The End of Western Civilization
CHAPTER 7 The Twentieth Century
Karl Barth Church Dogmatics
Church Dogmatics (German: Kirchliche Dogmatik) is the thirteen-volume magnum opus of Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth, which was published in stages from 1932 to 1967.
Contents: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/church-dogmatics-study-edition-31-vols-9780567022790/
The Barmen Declaration
The Barmen Declaration or The Theological Declaration of Barmen 1934 (Die Barmer Theologische Erklärung) was a document adopted by Christians in Nazi Germany who opposed the Deutsche Christen (German Christian) movement. In the view of the delegates to the Synod that met in the city of Barmen in May, 1934, the German Christians had corrupted church government by making it subservient to the state and had introduced Nazi ideology into the German Protestant churches that contradicted the Christian gospel.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/barmen.htm
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Letters and Papers from Prison
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (German: [ˈdiːtʁɪç ˈboːnhœfɐ]; 4 February 1906 – 9 April 1945) was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian, anti-Nazi dissident, and key founding member of the Confessing Church. His writings on Christianity’s role in the secular world have become widely influential, and his book The Cost of Discipleship became a modern classic.
selections: http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2010/12/letters-from-cell-92-part-1-new.html
Charles Hodge Systematic Theology
Charles Hodge (December 27, 1797, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – June 19, 1878, Princeton, New Jersey) was the principal of Princeton Theological Seminary between 1851 and 1878. A Presbyterian theologian, he was a leading exponent of historical Calvinism in America during the 19th century. He was deeply rooted in the Scottish philosophy of Common Sense Realism. He argued strongly that the authority of the Bible as the Word of God had to be understood literally.
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/hodge
Reinhold Niebuhr Christianity and Power Politics
Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr (ˈraɪnhoʊld ˈniːbʊər; June 21, 1892 – June 1, 1971) was an American theologian, ethicist, public intellectual, commentator on politics and public affairs, and professor at Union Theological Seminary for more than 30 years. The brother of another prominent theological ethicist, H. Richard Niebuhr, he is also known for authoring the Serenity Prayer, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. Among his most influential books are Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Nature and Destiny of Man, the second of which Modern Library ranked one of the top 20 nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Starting as a minister with working-class and labor class sympathies in the 1920s oriented to theological pacifism, he shifted to neo-orthodox realist theology in the 1930s and developed the theo-philosophical perspective known as Christian realism. He attacked utopianism as ineffectual for dealing with reality, writing in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944): “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
Rudolf Bultmann New Testament and Mythology
Rudolf Karl Bultmann (German: [ˈbʊltman]; 20 August 1884 – 30 July 1976) was a German Lutheran theologian and professor of New Testament at the University of Marburg. He was one of the major figures of early 20th century biblical studies and a prominent voice in liberal Christianity.
Bultmann is known for his belief that the historical analysis of the New Testament is both futile and unnecessary, given that the earliest Christian literature showed little interest in specific locations.1Bultmann argued that all that matters is the “thatness”, not the “whatness” of Jesus, i.e. only that Jesus existed, preached and died by crucifixion matters, not what happened throughout his life.
Interesting short piece involving Bultmann: http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.religion.emory.edu/faculty/robbins/Pdfs/BultmannNTMyth.pdf&sa=U&ved=0CBQQFjAAahUKEwj28Lby4ojHAhUB6YAKHfoBBX0&usg=AFQjCNGQrM0qupAYPiUKw0xvdOYVIdfhqQ
Paul Tillich Systematic Theology
Paul Johannes Tillich (August 20, 1886 – October 22, 1965) was a German American Christian existentialist philosopher and theologian who is widely regarded as one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century.
Among the general public, he is best known for his works The Courage to Be (1952) and Dynamics of Faith (1957), which introduced issues of theology and modern culture to a general readership. Theologically, he is best known for his major three-volume work Systematic Theology (1951–63) in which he developed his “method of correlation”, an approach of exploring the symbols of Christian revelation as answers to the problems of human existence raised by contemporary existential philosophical analysis.
Reader’s guide: http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/tillich/stguide/stguide.htm
2nd Vatican Council Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World
Gaudium et spes (Ecclesiastical Latin: [ˈɡawdium et ˈspɛs], Joy and Hope), the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, was one of the four Apostolic Constitutions resulting from the Second Vatican Council. The document is an overview of the Catholic Church’s teachings about humanity’s relationship to society, especially in reference to economics, poverty, social justice, culture, science, technology and ecumenism.
https://www.ewtn.com/library/COUNCILS/v2modwor.htm
Karl Rahner. In Search of a Short Formula of the Christian Faith
Karl Rahner, S.J. (March 5, 1904 – March 30, 1984), was a German Jesuit priest and theologian who, alongside Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Yves Congar, is considered one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the 20th century. He was the brother of Hugo Rahner.
Rahner was born in Freiburg, at the time a part of the Grand Duchy of Baden, a state of the German Empire; he died in Innsbruck, Austria.
Alfred North Whitehead Process and Reality
Process and Reality is a book by Alfred North Whitehead, in which he propounds a philosophy of organism, also called process philosophy. The book, published in 1929, is a revision of the Gifford Lectures he gave in 1927–28.
https://archive.org/details/AlfredNorthWhiteheadProcessAndReality
Jürgen Moltmann /The Crucified God /
Jürgen Moltmann (born 8 April 1926) is a German Reformed theologian who is Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at the University of Tübingen. Moltmann is a major figure in modern theology and was the recipient of the 2000 University of Louisville and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary Grawemeyer Award in Religion, and was also selected to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 1984–1985. He has made significant contributions to a number of areas of Christian theology, including systematic theology, eschatology, ecclesiology, political theology, Christology, pneumatology, and the theology of creation.
resources: https://www.tyndale.ca/seminary/mtsmodular/reading-rooms/theology/moltmann
Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail
The Letter from Birmingham Jail (also known as “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” and “The Negro Is Your Brother”) is an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King, Jr. The letter defends the strategy of nonviolent resistance to racism. It says that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws, and to take direct action rather than waiting potentially forever for justice to come through the courts. Responding to being referred to as an “outsider”, he wrote that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere“.
The letter was widely published and became an important text for the American Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s.
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html