Etsi deus non daretur spinoza biography
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Bonhoeffer and Luther: Interpreting Two Kingdoms in a World Etsi Deus non Daretur
BONHOEFFER AND LUTHER: INTERPRETING TWO KINGDOMS IN AWORLD ETSI DEUS NON DARETUR Introduction Writing from Tegel Military prison on July 16, 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer informs his lärling and posthumous relative Eberhard Bethge that, “we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur. And this fryst vatten just what we do recognize – before God! God han själv compels us to recognize it.” Letters and papper from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 360-61. Bonhoeffer briefly traces the idea of etsi dues non dateture from Montaigne to Hegel. “In theology one sees it first in Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who maintains that reason fryst vatten sufficient for religious knowledge. In ethics it appears in Montaigne and Bodin with their substitution of rules of life for the commandments. In politics Machiavelli detaches politics from morality in general and founds the
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The Christian Roots of the Secular State
1In this paper I would like to test the following thesis: that the different fortunes of the secular State in the predominantly Jewish, Christian and Muslim countries depends significantly (although not exclusively) on their different religious background and, in particular, on the conception of God’s law that developed in the theological and legal traditions of these three religions. I am not denying the importance of historical events and cultural processes in the formation of the secular State. But, on the one hand, history alone cannot explain the whole picture, as historical facts take place within a reference framework provided, in our case, by the sacred texts and the interpretive tradition of each religion. Historical processes do not develop in a vacuum and believing that they are completely disconnected from the religious and cultural context in which they take shape is as naïve as believing that they are totally dependent o
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For a few months I have been thinking about a phrase I first encountered in 1995 when I was teaching an introductory course in theology at Wheaton. We were using Alister McGrath’s reader as the primary text for the class and he quoted Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45) as saying that, in Modernity, we must learn to live “etsi Deus non daretur” (as if God is not a given).
Bonhoeffer was trying to figure out how to be a Modern person and affirm Christianity in some sense.
Contra at least one recent evangelical rendering of Bonhoeffer, which follows a trend that has existed for some time of treating him as though he were educated in Moody Bible College rather than in the Universities of Tübingen and Berlin, Bonhoeffer did not hold the historic Christian faith. He was a Modernist, i.e., he accepted as a given the Enlightenment critique of the historic Christian faith and understanding of the world. What does that mean? It means, as one of my undergraduate profs said in 1979: “I