Letters and Papers from Prison book club questions

1. 1.

   Bonhoeffer describes a 'world come of age' that no longer needs God as an explanation or a comfort. Does that description fit the world you live in, and does it seem like a problem or a clarification?

2. 2.

   What is 'religionless Christianity' as Bonhoeffer sketches it? Do you think it is coherent, or is it Christianity stripped of what makes it distinctive?

3. 3.

   The letters were written knowing they might be read by censors. How does that constraint affect how you read them? How do we read a text whose author was performing composure for multiple audiences?

4. 4.

   Bonhoeffer writes with apparent calm while facing execution. Do you read that calmness as genuine, as performed, or as something that resists that distinction?

5. 5.

   He argues that God should not be sought in human weakness or ignorance but at the center of life. What would it look like in practice to relate to God that way?

6. 6.

   The poem 'Who Am I?' describes the gap between Bonhoeffer's external presentation and his internal state. When have you maintained a public composure that masked something very different inside?

7. 7.

   These letters were written to be read by people Bonhoeffer trusted, not as public theology. Does knowing they were private correspondence change your relationship to the theological ideas in them?

8. 8.

   Bonhoeffer's execution came ten days before the end of the war in Europe. What does it mean to read these letters knowing that outcome?

9. 9.

   He was involved in an assassination plot against Hitler — an act of violence that contradicts his earlier theology of nonresistance. What does the fact that he never resolved that tension publicly tell us about the relationship between ethics and action under extreme conditions?

10. 10.

    The book is fragmentary. Do the incompleteness and the circumstances of its composition make it more or less credible as a theological document than a finished, systematized work?

11. 11.

    Which of the fragmentary theological ideas in the later letters do you find most generative? Most confusing?

12. 12.

    If you were writing letters from your own version of extremity, what would you find yourself thinking about most?

How to run the discussion

• Pick six to eight, not all of them. An hour of real discussion covers fewer questions than anyone expects, and racing the list is what makes a book club feel like homework.
• Open with what people noticed, not what they concluded. Asking for a verdict first hardens opinions before anyone has heard each other.
• Let the disagreement run. The questions below that split a room are the ones worth the time; the ones everyone answers the same way can be skipped.
• Ask the quiet person a specific question. A direct, narrow question is far easier to answer than an open invitation to contribute.