Bonhoeffer''s America : A Land Without Reformation

Bonhoeffer's America explicates these criticisms, then turns to consider what they tell us about Bonhoeffer's own theological commitments and whether, in fact, his judgments about America were accurate. Joel Looper first brings Bonhoeffer's reformational and Barthian commitments into relief against the work of several Union theologians and the broader American theological milieu. He then turns to Bonhoeffer's own genealogy of American Protestantism to explore why it developed as it did: steeped in dissenting influences, the American church became one that resisted critique by the word of God. American Protestantism is not Protestant, Bonhoeffer shows us, not like the churches that emerged from the Continental Reformation. This difference gave rise to the secularization of the American church.

Bonhoeffer's claims against the church in the United States, Looper contends, hold strong, even after considering objections to this narrative—Bonhoeffer's experience with Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and the possibility that Bonhoeffer, during his time in Tegel Prison, abandoned the theological commitments that undergirded his critique. Bonhoeffer's America concludes that what Bonhoeffer saw in America, the twenty-first-century American church should strive to see for itself.