Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis: Recovering the True Legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

by Mark Nation

This point is particularly important to register because there exists a permanent temptation, theological and practical, to substitute something else for the offensively particular name of Jesus, to search for something more generic, something which does not bring with it the affront of Jesus’ implausible and singular direction: “Follow me.” It is a temptation to which the church has often succumbed and continues to do so: contemporary substitutes for the name of Jesus include: justice; spirituality; inclusiveness; orthodoxy; moral truth. However valuable some of these generic realities may appear to be, however much gospel resonance they may bring with them, they run the risk of abstracting from the pure singularity of Jesus and his command. His name—his non-transferrable identity as this one—is the one reality in which salvation is to be found. And his name is to be filled out, not by reference to some principle which he illustrates or which may even be drawn from him. He is the divine self-declaration in person.323