Explore "Gideon: God is my Lord" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Berlin, First Sunday in Lent, February 26, 1933.
In this sermon, the first that he preached after Hitler's takeover of power, Bonhoeffer was concerned to put things in place, to proclaim at this moment when even German cathedrals were hung with swastika flags that for Christians there is only one Lord. He took as his text the Old Testament story of Gideon, a young man chosen by God to save the Israelites from their enemies and to turn them away from the worship of false gods. As Bonhoeffer scholar Larry Rasmussen has said, Bonhoeffer "contrasted the reluctant Gideon with Siegfried, the unconquered Germanic hero figure of the Nibelung saga, who was already being idealized in Nazi propaganda. " Bonhoeffer quotes from both Old and New Testaments in describing God's power in contrast to human might, and finally from Martin Luther's hymn "A Mighty Fortress," to assure his hearers that even now the power, and the victory, are God's alone.