God Speaks to Us: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Biblical Hermeneutics

Peter Lang Press, 2013.

Bonhoeffer was convinced that God spoke to his people through the Bible. How did a theologian of his caliber, who was well acquainted with the historical-critical interpretation of the scriptures, justify such a claim, and how did he apply this conviction to his daily challenges as theologian, pastor and political dissident during the Nazi regime? This book presents the attempts by a group of international Bonhoeffer scholars to answer some of these questions. By approaching Bonhoeffer’s theology from a number of different hermeneutical angles, the contributions in this volume cast new light both on his more general hermeneutical framework and on specific theological and political issues concerning his reading of the Bible. The essays underline Bonhoeffer’s contemporary relevance for the current resurgence of theological interpretation and for postmodern discussions about the interpretive nature of truth.

Bonhoeffer, Religion and Politics: 4th International Bonhoeffer Colloquium

Peter Lang Publishing, 2012.

Bonhoeffer’s stance on political issues has been the focus of considerable research. Insufficient attention has been given, however, to the theoretical foundations of Bonhoeffer’s political theology, that is, to the fundamental elements and concepts that shape his understanding of religion’s relation to politics. This volume aims to redress this oversight in Bonhoeffer studies. The collected essays show how Bonhoeffer’s theological core convictions resulted in assumptions about the nature and goal of politics that remain relevant for today. The contributions to this volume document the 4th International Bonhoeffer Colloquium which took place in Mainz, Germany, in 2010 and was funded by the Fritz-Thyssen-Foundation.

Incarnational Humanism: A Philosophy of Culture for the Church in the World

2013 CCED Book Prize winner! Having left its Christian roots behind, the West faces a moral, spiritual and intellectual crisis. It has little left to maintain its legacy of reason, freedom, human dignity and democracy. Far from capitulating, Jens Zimmermann believes the church has an opportunity to speak a surprising word into this postmodern situation grounded in the Incarnation itself that is proclaimed in Christian preaching and eucharistic celebration. To do so requires that we retrieve an ancient Christian humanism for our time. Only this will acknowledge and answer the general demand for a common humanity beyond religious, denominational and secular divides. Incarnational Humanism thus points the way forward by pointing backward. Rather than resorting to theological novelty, Zimmermann draws on the rich resources found in Scripture and in its theological interpreters ranging from Irenaeus and Augustine to de Lubac and Bonhoeffer. Zimmermann masterfully draws his comprehensive study together by proposing a distinctly evangelical philosophy of culture. That philosophy grasps the link between the new humanity inaugurated by Christ and all of humanity. In this way he holds up a picture of the public ministry of the church as a witness to the world's reconciliation to God.

“A timely and insightful analysis of how human beings, in the course of several centuries, have come to dominate a world and yet have lost their sense of what it means to be human. Jens Zimmermann demonstrates with depth and clarity the way that our common humanity was recovered in the incarnation and is communicated to us and to the world in the eucharist. This is truly a book for our times.”

— Barry Harvey, professor of theology in the Honors College, Baylor University

“The book is an invaluable guide through the way that traditional Christian understandings of human beings and humanism have been engaged by critics through the centuries since the foundation of the Church.”

— Thomas Creedy, Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, Vol. XXVI, Vol 1-2

“Despite wading through deep waters of theology and philosophy, the author’s nimble prose makes this book readable and suitable for both advanced undergraduates and graduate students in theology. I would suggest it for inclusion in an introductory course on historical theology, and classes on Christianity and culture or philosophy and theology.”

— Michael Buttrey, The Conrad Grebel Review, Fall 2013

Humanism and Religion: A Call for the Renewal of Western Culture

The question of who 'we' are and what vision of humanity 'we' assume in Western culture lies at the heart of hotly debated questions on the role of religion in education, politics, and culture in general. The need for recovering a greater purpose for social practices is indicated, for example, by the rapidly increasing number of publications on the demise of higher education, lamenting the fragmentation of knowledge and university culture's surrender to market-driven pragmatism. The West's cultural rootlessness and lack of cultural identity are also revealed by the failure of multiculturalism to integrate religiously vibrant immigrant cultures. A main cause of the West's cultural malaise is the long-standing separation of reason and faith. Jens Zimmermann suggests that the West can rearticulate its identity and renew its cultural purpose by recovering the humanistic ethos that originally shaped Western culture. In tracing the religious roots of humanism from patristic theology, through the Renaissance into modern philosophy, we find that humanism was originally based on the correlation of reason and faith. In this book, the author combines humanism, religion, and hermeneutic philosophy to re-imagine humanism for our current cultural and intellectual climate. The hope of this recovery is for humanism to become what Charles Taylor has called a 'social imaginary', an internalized vision of what it means to be human. This vision will encourage, once again, the correlation of reason and faith in order to overcome current cultural impasses, such as those posed, for example, by religious and secularist fundamentalisms.

“The critical retrieval of religious, theological and specifically Christian humanism, which has been gathering momentum during the past decade, has received a major boost with the publication of these two fine studies by Jens Zimmermann ... Each volume can stand on its own, but they overlap and complement each other in addressing the cultural crisis that faces Western society with secularism in confusion and religious fundamentalism rampant ”

— John de Gruchy, Modern Theology

Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory

Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2010.

Suffering, the sacred, and the sublime are concepts that often surface in humanities research in an attempt to come to terms with what is challenging, troubling or impossible to represent. These intersecting concepts are used to mediate the gap between the spoken and the unspeakable, between experience and language, between body and spirit, between the immanent and the transcendent, and between the human and the divine. The twenty-five essays in Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory, written by international scholars working in the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, and history, address the ways in which literature and theory have engaged with these three concepts and related concerns. The contributors analyze literary and theoretical texts from the medieval period to the postmodern age, from the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert to those of Endô Shûsaku, Alice Munro, Annie Dillard, Emmanuel Levinas, and Slavoj Žižek. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of religion and literature, philosophy and literature, aesthetic theory, and trauma studies.

Politics and the Religious Imagination

Routledge, 2010.

Politics and the Religious Imagination is the product of a group of interdisciplinary scholars each analyzing the connections between religious narratives and the construction of regional and global politics, combining a set of theoretical and philosophic insights with several case studies that represent varied geographies and religious customs.

The past decade has seen increasing interest in the links between religion and politics, and this edited volume seeks to take religion seriously as a motivator of action. Few studies have attempted to bring together the multi-disciplinary work in this burgeoning field of study and this work takes a global perspective, using a variety of contexts including East-West relations to analyze the following key themes:

• the constructive and destructive hermeneutics of religious stories

• the relevance and importance of religion as a dominant political narrative

• the rise of new stories among groups as agents of change

• the way that religious narratives help to define and constrain the Other

• the manipulation of religious stories for political benefit

This work argues that it is insufficient to judge the relationship of religion and politics through mere institutional or quantitative lenses, and this collection proves that while this promise of the narrative part of the social imaginary has been recognized in political theory to a certain extent, its influence in the realm of empirical political science has yet to be fully considered.

Combining the work of a wide range of experts, this collection will be of great interests to scholars of politics, philosophy, religious studies, and the literary influence of religion.