Ralf K Wüstenberg - Böcker

How is it that Islam is so feared and misunderstood among Christians? Is there any possibility of an open dialogue between Muslims and Christians that will lead to a greater understanding of both? Ralf K. Wüstenberg explores these and other questions in an in-depth investigation of Islam, using as his guide the teachings of the revered Muslim scholar, Al-Ghazali, and placing them in dialogue with those of the protestant theologian and Reformer, John Calvin. The journey of discovery offered in this book is of long-lasting value to both Christians and Muslims as they seek to find common ground in understanding the most important and basic tenets of each other’s faith.

What might the often cited phrases from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison theology mean for the ethical discourse at the beginning of the 21st century? Which hermeneutical concepts might enable contemporary religious thinkers to enter into a dialogue with Bonhoeffer’s thought? This collection of lectures will address questions like these both by examining the intellectual, cultural and historical origins of Bonhoeffer’s Tegel Theology and by drawing out the ethical consequences of Bonhoeffer’s contribution for current political discourses. Going Bonhoeffer and Beyond – as the title indicates – means interpreting contemporary issues like religious pluralism and political ethics in the light of Bonhoeffer’s key ideas such as his Christological «life-concept» or his ethical distinction between the «ultimate and the penultimate things».

This first volume of the new series International Bonhoeffer Interpretations (IBI) contains several impulses for translating Bonhoeffer’s key ideas on Religion, Religionlessness and the Church into current contexts. These impulses vary from prospects for a Christian university looking at Bonhoeffer’s distinction between the ‘ultimate and the penultimate things’ to an ethical understanding of Bonhoeffer’s ‘as-if-theology’ in the light of Luther’s distinction between law and gospel; from a fresh perspective on Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity in the light of his thought on ‘oikumene’ to a Christological re-interpretation of repentance as the contribution of religionless Christianity to the task of the Church in the United States of America. The impulses are framed by programmatic contributions suggesting a framework for reading Bonhoeffer in the 21st century in his hermeneutic exploration of Bonhoeffer’s theology and the crises of Western culture, and analyzing ‘religionless Christianity’ in a complexly religious and secular world.

The hermeneutics of human life is one of the most challenging issues in the fields of bioscience and of ethics today. Recent breakthroughs in bio science challenge the prevalent metaphors and paradigms which define human life in the human and natural sciences, that influence our understanding of «diseases», «illness», «therapy», «aging», «dying», and, consequently, also shape medical practice. In the essays collected in this book, scientists, ethicists, philosophers and theologians bring Bonhoeffer’s ethics and his theological anthropology into dialogue with bioscience and explore current bioethical and anthropological issues. All articles were first presented as lectures at the Third International Bonhoeffer Colloquium at Freie Universität Berlin, 2009. Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, as presented in this book, helps to articulate a semantics of human life which stimulates a debate between science and ethics, and which assists in finding fresh ways for understanding human life and the related tasks of scientific research and medical practice.