Volume 81, Issue 1

In prison, Bonhoeffer reads the Old Testament over and over again. Implicitly, by doing that, he struggles for a new theological evaluation of Judaism of whose present fate he is well aware. In view of this, it is questionable whether Bonhoeffer's new theological insights can really be read from a dogmatically fixed Christology oriented solely on the New Testament. The examples of erotic love and blessing rather show that Bonhoeffer's idea of »all earthly life being utilized to testify« for God is entirely based on the diverse spectre of the Old Testament voices. When Bonhoeffer focuses on »who Christ actually is for us today«, or how central concepts of Christian soteriology such as »repentance, faith, justification, rebirth, sanctification« are to be interpreted »in a worldly sense« - and that means to him: »in the Old Testament sense« - then he does not read the Old Testament any longer with the lenses of a fixed Christology, as he has done for long in the shadow of Barth. Rather, he anticipates the basic insight of the later Jewish-Christian dialogue that the New Testament is essentially related to the Old Testament and Christianity thus stays dependent on Judaism and its truth.

Fundamental questions offer the chance to see the familiar in a new light and to examine it in a wider perspective. From five theological perspectives, the paper takes a look at the current challenges facing the church and thus attempts to provide impulses for the self-understanding and action of the church.

In the debates on post-mortal organ donation German protestant churches fundamentally argue in favour of the motif of Christian charity: To donate organs after death must be a voluntary act of giving. Any duties to do so are incompatible with this motif. In principle Christian charity focuses on a concrete other, whose specific needs in a given situation are apparent. Against this backdrop the article argues, that charity is an insufficient motif in these debates, since anonymous post-mortal organ donation structurally deals with a generalised other. Therefore, it seems more appropriate to understand organ donation as an expression of the individual’s orientation towards the common weal and as a matter of responsibility for the whole of society. Indeed: there is no individual duty to donate organs after death, but a demand for personal reasoning and public participation in a crucial social and political question, that seems well in line with the concept of Public Protestantism.

Against the background of the virulent question of destructive conflict dynamics between groups, the present contribution introduces the social-psychological theory complex of the »Social Identity Approach« (SIA) and discusses it from a theological-anthropological and theological-ethical point of view. While the SIA assumes that social identity, which is important for the concept of self, leads to depersonalization and the devaluation of foreign groups, a Christian understanding of identity could on the one hand protect against overidentification with collective identities and on the other hand, following Bonhoeffer's reflections, remind us that collectives, too, must be understood as actors with an ethical orientation and, as collective persons, must be held responsible in a specific way for processes of social transformation. The church, as an actor in civil society, could play the prototypical role of a reconciling collective.