Dietrich Bonhoeffer was only thirty-nine years old when he was executed in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, yet his courage, vision, and brilliance have greatly influenced the twentieth-century Church and theology. Particularly through his bestselling classic, The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer profoundly shaped such minds and movements as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Leonardo Boff, civil rights and leberation theology.

A Testament to Freedom, completely revised and expanded for this edition, includes previously untranslated writings, excerpts from major books, sermons, and selected letters spanning the years of Bonhoeffer's pastoral and theological career. This magnificent volume takes readers on a historical and biographical journey that follows Bonhoeffer through the various stages of his life--as teacher, ecumenist, pastor, preacher, seminary director, prophet in the Nazi era and, finally, as martyr in pursuit of peace and justice....

Now in an affordable paper edition, Sanctorum Communio is more readily usable for teaching and scholarship. The work, available in this series for the first time in its entirety in English, includes all material omitted from the original 1930 German publication. Bonhoeffer's doctoral dissertation sets out the theology of sociality that informed all his work, engaging social philosophy and sociology to interpret the church as "Christ existing as church-community. " Here are the roots of his commitment to the Confessing church and the ecumenical movement, and of his actions in the resistance movement for the sake of peace and Germany's future....

After his martyrdom at the hands of the Gestapo in 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer continued his witness in the hearts of Christians around the world. His Letters and Papers from Prison became a prized testimony to Christian faith and courage, read by thousands. Now in Life Together we have Pastor Bonhoeffer's experience of Christian community. This story of a unique fellowship in an underground seminary during the Nazi years reads like one of Paul's letters. It gives practical advice on how life together in Christ can be sustained in families and groups. The role of personal prayer, worship in common, everyday work, and Christian service is treated in simple, almost biblical, words. Life Together is bread for all who are hungry for the real life of Christian fellowship.

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One of the great classics of prison literature, Letters and Papers from Prison effectively serves as the last will and testament of the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by the Nazis after incarceration in Tegel Prison. Acute and subtle, warm and perceptive, yet also profoundly moving, the documents collectively tell a very human story of loss, of courage, and of hope. Now reissued with a new Preface, by one of his leading interpreters. Bonhoeffer's story seems as vitally relevant, as politically prophetic, and as theologically significant, as it did yesterday....

Before his arrest by the Nazis in 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was head of a seminary of the German Confessing Church. In "The Cost of Discipleship", he focuses on the most treasured part of Christ's teaching, the Sermon on the Mount....

One of the most important theologians of the twentieth century illuminates the relationship between ourselves and the teachings of Jesus

What can the call to discipleship, the adherence to the word of Jesus, mean today to the businessman, the soldier, the laborer, or the aristocrat? What did Jesus mean to say to us? What is his will for us today? Drawing on the Sermon on the Mount, Dietrich Bonhoeffer answers these timeless questions by providing a seminal reading of the dichotomy between "cheap grace" and "costly grace." "Cheap grace," Bonhoeffer wrote, "is the grace we bestow on ourselves...grace without discipleship....Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the girl which must be asked for, the door at which a man must know....It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life."

The Cost of Discipleship is a compelling statement of the demands of sacrifice and ethical consistency from a man whose life and thought were exemplary articulations of a new type of leadership inspired by the Gospel, and imbued with the spirit of Christian humanism and a creative sense of civic duty....

The fresh, critical translation of the volume is now available in paper. Act and Being, written in 1929-1930 as Bonhoeffer s second dissertation, deals with the questions of consciousness and conscience in theology from the perspective of the Reformation insight about the origin of human sinfulness in the heart turned in upon itself and thus open neither to the revelation of God nor to the encounter with the neighbor. Here, therefore, we find Bonhoeffer's thoughts about power, revelation, otherness, theological method, and theological anthropology....