Bonhoeffer's America A Land without Reformation

In the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer came to Union Theological Seminary looking for a "cloud of witnesses." What he found instead disturbed, angered, and perplexed him. "There is no theology here," he wrote to a German colleague. The New York churches, if possible, were even worse: "They preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed... namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life." Bonhoeffer acts for American Protestantism as an Alexis de Tocqueville, whose , a cultural and political analysis of the new republic, appeared a century prior. But what the Berlin theologian found was, if possible, more significant than the observations of the French aristocrat: Protestantism in America was a "Protestantism without Reformation."
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