Liberating Faith

Book excerpt: Liberating Faith remains an effective introduction to the theology and spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. After a brief biographical portrait of Bonhoeffer’s adult life, Kelly offers a thematic overview of Bonhoeffer’s Christological theology with an emphasis on the sociality of Christ. Other chapters focus on the “liberation of faith,” which is essentially Bonhoeffer’s theology of revelation that emerged from his own existential crisis regarding his own faith and an examination of his theology of the Church. While Kelly draws heavily on Bonhoeffer’s later writings like The Cost of Discipleship, Ethics, and especially Letters and Papers from Prison, he also uses key texts spanning the entirety of Bonhoeffer’s career to develop the critical ideas at the heart of Bonhoeffer’s theology. Therefore, Liberating Faith does very well to set the stage for Bonhoeffer’s overall theology.