what is the meaning of history?

• Lecture on The Meaning of History: Covenant and Kingdom.

• Review requirements for Essay 1 "My Personal Worldview".

• Review grading criteria for Essay 1

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a pastor and a secret double-agent who was part of the German resistance to overthrow and assassinate Hitler. He escaped Germany but couldn't shake his feeling of responsibility for his country. He returned shortly thereafter knowing he would likely be captured, imprisoned and even tortured or executed by the Nazi regime. He was eventually captured, spent two years in prison and was executed at the death camp in Flossenburg just a month before Germany surrendered. The death camp doctor who witnessed his execution said, "In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God."

Bonhoeffer describes his journey from being a theologian and pastor to being a Christian. (Wait? Isn't it the other way around?) Reading the Bible as the authoritative Word of God, rather than as an object of intellectual inquiry, brought a decisive change. He says, "For the first time I discovered the Bible...I had often preached, I had seen a great deal of the church, spoken and preached about it--but I had not yet become a Christian...I turned the doctrine of Jesus Christ into something of personal advantage to myself...I pray that will never happen again. Also I had never prayed or prayed only very little. For all my loneliness, I was quite pleased with myself. Then the Bible, and in particular, the Sermon on the Mount, freed me from that...It became clear to me that the life of a servant of Jesus Christ must belong to the church, and step by step it became clearer to me how far that must go." -The Faith (p. 119) by Charles Colson.