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drbobcornwall's review
4.0
I had heard the name Helmut Gollwitzer, but I have known little about him. He was a prized student of Karl Barth and was considered to be his successor at Basel. Unfortunately for Basel or Gollwitzer, he was turned down due to his political activism, even though he was following Barth's lead. He was, like Bonhoeffer, a Confessing Church pastor. Drafted into the German army, he served as a medic, mostly on the Eastern Front, despite his opposition to Hitler. He was captured at the end of the war, and spent five years in Soviet prisoner of war camps, before returning to Germany, where he took up a teaching position first at Bonn and then at Berlin.
Travis McMaken has done an excellent job making known this theologian who was a socialist and committed to political action, not in spite of his Barth-influenced theology but because of it. We see in this portrayal, which is more theological explication than biography, a theological method that embraced social science and political theory. We see a German theologian conversant in the Black theology of James Cone.
It's an intriguing book about an important theological figure who is not well known to Americans. That is the purpose of the book -- an introduction for American readers.
Travis McMaken has done an excellent job making known this theologian who was a socialist and committed to political action, not in spite of his Barth-influenced theology but because of it. We see in this portrayal, which is more theological explication than biography, a theological method that embraced social science and political theory. We see a German theologian conversant in the Black theology of James Cone.
It's an intriguing book about an important theological figure who is not well known to Americans. That is the purpose of the book -- an introduction for American readers.
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