December 2, 2024

by Charles Marsh

I shared this short essay with my students recently. It’s a piece I wrote for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin in Spring 2005. Several students in the class thought it speaks directly to the current situation, so we’re sharing it here in Theology Now! The idea of holy silence and political resistance came to me while reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, in the section on “silence before, under, and coming out of the Word”, when Bonhoeffer writes of a silence that brings “purification, clarification, and concentration upon the essential thing”; which I would develop in my 2007 book, Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity (Oxford University Press).