The Ambiguity between “Personality” and “Person” in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Theology
Abstract
His late 1932 first-time public positioning to the radical socio-political changes of his context provoked Bonhoeffer to express his personal turmoil in a literary fragment. In working through his confusion, Bonhoeffer went beyond learned concepts towards a theology that elevated revealed content over formal authority and the concept of the person of Jesus Christ over a culturally understood concept of personality. This he based on the incarnation of God in the natural person of Jesus Christ, which added a spiritual dimension to the constitutional requirement for the institutional church to be centred on the juristic concept of the natural person. In Jesus Christ, the Resurrected One, the concept of the natural person proved politically untouchable. It contested the juristic authority over life that is limited by birth and death with the theological frame of sin and redemption by God’s grace and Jesus Christ’s Stellvertretung on the cross within earthly reality.Downloads
Authors retain copyright and grant the Journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this Journal.
This is an open access journal, and the authors and journal should be properly acknowledged, when works are cited.
Authors may use the publishers version for teaching purposes, in books, theses, dissertations, conferences and conference papers.
A copy of the authors’ publishers version may also be hosted on the following websites:
- Non-commercial personal webpage or blog.
- Institutional webpage.
- Authors Institutional Repository.
The following notice should accompany such a posting on the website: “This is an electronic version of an article published in Scriptura, Volume XXX, number XXX, pages XXX–XXX”, DOI. Authors should also supply a hyperlink to the original paper or indicate where the original paper (http://scriptura.journals.ac.za/pub) may be found.
Authors publishers version, affiliated with the Stellenbosch University will be automatically deposited in the University’s’ Institutional Repository SUNScholar.
Articles as a whole, may not be re-published with another journal.
The following license applies:
