[September 2003 journal entry]
It is very important to put in historical and cultural context the ‘come of age’ metaphor (which I trace to Kant’s response to the question – What Is ‘Enlightenment’?) which points to the autonomy/accountability associated with advancing from childhood to adulthood and Dietrich’s contention in the prison correspondence (but not before as far as I have been able to tell) that theology (specifically in the German/Protestant tradition of which he was a part) must make the radical (i.e., to the root) changes necessary to catch up with and be relevant to ‘the world’ (which he was convinced would, after the war and the fall of the Nazis, move forward on a secularized path rather than turn back to pre- ‘come of age’/pre-modern perspectives) which ‘religion’ had hesitated to embrace at the price – Dietrich had concluded and I agree – of an increasing and irreversible marginalizing of ‘religion’.
