The Germany of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's lifetime (1906-45) experienced three radical constitutional changes, all of which were to affect Bonhoeffer's formation in crucial ways. His first twelve years saw the Wilhelmine Empire (Kaiserreich), founded under Otto von Bismarck in 1871, reach the zenith of its power and then virtually self-destruct at the end of the First World War in 1918. The Kaiserreich was followed by Germany's first experiment in parliamentary democracy; the ill-fated Weimar Republic. It lasted from 1919 until 1933 when it also collapsed, or more accurately, was destroyed by a combination of hostile attacks from the anti-democratic forces of both the extreme left and the extreme right, on the one hand, and the political inexperience of the supporters of the constitution on the other. Then, out of the political and economic chaos of the end-phase of the Weimar years (1929-33), arose the National Socialist dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich. It was this latter manifestation of the German spirit which Bonhoeffer judged as essentially evil and which left him no alternative but to resist to the death.

It is not uncommon to find that the best-known writings of an author are the most difficult to examine. Familiarity produces its own 'readings' of a text, an audience already clear what its central content amounts to; and certainly clear about any impact the text may have made on them personally. Unlike some of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's earlier texts, the Letters and Papers from Prison have a place in the life of many who, perhaps as a result, come to want to study him further. It is Letters and Papers from Prison that are the home of those evocative phrases, 'a world come of age', 'the religious a priori and 'religionless Christianity', and therefore it is in Letters and Papers from Prison that those who have sought Bonhoeffer's support for their agenda for the interpretation of the Christian faith so as to take account of the changed thought patterns of the contemporary world have found it.

In the midst of these theological explorations there are other phrases of a profoundly evocative quality, such as the reference to God's being 'pushed out of the world on to the Cross',3 that have offered themselves for use in the devotion of many subsequent believers. Here also is an utterly engaging human story, with its insight into the way in which a particular person survived in the uncertain, frightening and potentially demoralising circumstances of imprisonment: we learn of his love for and a little of his taste in music, of the kind of life for which he longed and the way in which he managed the intense loneliness of his situation. At the heart of the letters is a warm human being, a passionate lover of life, with enough capacity to engage his readers (readers he never envisaged), even if they had no particular interest in theology.

Bonhoeffer provided the title of this chapter in his doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, when he said that theological doctrines such as creation, sin and revelation can only be fully understood in terms of sociality. If the venerable English word 'sociality' does not spring to our lips in everyday speech, that reflects the degree to which practical and philosophical individualism pervades modern Anglo-Saxon culture. But to use 'sociality' as a fundamental category to describe Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology is not simply to distinguish German from American and British culture. The reason is essentially theological: 'the concepts of person, community and God are inseparably and essentially interrelated'.

This means that articulating a Christian understanding of human sociality is an inner-theological task. What 'person' and 'community' mean is a question of theological anthropology. It is not as if one could take an already developed interpretation of human social existence and then simply pour Christian content into it. For there are many different systems embedding competing world views: in the modern world, theories of social contract, civil rights, utilitarianism and Marxism have powerfully shaped economic and political systems, and the mentality and mores of whole populations. Similarly, philosophy from Aristotle to the Stoics and up to Idealist epistemology and Hegelianism have all developed views of human persons and social life.

From 1935 to 1937 Bonhoeffer ran an illegal seminary for the Confessing Church, first in Zingst; then in Finkenwalde in Pomerania. When it was closed down by the Gestapo, he wrote three books reflecting the teaching, ethos and methods of the seminary, namely The Cost of Discipleship, Life Together and The Prayerbook of the Bible: An Introduction to the Psalms. These books take us to the heart of the theological and practical preparation Bonhoeffer gave to the five sets of ordinands who went through the sixmonth- long courses. Life Together conflates descriptions of the seminary's common ordered life, influenced by monastic models, with theological explanation and spiritual advice. This book and The Cost of Discipleship are probably Bonhoeffer's most famous and influential writings, apart from Letters and Papers from Prison. The Prayerbook of the Bible (1940) was the last of his writings published in his lifetime.

As a Christmas gift to his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi; fellow member of the conspiracy Hans Oster; and his closest friend Eberhard Bethge; Bonhoeffer penned an essay at the turn of the year 1942-3. Entitled 'After Ten Years', it was an account of lessons learnt in opposing Nazism across the decade following Hitler's rise to power in January 1933. Bonhoeffer speaks of feeling 'no ground under our feet' and of the shared experience that these friends straddled a 'turning-point in history', an epochal break in time. They had landed in that awkward place history sometimes serves up when 'every available alternative seem[s] equally intolerable' yet the shape of the future cannot be discerned. The way forward is not visible, even to the sage.

The subsection 'No ground under our feet' is followed by 'Who stands fast?' Bonhoeffer leads off with a blunt report: 'The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts.' Then he catalogues standard moral options generations have trusted, only to describe their destruction in the West as that had come to murderous expression under fascism. Appeals to 'reason', to 'moral fanaticism' (principled single-mindedness), to 'conscience' and to the paths of 'duty', 'freedom' and 'private virtuousness' had all crumbled as sure guides for living amidst turmoil and crisis.

Shortly after Dietrich Bonhoeffer's abrupt and tragic death on 9 April 1945, one of his long-standing friends, Reinhold Niebuhr, paid him the ultimate tribute in an article entitled The Death of a Martyr'. The story of Bonhoeffer', Niebuhr wrote, 'is worth recording. It belongs to the modern acts of the apostles.' Niebuhr went on to predict that

In the past half-century this prediction has become true not only within the boundaries of Bonhoeffer's native Germany, but also far beyond.

Bonhoeffer's life is a story of family solidarity, of faith and faithfulness, of courage and compassion and of true patriotism. Moreover, Bonhoeffer's life is a necessary key to understanding his theology. The numerous writings which flowed from his creative pen can most effectively be interpreted when seen in the unfolding context of his life and times. In sum, biography inevitably sheds light on the foundational themes of his theology and is an interpretative key in reaching the depths of meaning in his writing.

Emerson has been called many things, but except by theological stalwarts outraged by the Divinity School “Address,” “radical” has seldom been one of them. Disposed by taste and training to the rule of gentlemen, he was appalled by the Jacksonian rabble even as he saw it impelled by a feeling of human worth much like his own. Emerson's practical politics were instinctively conservative; the political coloring of his writings is harder to assess. It was once commonplace to observe that the literary Emerson had no politics at all and little sense of history as progressive or teleological. Nature and the Soul were timeless; only the outward costumes and idioms changed. More recently, Emerson has been historicized by embedding him within an American world “poised,” as Carolyn Porter has said, “on the verge of the most accelerated capitalist development in modern history.” Surely no contemporary registered the new economic forces more acutely than Emerson did. Yet if the Emerson of the 1940s and 'SOS was construed as loftily indifferent to the currents of the age, the Emerson of the 1980s and '90s has been portrayed as ideologically captive to them.

Explicit or implicit in nearly everything Emerson wrote is the conviction that nature bats last, that nature is the law, the final word, the supreme court. Others have believed - still believe - that the determining force in our lives is grace, or that it is the state - the polis, the community - or that it is the past. More recently it has been argued that the central force is economics or race or sex or genetics. Emerson's basic teaching is that the fundamental context of our lives is nature. Emerson's definition of nature is a broad one. Nature is the way things are. Philosophically, Emerson says, the universe is made up of nature and the soul, or nature and consciousness. Everything that is not me is nature; nature thus includes nature (in the common sense of the green world), art, all other persons, and my own body.

I wonder if I am the only reader of Emerson who weeps over the death of his son in 1842. I have never heard anyone else confess to this reaction, although the story of how Emerson's “Experience” refers to Waldo Emerson's death is told briefly by Emerson himself, in the willfully perverse third paragraph of the essay. Then it is narrated repeatedly by twentieth-century scholars and critics, who treasure this moment as the most dramatic autobiographical reference in Emerson's published prose: 'In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, - no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me, - neither better nor worse.'

In the I 830s and 'qos, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau engaged in a prolonged series of meditations and dialogues on the meaning of friendship. At key moments, each writer decided that fundamental issues of human development could not be articulated without taking into account the role of friends. But Transcendentalist models of individuation cannot be completely reconciled with theories of social relationship; for the demands of self-reliance, especially the intuition of the “divine” depths of the self, often pull one out of the social orbit into an intense introspection. As a result, Transcendentalist discussions of friendship often emerged in response to moments of crisis (whether encounters with death, separation, or personal misunderstanding) that laid bare the specter of isolation underlying their theories. This tension (between friendship and isolation) poignantly dramatizes one of the paradoxes of Transcendentalist literary expression: its central subject matter - profound moments of imaginative and spiritual intensity - could only be described in retrospect, from the vantage point of someone who had passed through and remembered the experience.

Without superstitious reference to the Bible - indeed, without the slightest veneration of any scripture - Emerson yet writes in the tradition of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. He is concerned, as the prophets were, with the relation of spirit and human behavior, of right seeing and right living, the perfection of justice, and the power that comes into human beings when they yield to the truth. Too polite and civilized to be a Jeremiah in style, Emerson nevertheless sees his audience as worshiping false gods and as laboring under a compensatory punishment for their general disloyalty to the regime of spirit. His work is restoration. He finds the sacred quarantined in small religious redoubts, calls it out, makes it credible, and broadcasts it lavishly over the landscape. We watch this process in astonishment.

Is there a “late” Emerson? Certainly there was an elder one. Emerson lived a long and extraordinarily prolific 79 years. It seems only natural and reasonable to assume that his thought - like his life, like the metamorphic history of his times - can be divided into chronological periods. Emerson seems, in fact, to invite us to read him in terms of early and late phases. In the opening pages of The Conduct of Life, generally considered his last important book, he speaks of a former naiveté (the optimistic assurance that the world is all “positive power”) and a new realism (the chastened acknowledgment that “negative power” is really something to be reckoned with): “Once we thought, positive power was all. Now we learn, that negative power, or circumstance, is half.”

My purpose here is to say something about Ralph Waldo Emerson as a figure in American culture. It was Emerson who, in literary terms at least, really put America on the map; who created for himself the practically nonexistent role of man of letters, and for about a half century - from the golden age of Jackson to the gilded age of Grant - criticized, cajoled, sometimes confused, but mainly inspired audiences in America and abroad. When Emerson died in 1882 he was indisputably a figure - for some a figure of fun, but for most one to be spoken of with reverence approaching awe. Matthew Arnold declared that Emerson's was the most important work done in prose in the nineteenth century. Nietzsche called him a “brother soul.” One of his disciples, Moncure Conway, likened him to Buddha, and twenty years later William James would pronounce him divine.

On a transitional November day, in the year 1872, a pair of American gentlemen could be seen roaming the rooms of the Museum of the Louvre. The elder of them was clearly in the scanning mode, moving his tall, spare frame briskly through the rooms. His younger, fleshier partner frequently would urge hesitation in the midst of one or another masterpiece, to which his companion would give friendly but only momentary assent before moving on once more, like a steer of the Western plains avoiding the rope. Again the younger man would linger with his all-absorbing gaze, then respectfully touch his friend's elbow. He would softly exclaim and modestly explicate, progressively but pleasantly puzzled by his companion's polite impatience and clear desire to gallop on, taking in everything at large yet nothing in particular with his strong, frank stare.

In 1833, Waldo Emerson (as he still called himself) gave a talk at the Unitarian chapel in Edinburgh, Scotland. At least one member of the audience remembered it ecstatically: 'The originality of his thoughts, the consummate beauty of the language in which they were clothed, the calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effect, and the singular directness and simplicity of his manner . . . made a deep impression on me. . . . His voice was the sweetest, the most winning and penetrating of any I ever heard.' The enthusiastic auditor might have added that the go-year-old visiting American speaker did not receive any sort of fee.