[September 2002 journal entry]
During a conversation with Renate Bethge (Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s niece), she asked about an observation in one of my letters to her – i.e., that “I am a historian first, a theologian second”. I began my explanation with a 1974 exchange with a fellow graduate student re how to approach and handle research into the critical scholarship about Jewish scripture and Christian scripture. The student said he intended to take seriously only research results that supported his already established and uncritical view of Jewish scripture and Christian scripture as ‘inspired’. I said my approach would be the reverse. I have never knowingly veered from the approach with which I aligned myself in that conversation. I explained to Renate that in time I concluded I could not maintain ‘a historian first, a theologian second’ approach within the ‘religious’ T/O paradigm/sphere. We then spent most of our time associating the ‘historian first, theologian second’ position with my subsequent interaction with the beginnings of a ‘non-religious’ approach to spirituality and ethics in Dietrich’s prison letters.
