[September 2003 journal entry]
Dietrich (as I recall) began his 1933 Christ the Center lectures in Berlin with a ‘Present Christ’ section. He had lost this confidence in a ‘Present Christ’ as some remnant of the church (i.e., ‘religion’) after the Confessing Church failed to persist effectively as a resistance movement against the Nazis. The Bonhoeffer met in the Christ the Center lectures and in the pre-1938 Confessing Church years was very Barthian in theological orientation. Remember that Barth (who was removed by the Nazis from his teaching position at Bonn in 1934 and returned to his homeland of Switzerland where he spent the rest of his career) had just come out with the first volume of his Church Dogmatics before Dietrich presented his Christ the Center lectures in Berlin. Dietrich’s 1939 decision to return from New York City to Germany and his decision to join the Abwehr covert resistance circle necessitated that he abandon Barth’s theological method/perspective as he pondered afresh the ethical (as evident in the various drafts of his Ethics) and the theological (as evident in the prison correspondence) implications of these decisions. Note Dietrich’s stinging critiques of Barth in the prison correspondence. Remember that after the war Barth would not guide the research of students who proposed to study Bonhoeffer past the 1939 point in his life/thought.
