• Medientyp: E-Artikel
  • Titel: ‘To our earthly view Dietrich is dead’: George Bell's Eulogy for Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  • Beteiligte: Cruickshank, Dan D.
  • Erschienen: Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2023
  • Erschienen in: Studies in Church History
  • Sprache: Englisch
  • DOI: 10.1017/stc.2023.19
  • ISSN: 0424-2084; 2059-0644
  • Schlagwörter: Sociology and Political Science ; Religious studies ; History
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  • Beschreibung: <jats:p>This article considers the eulogy given by George Bell, then bishop of Chichester, at the London remembrance service held in July 1945 for Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bell's eulogy offers a unique form of marking a death. On the one hand he presented a traditional biography of Bonhoeffer, whilst at the same time he depicted Bonhoeffer's life as not over, but as having moved into a stage of glorified martyrdom. The article explores how Bell argued that Bonhoeffer's death offered the potential for life to a post-war Europe, raising issues with van Gennep's understanding of the relationship between the living and a dead person who had had no proper funerary rites. The article thus seeks to explain how Bell marked Bonhoeffer's death by presenting him as a man, a potential assassin and a martyr, in an attempt to secure an eternal earthly legacy for a man Bell believed had offered the world life through his death. The article is followed by an edition of the text of Bell's eulogy in full.</jats:p>