Can you please make your smiley face not take up an extra line? just kidding

I read a Christian forum on the Motley Fool, and another forum called “Faith in a Post-Modern World.” I was drawn to the latter because the participants were talking about how important it was to be tolerant of all religions, then they’d bash Christianity. I’d point out their hypocrisy.

The person that started the forum goes by the handle Bonhoeffer. I made the leap that a postmodern participant would choose a postmodern philosopher, and that apparently is not the case.

Mostly, though, “I’m not a student of theology” either, so my response should be taken as ill-informed.

I’m not a student of theology, and I’m just getting confounded by terms that I’m not entirely sure of. You really didn’t mean to do this to me, did you?

Bonhoeffer has entire societies dedicated to studying his writings. It’s true, his later writings are sort of disconcerting to me. I’m taking time to attempt to sift through this, however, because if I’m pointing other people to Bonhoeffer, I’d better be comfortable with what they’ll find. There’s a phrase of Bonhoeffer’s that represents his new theology: “The nonreligious interpretation of biblical terms in a world come of age.” I’ll just say that he began using this phrase only in the last year of his life, and never had the opportunity to fully explain his theology here. But I think this is where he could be labeled a Postmodernist (though I will not agree with that). I tend to agree with the folks who point to the extreme conditions in which he lived, as part of the reason for this shift- in the midst of the Nazi horrors, imprisoned, family members and friends executed, and a new landscape that looked void of God. So he’s attempting to reconcile a lot of things in his faith.

I dunno, Michael! Like I said, in over my head, still thinking.

There are certainly a lot of Bonhoeffer’s prison writings that sound “postmodern,” especially as he refers to a “religionless Christianity” and “living without God.”

But when I think of the term Postmodernism, here’s what I come up with: Postmodernism says there is no absolute truth anywhere. Postmodernists believe that all truth is always changing, and all truth is manufactured – a product of the culture in which we live. (This is how Fritz Ridenour puts it in his book on 20 Worldviews).

I definitely can’t call Bonhoeffer a Postmodernist when I take that definition. There must be a difference between the worldview of Postmodernism and a “postmodern philosopher.” Jesus Christ is an absolute truth, and Bonhoeffer held fast to Christ as the center of all. But I’ve read a bit recently about …

hang on, I’ll have to write more later, just realized I have 4 wet, naked children who escaped from the bathtub…

I’m glad you liked it, Jennifer. I see you posted that at 2am, so you need to wrap up that Carnival and go to bed.

I’m up too late working on the carnival, hope y’all like Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

How about you?

Thanks, Mike.