Abstract

The Sermon on the Mount guided Bonhoeffer's ethics in his decisive early opposition to Hitler. His interpretation was guided by a hermeneutic of renunciation. But the Sermon is strangely missing in his Ethics. The context had shifted; he needed to confront a massive concentration of power — crucial in our context as well. We need to see that the structure of the Sermon is not dyadic antitheses of renunciation, but triadic transforming initiatives of confrontation — significantly more helpful in confronting power, and in recovering its original meaning. We need to heal the historic split between the Sermon and Christian ethics