Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 86:1 (Spring 2024)
Article: The Evangelical Appropriation Of Bonhoeffer: An Examination Of His Soteriology
Author: James Beevers

WTJ 86:1 (Spring 2024) p. 87

The Evangelical Appropriation Of Bonhoeffer: An Examination Of His Soteriology

James Beevers

James Beevers is a PhD candidate in New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary.

Ideologically charged appropriations of Bonhoeffer fail to deal fairly with Bonhoeffer’s theology. The misinterpretation of isolated quotations has led to improper classification of Bonhoeffer’s theological affiliations and misinterpretations of his views on salvation. In this study, Bonhoeffer’s doctrine of salvation is examined in his primary works. This study argues that Bonhoeffer’s conception of human sociality and ethical solidarity, his perspective on belief and unbelief as a spectrum rather than a static polarity, and his understanding of God’s redeeming actus directus in Christ represent a distinct soteriology that explicitly and deliberately leaves room for apocatastasis, the final universalistic redemption of all beings.

I. Approaching Bonhoeffer

The publication of the English translation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s collected works, completed in 2014, enables previously unavailable access to the primary texts for those interested in the German theologian’s thought.1 Similarly, the recent resurgence of interest in Bonhoeffer was facilitated by the 2010 publication of Eric Metaxas’s biography, which reopened the question of Bonhoeffer’s theological affiliations and garnered significant attention.2 Famously, Metaxas declared that “Bonhoeffer is more like a theologically conservative evangelical than anything else.”3 Indeed, according to Metaxas, “theological liberals have somehow made Bonhoeffer in their own

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image, mainly based on the fact that he studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and that he wanted to visit Mahatma Gandhi, and that he used the phrase ‘religionless Christianity’ in a letter.”4

But is the basis for claiming Bonhoeffer as a liberal truly so superficial? Can evangelicals really appropriate Bonhoeffer’s writings as those of a compatriot? In addressing these questions, Peter Barnes takes a more nuanced approach, acknowledging the variety of streams and sources in Bonhoeffer’s thought, but also reaching the conclusion that his understanding of the “gospel” was “impeccably orthodox” from a conservative evangelical point of view.5 Barnes offers some support for his conclusion. Evangelicalism grew out of twentieth-century funda...