Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Academic Training

Academic Training

Bonhoeffer attended Tübingen University for a year and visited Rome, where he began to believe in the universality of the church. In 1924 he matriculated at the University of Berlin, then a centre of liberal theology with theologians such as Adolf von Harnack. Around this time, he discovered the writings of Karl Barth, the eminent Swiss theologian whose pioneering work in neo-orthodoxy was a reaction against liberal theology. Barth believed that "liberal theology" (understood as emphasizing personal experience and societal development) minimized Scripture, reducing it to a mere textbook of metaphysics while sanctioning the deification of human culture. Von Harnack cautioned Bonhoeffer against dangers posed by Barth's "contempt for scientific theology", but the younger Bonhoeffer became increasingly critical of liberal theology as not only too constraining but also responsible for the lack of relevance in the church. Won over to Barth's dialectical theology, Bonhoeffer was nevertheless not beyond criticizing Barth. The confluence of Barth's Christocentrism and Harnack's concern to show the relevance of Christianity to the modern world had an indelible effect on Bonhoeffer's approach to theology.

Bonhoeffer graduated summa cum laude from the University of Berlin in 1927 and earned a doctorate in theology at the age of 21 with a thesis, Sanctorum Communio (Communion of Saints), which presented a significantly new way of looking at the nature of the Christian church and was praised by Barth as a "theological miracle."

To prepare to become a pastor, Bonhoeffer served for a year in 1928-1929 as curate in the German Lutheran parish in Barcelona, Spain. In 1929, Bonhoeffer returned to the University of Berlin to write his habilitation thesis Akt und Sein ("Act and Being"), in which he traced the influence of transcendental philosophy on Protestant and Catholic theologies.