Posted on March 7, 2022 by PLT Staff

Lecture given by Charles Marsh at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA (December 1, 2021). Marsh first explains that German theologian Dorothee Soelle is the continuation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s legacy. But beyond that, her theology has also been characterized as radical, political, feminist, mystical, post-theistic, post-metaphysical, and post-religious, while her writing style has been called lyrical and fragmentary. Marsh argues that Soelle’s memoir, Against the Wind: A Memoir of a Radical Christian, asks readers to consider how we might understand her as a theologian, not only mapping her into the story of modern theology but also within the Christian tradition. Marsh then examines the themes of Soelle’s book The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance: the development of a theology of resistance, the offering of a theology of seeing, and the question of what comes after the resistance movement. To find a listing of all our Occasional Lectures, click here.

Excerpt: “We can call The Silent Cry…our most fully realized account of a Christian theology of resistance, and this context indeed prompts Soelle’s entire theological project around such questions as ‘How might Christians or anyone in the Anglo-European context develop the skills and discernments and interpretive capacities that will enable us to see the idols, to see the Antichrist, to wage resistance against the false gods, against the Nazified church, against demands for total state loyalty?’ The Christians in this time after [the Holocaust] have the theological tools to name and then to resist the false gods.”

• Audio Information
• Date Recorded:December 1, 2021
• Location Recorded:Charlottesville, VA
• Audio File:Download File »