[September 2003 journal entry]
I think Dietrich gave up looking (in)to the church in its various familiar forms once the Confessing Church failed to be/have the ‘Present Christ’ in/for Germany. “If not the Confessing Church, then where else is there to look in the church as it has been formed and reformed up to now?” is where I see Dietrich to have moved by the prison correspondence. Yes, his prison question “Who is Christ for us today?” implies continued confidence/expectation re a ‘Present Christ’. Addressing that question led him to radical rethinking re methodology (e.g., a ‘non-religious interpretation’) and to radical rethinking re ‘community of faith’ (e.g., the ‘outline for a book’ near the end of the prison letters). I also think it is significant that Dietrich put the question in terms of ‘who’ rather than ‘where’. And remember he was looking ahead to the decisions after the war re reconstructing ‘religion’ in Germany. By the last months of the prison correspondence, I see Dietrich becoming increasingly passionate that the response after the war not be to piece back together something familiar. As it turns out, that is exactly what happened.
