Against the Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian Paperback – May 28, 1999
by Barbara Rumscheidt (Author), & 2 more
4.6 out of 5 stars 11 ratings
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184 pages
Fortress Press
Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover
"Written with clarity, eloquence, and passion, Dorothee Soelle's memoirs resound with a clarion call to remember the costs of injustice. Just as we must never forget the horrors of history, so too we must never forget the lives of those who live for justice. Soelle's is such a life, and this account is a gift to the imagination, to the intellect, and to the will. Against the Wind is a joy to read and has much to offer students, scholars, activists, and all who seek to live out an 'indestructible love for life." ---Sharon D. Welch Author of a Feminist Ethic of Risk
About the Author
Martin Rumscheidtis an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada and retired professor of historical theology at the University of Windsor, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Charles University, Prague. He is the translator of Act and Being (1996)in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English edition, and cotranslator with the late Barbara Rumscheidt of Soelle"s Against the Wind (1999) and The Silent Cry.
Dorothee Soelle was Professor of Theology at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, for thirteen years. Among her many influential writings are Great Couples of the Bible (2005; 0-8006-3831-X), Theology for Skeptics (1994; 0-8006-2788-1), and The Silent Cry (2001; 0- 8006-3266-4). She died in 2003.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
dorothee soelle a Lutheran who is also a sectarian a poet who is also an essayist a systematic thinker who also live and writes with passion a believer in life who can life creatively within the reality of death acquainted with eschatological exuberance she insists that we pray for the world, but only as we strive to live within it made from dust and created in god's image she gives us ground for hope she believes, along with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in both resistance and submission but only in their proper proportions she fits no conventional categories and can employ a fairy tale to make a point she is a pacifist who can demand stern commitments because they are already part of her own life she is an activist who is also a mystic she refuses to separate prayer and politics and stresses the redemptive possibilities in every human situation as a scholar, she is deeply immersed in the prophets and as a feminist she is committed to equal rights for all god's children everywhere
Join her. It will be worthwhile; she presents her faith on her own authority, which she has already donated to the glory of God ---A Tribute by Robert McAfee Brown
A few years ago, my friend and editor Johannes Thiele suggested that I write an autobiography. "Are you crazy? I am no unharnessed politician, and I have better things to do!" was my first reaction. But he did not let go. And so a productive tussle arose about what was important and worth telling, what was already prefigured or hinted at in various places of my books and talks, and what could be taken over, brought together, and left out. The result of that tussle or pleasant cooperation is before you. Thank you, dear Johannes. Every headwind also has its upward draft.
Much is missing that a classic autobiography would contain. I have told nothing about my father, nothing about the encounters with Hannah Arendt, Ernst Bloch, President Gustav and Ms. Hilda Heinemann, Premier Johannes Rau. Nor is there anything about my abhorrence of crocheting and knitting or enough about my favorite activities, swimming and singing. I have preferred to speak about certain central aspects of life in poetry, seeing that life brings along enough prose as it is.
I am very glad that this book now also appears in English. It is surely no coincidence that a German woman-theology, who has become rather well-known, found no teaching position in her fatherland but could work in the more liberal world of the American academy. The encounter with that world has enriched and formed me to an extraordinary degree: Being "right in the belly of the beast," as we used to say, that world deepened my fears, but much more than that, it strengthened my hope in people who do not submit to the dictates of the economy, the military, and the advertising industry. Indeed, there was and still is what we always called the "other America." ---from the Preface
This is the highest honor I can offer: The life of Dorothee Soelle speaks for itself. It needs no justification; it refisters no longing to prove itself, to base on appeal on status, education, gender, color, theological niceties.
Indeed the life of Dorothee has been blessed with all the above and more; admiration and friendship come to mind. So does that ironic, unexpected last "blessing" promised the disciples. First, plenty of good things: "homes, brothers and sisters, mothers, children and property." Then the twister: "and persecution besides."
In a sense dear to Bonhoeffer, this woman's theology is worldly. One thing: as the Incarnation is worldly. From Latin America to the U.S. to Europe she has tested the gospel (and been tested!), laying the Word against the realities of this horrific century---torture, disappearance, oligarchic immunity, enforced misery, weapons, warfare, the buttoned-up arrogance of the great powers.
And in personal life as well, testing, testing---in marriage and motherhood, in being pilloried and denied academic place. In aligning herself, to put the matter briefly, with the plight of Jesus in his century or ours; one and the same.
Her writing, here and elsewhere, has the edge and clarity of a telegram to the world. One does not waste words; the time is short. Speak up then, shout aloud, on behalf of the inarticulate and victimized.
And remember, an intellectual also has a heart.
Therefore this heartfelt book. Which is as much about friendship as anything else---or more so.
Let me rejoice, too, in a long friendship with Dorothee. I learn from her. Theology must not be mired or stalemated in the mind. It must enable, induce an imperative.
Stand squarely in the world. And once there, withstand ---Daniel Berrigan, S.J. from the Foreword
Top reviews from the United States
J. Cutting
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommend. This arrived from a third party in excellent ...
Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2017
Verified Purchase
Having read 'The Silent Cry, Mysticism and Resistance', I wanted to learn more about this profound thoughtful theologian activist. In her memoir 'Against the Wind' written in short chapters she shares the evolution of her spiritual and activist development and the factors that influenced her from post war Germany to the early 21st century. Highly recommend.
This arrived from a third party in excellent condition and in a timely fashion.
2 people found this helpful
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douglas a. dailey
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2017
Verified Purchase
excellent copy
===========
Christina Hennig
3.0 out of 5 stars ... different from others of her publications - not so easy to read
Reviewed in the United States on July 17, 2015
Verified Purchase
this book was different from others of her publications - not so easy to read either
One person found this helpful
=================
Steven H Propp
TOP 100 REVIEWER
5.0 out of 5 stars THE GERMAN THEOLOGIAN RECALLS AND EXPLAINS HER LIFE AND WORK
Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2018
Dorothee Steffensky-Sölle [Soelle] (1929-2003) was a German liberation theologian who taught systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary from 1975 to 1987. She wrote many books, such as On Earth as in Heaven: A Liberation Spirituality of Sharing , Thinking About God: An Introduction to Theology , The Strength of the Weak: Toward a Christian Feminist Identity , Celebrating Resistance: The Way of the Cross in Latin America , Political Theology , etc.
She wrote in the Preface of this 1995 book, “Much is missing that a classic autobiography would contain. I have told nothing about my father… I have preferred to speak about certain central aspects of life in poetry, seeing that life brings along enough prose as it is… It is surely no coincidence that a German woman-theologian, who has become rather well-known, found no teaching position in her fatherland but could work in the more liberal world of the American academy. The encounter with that world has enriched and formed me to an extraordinary degree… it strengthened my hope in people who do not submit to the dictates of the economy, the military, and the advertising industry.” (Pg. xi)
She recalls of her youth, “I tried to make a distinction between Germany, the dream, and the Nazis, whom, almost without exception, I found repugnant or trivial… My parents had many Jewish friends, and by the time I was eight or nine, I had known what a concentration camp was. As children of parents opposed to the Nazis, we literally grew up with two languages. At home, there was plain language that named the shootings, torture, and deportations. But for school, where frankness was mortally dangerous, our speech was guarded… I knew much, but certainly not everything. I definitely knew nothing of Auschwitz…” (Pg. 4)
In her teen years, “My relationship to Christianity was a critical-liberal one; it had been damaged by the Nazis… I respected the Church inasmuch as it had dared to speak out now and then against what was happening… I could not call it ‘resistance’ because that was too big a word for the church’s actions… Christians were cowards, unable to look nihilism in the eye. I harbored a vulgarized Nietzschean disdain for Christianity… Our religion classes [in school] were so unbearable that my best friends in the grade above mine walked out en masse. I could not bring myself to join in their boycott, because I still wanted to know more---particularly about Jesus, the tortured one who did not become a nihilist… I really could not accept that one had to believe in the virgin birth in order to understand the Sermon on the Mount. Soon a new religion teacher made her appearance … [She] steered us into a radically different understanding of Christianity… I finally began to look for another philosophy of life. I studied theology in order to get at the truth that had been kept from me long enough. Slowly, a radical Christianity began to nest in me… I tried to make ‘the leap,’ as Søren Kierkegaard called it, into the passion for the unconditional, into the reign of God. I began to become a Christian.” (Pg. 12-13)
As she learned of the Holocaust, “I was preoccupied with the questions of my generation: How could this happen?... All during the fifties, I wanted to know exactly when, where, how, and by whom Jews had been murdered. Then, in the mid-sixties, I tried to develop a ‘post-Auschwitz’ theology---I did not want to write one sentence in which the awareness of that greatest catastrophe of my people was not made explicit… Collective shame is the minimum required for a people with a history like that of the Germans… And I am ashamed again, anew: by the poison gas that German industrialists sold to Israel’s enemies or by the billions German Marks that we could spare for the Gulf War but not for providing potable water to countries plagued with cholera. I need this shame about my people; I do not want to forget anything, because forgetting nurtures the illusion that it is possible to be a truly human being without the lessons of the dead.” (Pg. 16-17)
She explains, “It was Rudolf Bultmann who spoke to where I was in my final high school years… I knew Bultmann to be a Christian hospitable to the Enlightenment. I need not leave my mind at the church door… How could these go together: thinking and believing, criticism and religiosity, reason and Christianity? Bultmann answered such questions with his program of demythologizing… It was not Bultmann’s intention to do away with or dissolve myth but to interpret it… The cat is out of the mythological bag; the stories of Jesus’ empty tomb and of his perhaps filmable resurrection are legends, media in which the first disciple expressed their faith… As a teacher, again and again, [Bultmann] helped people to have the courage for piety and did so no less as a proponent of existence freed from the mythological.” (Pg. 28-29)
She notes, “I had often been asked about my personal reasons for engagement on behalf of Vietnam… One cannot care for a few children while supporting a policy that incinerates so many children, that lets them starve or rot in camps. Another reason I became involved with Vietnam was both personal and Christian. I thought that I had known what it meant when I said, ‘I am a Christian.’ In those words I expressed a relationship to a human being who lived 2,000 years ago and who spoke the truth… I believed his story has implications to this very day… I could find no difference worth mentioning between the newly tested shells and poisons and the ancient technique of killing by crucifixion… The American antiwar movement played a very significant part for me. I was shaped extensively by Christians… This has given me a deep fascination with the United States, so much so that when I moved there, I felt intimations of homecoming. I Western Europe… I almost had to apologize for being a Christian. But in the United States, it was taken for granted; a radical Christian tradition lives there. Political radicalism blossomed forth from Christianity and traveled with it.” (Pg. 45-46)
She points out, “The seminary where I taught has the reputation of being a place of rebelliousness… people were indeed radicalized at Union Theological Seminary. Conversion is… an occasion when the grace of god grasps a person usually associated with a specific moment in the person’s life. From this theological tradition, however, arose questions relating to how one’s political awareness came about. Many people have experienced a similar event, a theological-political conversion.” (Pg. 60) Later, she adds, “I became a feminist through the agency of my American women friends. After reading my books in English translation, they campaigned that I be called to Union Theological Seminary.” (Pg. 65) She admits, “Why did I not become a professor in Germany? The reasons certainly had to do with sexism, politics, and church theology… I cannot say that I feel particularly bitter about this. For me… a professorship at a very liberal theological school in the United States was actually ideal.” (Pg. 67)
She acknowledges the difficulty of being a working mother: “Of course, it was a balancing act… My husband and I now divide the work of the home among ourselves… I have four children. Were I a young woman today I would still decide to have children. However strongly I critique patriarchy, my feminism is not separatist in relation to men… after recovery from the damages inflicted by patriarchy, the tasks of humanity remain to be addressed in common with men.” (Pg. 69-70)
She observes, ‘My theology never conformed to the church. I wanted to write ‘edifying discourses’ like Kierkegaard’s. Presumably, my readership so a large extent consists of people who have been alienated from the church and who for good reasons no longer attend its services. Often they switch their support to Amnesty International, but still sense that there is something missing in their nonreligious endeavors. They look for and need something different. These are the people whose language I speak.” (Pg. 90)
She states, “I think that today I would no longer define my theological position as ‘political theology.’ … Even when the concept of ‘political theology’ began to be filled with new meaning years ago, it still lacked clarity… Today I am overwhelmed and grateful that the ‘theology of liberation’ … has opened up theological dimensions that are so different from those I knew. I refer to the rereading of the Bible from the perspective of developing countries.” (Pg. 98) Later, she laments, “I often fear that Christianity and socialism are hardly anything but dinosaurs in postmodernity… There is no common good whereby human beings feel responsible for what happens in their village, or their part of the city, or to the neighbors and the children… And I ask if it does not take a piece of religious language in order to safeguard a compassionate interrelationship among people, to keep commonality and a life that is good for all.” (Pg. 144)
She concludes, “Theology that is truly alive … does not drop straight from heaven as ‘God’s Word.’ Rather, it constitutes itself in the solidarity of those affected. I continue to understand faith as a mixture of trust and fear, hope and doubt… My life is that of a theological worker who tries to tell something of God’s pain and God’s joy… It was my participation in the worldwide Christian movement toward a Conciliar Process in which justice, peace, and integrity of creation finally, clearly represent the heart of faith. Theologically, I think I am less alone today than years ago.” (Pg. 166)
This is a charming and very informative book, that will be “must reading” for fans of Soelle’s work, and of great interest to those concerned with contemporary/progressive theology.
Read less
3 people found this helpful
==================
Steven H Propp
TOP 100 REVIEWER
5.0 out of 5 stars THE GERMAN THEOLOGIAN RECALLS AND EXPLAINS HER LIFE AND WORK
Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2018
Dorothee Steffensky-Sölle [Soelle] (1929-2003) was a German liberation theologian who taught systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary from 1975 to 1987. She wrote many books, such as On Earth as in Heaven: A Liberation Spirituality of Sharing , Thinking About God: An Introduction to Theology , The Strength of the Weak: Toward a Christian Feminist Identity , Celebrating Resistance: The Way of the Cross in Latin America , Political Theology , etc.
She wrote in the Preface of this 1995 book, “Much is missing that a classic autobiography would contain. I have told nothing about my father… I have preferred to speak about certain central aspects of life in poetry, seeing that life brings along enough prose as it is… It is surely no coincidence that a German woman-theologian, who has become rather well-known, found no teaching position in her fatherland but could work in the more liberal world of the American academy. The encounter with that world has enriched and formed me to an extraordinary degree… it strengthened my hope in people who do not submit to the dictates of the economy, the military, and the advertising industry.” (Pg. xi)
She recalls of her youth, “I tried to make a distinction between Germany, the dream, and the Nazis, whom, almost without exception, I found repugnant or trivial… My parents had many Jewish friends, and by the time I was eight or nine, I had known what a concentration camp was. As children of parents opposed to the Nazis, we literally grew up with two languages. At home, there was plain language that named the shootings, torture, and deportations. But for school, where frankness was mortally dangerous, our speech was guarded… I knew much, but certainly not everything. I definitely knew nothing of Auschwitz…” (Pg. 4)
In her teen years, “My relationship to Christianity was a critical-liberal one; it had been damaged by the Nazis… I respected the Church inasmuch as it had dared to speak out now and then against what was happening… I could not call it ‘resistance’ because that was too big a word for the church’s actions… Christians were cowards, unable to look nihilism in the eye. I harbored a vulgarized Nietzschean disdain for Christianity… Our religion classes [in school] were so unbearable that my best friends in the grade above mine walked out en masse. I could not bring myself to join in their boycott, because I still wanted to know more---particularly about Jesus, the tortured one who did not become a nihilist… I really could not accept that one had to believe in the virgin birth in order to understand the Sermon on the Mount. Soon a new religion teacher made her appearance … [She] steered us into a radically different understanding of Christianity… I finally began to look for another philosophy of life. I studied theology in order to get at the truth that had been kept from me long enough. Slowly, a radical Christianity began to nest in me… I tried to make ‘the leap,’ as Søren Kierkegaard called it, into the passion for the unconditional, into the reign of God. I began to become a Christian.” (Pg. 12-13)
As she learned of the Holocaust, “I was preoccupied with the questions of my generation: How could this happen?... All during the fifties, I wanted to know exactly when, where, how, and by whom Jews had been murdered. Then, in the mid-sixties, I tried to develop a ‘post-Auschwitz’ theology---I did not want to write one sentence in which the awareness of that greatest catastrophe of my people was not made explicit… Collective shame is the minimum required for a people with a history like that of the Germans… And I am ashamed again, anew: by the poison gas that German industrialists sold to Israel’s enemies or by the billions German Marks that we could spare for the Gulf War but not for providing potable water to countries plagued with cholera. I need this shame about my people; I do not want to forget anything, because forgetting nurtures the illusion that it is possible to be a truly human being without the lessons of the dead.” (Pg. 16-17)
She explains, “It was Rudolf Bultmann who spoke to where I was in my final high school years… I knew Bultmann to be a Christian hospitable to the Enlightenment. I need not leave my mind at the church door… How could these go together: thinking and believing, criticism and religiosity, reason and Christianity? Bultmann answered such questions with his program of demythologizing… It was not Bultmann’s intention to do away with or dissolve myth but to interpret it… The cat is out of the mythological bag; the stories of Jesus’ empty tomb and of his perhaps filmable resurrection are legends, media in which the first disciple expressed their faith… As a teacher, again and again, [Bultmann] helped people to have the courage for piety and did so no less as a proponent of existence freed from the mythological.” (Pg. 28-29)
She notes, “I had often been asked about my personal reasons for engagement on behalf of Vietnam… One cannot care for a few children while supporting a policy that incinerates so many children, that lets them starve or rot in camps. Another reason I became involved with Vietnam was both personal and Christian. I thought that I had known what it meant when I said, ‘I am a Christian.’ In those words I expressed a relationship to a human being who lived 2,000 years ago and who spoke the truth… I believed his story has implications to this very day… I could find no difference worth mentioning between the newly tested shells and poisons and the ancient technique of killing by crucifixion… The American antiwar movement played a very significant part for me. I was shaped extensively by Christians… This has given me a deep fascination with the United States, so much so that when I moved there, I felt intimations of homecoming. I Western Europe… I almost had to apologize for being a Christian. But in the United States, it was taken for granted; a radical Christian tradition lives there. Political radicalism blossomed forth from Christianity and traveled with it.” (Pg. 45-46)
She points out, “The seminary where I taught has the reputation of being a place of rebelliousness… people were indeed radicalized at Union Theological Seminary. Conversion is… an occasion when the grace of god grasps a person usually associated with a specific moment in the person’s life. From this theological tradition, however, arose questions relating to how one’s political awareness came about. Many people have experienced a similar event, a theological-political conversion.” (Pg. 60) Later, she adds, “I became a feminist through the agency of my American women friends. After reading my books in English translation, they campaigned that I be called to Union Theological Seminary.” (Pg. 65) She admits, “Why did I not become a professor in Germany? The reasons certainly had to do with sexism, politics, and church theology… I cannot say that I feel particularly bitter about this. For me… a professorship at a very liberal theological school in the United States was actually ideal.” (Pg. 67)
She acknowledges the difficulty of being a working mother: “Of course, it was a balancing act… My husband and I now divide the work of the home among ourselves… I have four children. Were I a young woman today I would still decide to have children. However strongly I critique patriarchy, my feminism is not separatist in relation to men… after recovery from the damages inflicted by patriarchy, the tasks of humanity remain to be addressed in common with men.” (Pg. 69-70)
She observes, ‘My theology never conformed to the church. I wanted to write ‘edifying discourses’ like Kierkegaard’s. Presumably, my readership so a large extent consists of people who have been alienated from the church and who for good reasons no longer attend its services. Often they switch their support to Amnesty International, but still sense that there is something missing in their nonreligious endeavors. They look for and need something different. These are the people whose language I speak.” (Pg. 90)
She states, “I think that today I would no longer define my theological position as ‘political theology.’ … Even when the concept of ‘political theology’ began to be filled with new meaning years ago, it still lacked clarity… Today I am overwhelmed and grateful that the ‘theology of liberation’ … has opened up theological dimensions that are so different from those I knew. I refer to the rereading of the Bible from the perspective of developing countries.” (Pg. 98) Later, she laments, “I often fear that Christianity and socialism are hardly anything but dinosaurs in postmodernity… There is no common good whereby human beings feel responsible for what happens in their village, or their part of the city, or to the neighbors and the children… And I ask if it does not take a piece of religious language in order to safeguard a compassionate interrelationship among people, to keep commonality and a life that is good for all.” (Pg. 144)
She concludes, “Theology that is truly alive … does not drop straight from heaven as ‘God’s Word.’ Rather, it constitutes itself in the solidarity of those affected. I continue to understand faith as a mixture of trust and fear, hope and doubt… My life is that of a theological worker who tries to tell something of God’s pain and God’s joy… It was my participation in the worldwide Christian movement toward a Conciliar Process in which justice, peace, and integrity of creation finally, clearly represent the heart of faith. Theologically, I think I am less alone today than years ago.” (Pg. 166)
This is a charming and very informative book, that will be “must reading” for fans of Soelle’s work, and of great interest to those concerned with contemporary/progressive theology.
Read less
=======================
Sela Finau
5.0 out of 5 stars a wind view
Reviewed in the United States on June 16, 2009
This is one of my favorite books. If you have not gotten the chance to read any of Dorothee Soelle's writings, let this be your intro; she is an amazing writer. Dorothee Soelle was a very open-minded theologian, radical with her thoughts and deeply considerate with her heart. Her heart-filled and beautiful stories are very moving to say the least. It is rich, real, well written, and worth the few pennies you'll invest.
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