order to sustain the fundamental convictions that it is good to exist and that life in the world with others should be loved without exclusion. Bonhoeffers ethics of new beginning is set in conversation with the thought of four moral philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Jonathan Glover, and Jonathan Lear. DeCort argues that Bonhoeffers ethics of new beginning opens and energizes a more promising, world-affirming moral vision with radical hope for new beginnings vis-?-vis the perceived absence of God in the face of devastation.Andrew DeCort is director of the Institute for Faith and Flourishing.

In mid-century Europe, totalitarians on both the left and the right sought to remake humanity, society, politics, morality, geography, and population. The scope of their hubris was astonishing, as was the body count they left behind. To accomplish their idolatrous, disastrous goals, everything was permissible.

In his important new book, Andrew DeCort demonstrates that Dietrich Bonhoeffer responded theologically in Nazi Germany to this mania for remaking the world through projects of political salvation at the point of a gun. DeCort shows that Bonhoeffer's biblical theology of creation, Christ, and resurrection precluded any human project to serve as our own creators and saviors by engineering a new beginning in human life. Instead, Christians at least, know (or should know) that we are called to respond to God's creative and reconciling action, and that we must do so in love of God and others.

This is a groundbreaking work, ranging exhaustively over the Bonhoeffer corpus and the secondary literature. It reveals a new dimension of Bonhoeffer's thought, and demonstrates once again that Bonhoeffer was always responding to the dangerous political and moral ideas around him with a disciplinel³>