Theological liberals like Harnack felt it was “unscientific” to speculate on who God was; the theologian must simply study what is here, which is to say the texts and the history of those texts. But the Barthians said no: the God on the other side of the fence had revealed himself through these texts, and the only reason for these texts was to know him. Bonhoeffer agreed with Barth3, seeing the texts as “not just historical sources, but [as] agents of revelation,” not merely “specimens of writing, but sacred canon.” Bonhoeffer was not against doing historical and critical work on biblical
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