As I read the messages that we post to this list,
I am impressed with our diversity. Some of us
receive the writings of Bonhoeffer as devotional
texts, sources of comfort and inspiration. Others
mine his writings for ideologies that support their
own adjudications of history.  Some of us venerate
him as a saint; some view him as an historical
figure, and some as just another German philosopher
who speculated about what the rest of us are able
only to "see through a glass, darkly," if at all.
I myself try to read his texts as a philologist
might, challenged to try to understand what
Bonhoeffer meant by them, what other readers
understand these texts to mean, and most important,
what these texts tell me about my own secular
and religious experiences.

I emphasize the diversity of our readership because
I fear that some of the questions which seem
inescapable to me may embarrass or offend those
who read Bonhoeffer with intentions different
from mine. Perhaps this warning will serve as
prophylaxis against the injuries which unconventional
considerations might unintentionally inflict.  For
the purposes of dialectical examination one may
not presuppose that what Bonhoeffer has written
will coincide with what is true for oneself, that
it is necessarily consistent, or even that it 
necessarily makes any sense at all. Not only does
one need the freedom to entertain the possibility
that Bonhoeffer was "wrong", but more importantly,
I need the freedom to test the various modes of
being in the wrong myself, and to take the risk that
my thoughts fall into one of the many categories
condemned by Bonhoeffer.  Perhaps I am one of the
practitioners of the occidental godlessness that
he laments.  Perhaps such insights as I can muster
are the fruits of satanic wisdom (Satanswahrheit).
In any event, it seems to me that potentially the
greatest benefit of discussions such as ours is
to experience what Kierkegaard described as
"the edification implied in the thought
that against God we are always in the wrong." 

                            Ernst Meyer