Word: dibelius
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...uncover that earliest stratum of Christian belief, Bultmann joined other scholars like Martin Dibelius in perfecting a research tool called form criticism, which examined the Gospels and Epistles with an eye to discerning the various stylized forms of the oral traditions behind them. Distinguishing among the oral traditions would help the scholar determine how faith built up the experiences of these early Christians into the formulas of what Bultmann called myths. Getting beneath those myths to the believers' experience is the famous Bultmann process of "demythologization." It reveals the kernel of existential faith that can be translated into a meaning...
...when he stood trial for asserting the church's right to preach, among other things, that Jesus was a Jew, Dibelius was asked by Hitler's Minister for Church Affairs, "Why do you keep on fighting when it is no longer your duty?" Replied Dibelius: "A Christian is never off duty...
After World War II, he was named Bishop of Berlin and head of the presiding Council of the Evangelical Church. Just as staunchly as he had rebuked Nazism, Dibelius attacked the "materialistic ideology" of Communism and repeatedly risked arrest to preach against atheism in his cathedral, East Berlin's Marienkirche. In 1957, after he signed an agreement with the Bonn Government on behalf of the church, providing for chaplain services to the new West German army, he was denounced by East Germany's Reds as the "NATO priest" and "atom bishop." Ultimately, he was barred from East Berlin...
...Dibelius' objection to Nazism and Communism was mainly theological rather than political: both ideologies, he believed, subverted the Christian faith. An ecumenical pioneer who helped found the World Council of Churches, Dibelius was devoutly evangelical as well as Evangelical. In his sermons he preached his conviction that the Gospel was genuinely God's everlasting, ever-valid word to man. "Lord My God," he wrote in his autobiography, "Your word preserved me from skepticism and contempt, those characteristics of an age alienated from...
Died. Bishop Otto Dibelius, 86, leader of Germany's Evangelical (Lutheran) Church; after a stroke and erysipelas; in West Berlin (see RELIGION...