Dorothee Sölle “was one of the most creative and prophetic German theologians of the post-war generation whose work was shaped by the memory of war, the Holocaust, and totalitarianism,” Orbis Books affirms. It’s as Wikipedia has it: “The idea of a God who was ‘in heaven in all its glory’ while Auschwitz was organized was ‘unbearable’ for Sölle.” For Consensus, a journal of Canadian Lutheran theology, Laura MacGregor observes, “It is this personal sense of angst that provided Sölle with much of the impetus for her creative theology and fierce political theological activism.”
Yes, she was “a controversial figure in her own church,” the Episcopal News Service reported upon her death in 2003. Still, “She was and remains the political conscience of Protestantism,” Maria Jepsen, the Lutheran bishop of Hamburg, where Sölle had lived, told the German Protestant news agency.
In Thinking About God, Sölle introduces three basic paradigms, the orthodox, liberal, and radical forms of theology—she is “unashamedly partisan in her espousal of the radical form of theology,” Sage Journals reckons. The book examines most of the major theological themes. But, as one review insists, “above all, the book is an invitation to share Dorothee Sölle’s enthusiasm for theology.”
Thinking About God: An Introduction to Theology
By Dorothee Sölle
SCM Press/Trinity Press International, 1990
