Dissertation

I received word yesterday that the Ph.D. Committee voted to approve my request for “Excused Program Leave” beginning in January 2021 and lasting until January 2022. At the risk of sounding like Captain Obvious, 2020 has been a particularly difficult year. Attempting to complete my “Barth, Bonhoeffer, and the Bible” dissertation has taken a toll on my mental health as I ran into some major research and writing roadblocks right before and during the COVID pandemic....

For months and months now, I’ve been praying for either (1) a breakthrough on my “Barth, Bonhoeffer, and the Bible” dissertation or (2) a clear sign that I should quit the Ph.D. Unfortunately, after countless confusing dead ends in my endeavors to put Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer into precise conversation with each other regarding specific passages of the Bible, I’ve now realized that such an approach is not going to work....

What does “religion” mean? Great question! I’m writing my dissertation on Barth, Bonhoeffer, the Bible, and “religion.” However, getting clear on just what Barth and Bonhoeffer meant by “religion” is a huge challenge. It’s what I devoted my entire writing sample to examining, and I plan to devote an entire chapter of my dissertation to the topic. Neither Barth nor Bonhoeffer used the word “religion” in the way that we’re prone to use the word in everyday speech today....

I’m trying to parse out the relevance of Barth’s and Bonhoeffer’s engagement with Scripture for making sense of the “Barth-Bonhoeffer relationship.” Specifically, I’m trying to, at the very least, add some biblical content and context to the ongoing debate over the relationship between Barth’s and Bonhoeffer’s theological critiques of religion. As I put it in the “elevator pitch” for my dissertation proposal: Why does Bonhoeffer in prison, after adopting Barth’s theological critique of religion as idolatrous unbelief…...

Perhaps it’s just the global COVID–19 pandemic, but I’ve been really discouraged about my dissertation lately. My normal reading/writing workflow has ground to a halt because (1) we are temporarily without childcare and (2) my wife, a Family Nurse Practitioner is still working full-time from the office. That leaves me home alone with our 1.5-year-old during the week and, while she is a wonderful child, she’s not really jazzed about dad sitting quietly in a corner getting some reading and writing done during the day....

In Discipleship (DBWE 4), Dietrich Bonhoeffer frames all of the Beatitudes in terms of Jesus’ disciples living in renunciation (Verzicht) and want (Mangel). Interestingly, for Bonhoeffer, Jesus is only speaking to his disciples in the Beatitudes (he makes this argument on the basis of Luke 6:20ff.). And the disciples’ renunciation and want are caused by Jesus’s call to discipleship. Jesus sees: his disciples are over there. They have visibly left the people to join him....

Yesterday, I wrote just a bit about interpretive approaches to the Beatitudes in Matthew 5. I’m trying to get a better handle on how Barth and Bonhoeffer treat the Sermon on the Mount, and I’m starting with the Beatitudes. However, it’s pretty challenging to situate Barth and Bonhoeffer in light of the “standard” approaches to both the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount. A case in point: yesterday, I felt pretty confident that Bonhoeffer does not take the standard “entrance requirements” approach to the Beatitudes....

As I said in my previous post, “Interpretive Approaches to the Sermon on the Mount,” I’m working on how Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer read the Sermon on the Mount. Of course, when interpreting the Sermon on the Mount, the best place to start is at the beginning! This means beginning with the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:1–12. The Beatitudes (Matt. 5:1–12) 1 When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him....

I’m working on how Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer read the Sermon on the Mount. In order to help situate my discussion of Barth’s and Bonhoeffer’s readings, I’m trying to get a better grasp of the various interpretive approaches to the Sermon on the Mount. So far, the most exhaustive Sermon on the Mount “interpretive taxonomy” that I’ve found has been from Grant Osborne’s Matthew (Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 159....

When it comes to the Barth-Bonhoeffer relationship, there is perhaps no greater conundrum than the meaning of what Bonhoeffer called Barth’s “Offenbarungspositivismus” (“positivism of revelation” or “revelatory positivism”) in his Letters and Papers from Prison (DBWE 8). Now, before we proceed, please note that Bonhoeffer meant something very particular by “religion” in his prison letters. For an overview of how Bonhoeffer and Barth differed on the meaning of “religion,” and what that means for how we interpret their theological critiques of religion, please see my essay: “To Be or Not To Be Religious: A Clarification of Karl Barth’s and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Divergence and Convergence Regarding Religion....