Chapter 1
tions of God’s disclosure of Godself in Jesus of Nazareth than it does with Tillich’s “correlation” with questions concerning human existence. From above, the cross is the answer to no question anymore than philosophers anticipated the self-disclosure of God in a baby. The method employed in this book is an attempt to come to terms with a scandalously universal validity for humanity tied to the events of a manger and a cross for the salvation of the world. A second aspect of the Bonhoeffer-Tillich debate related to method is that even if a correlation exists between philosophy and theology in the way Tillich articulates, it does so only because of the terms established by theology— herein lies Bonhoeffer’s inversion of Tillich’s method of correlation. That is, philosophical anthropology becomes meaningful only in the space created by revelation. So, correlation is extraneous to sound theological method and is unemployed in this book. Any further analysis of the nuances of the Bonhoeffer-Tillich relationship fall outside the parameters of this study and are provided here only to point out the difference in method between the two theologians. That said, the twentieth century possessed no finer exegete of North American culture than Paul Tillich, who attempted to explain culture in religious language. Tillich’s letters of encouragement written from the US to the German people during World War II clearly resonate with Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of National Socialism and its nihilistic impact on Germany as a nation. Just as revelation raises issues of method between Tillich and Bonhoeffer, a more nuanced and compatible methodological relationship exists between Bonhoeffer and Heidegger. The use of Act and Being as a source for Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology implies a methodology which, like his, attempts to retain rational thinking about theology without falling prey to the nineteenth-century naive confidence in human rationality and 26