Ethics (Bonhoeffer)

Bonhoeffer's Ethik (published posthumously in 1949, English translation Ethics, 1955; critical edition 2005) is a collection of manuscripts composed during the years Bonhoeffer was simultaneously participating in the Abwehr conspiracy and attempting to write systematic theology. The book is not a book in the ordinary sense. Bonhoeffer never completed it, never settled its architecture, and left multiple partial versions of key sections. Bethge's editorial reconstruction, later revised by subsequent scholars, produced the text that has circulated for seven decades. Its influence has been disproportionate to its unfinished character: the concepts of vicarious representative action, the penultimate and the ultimate, the four mandates of creation, and the ethics of responsibility all appear here, sketched with the urgency of a thinker who did not know whether he would have time to complete what he was beginning. He did not. He was arrested in April 1943 and executed in April 1945.