In 2025 we took a group to Berlin and walked Bonhoeffer's city with them. It worked better than we hoped, and it exposed something: the people who came were asking two different questions.

Some came as readers. They had been chewing on the prison letters for years and wanted to know where all of it came from and where it went. What was in the water in Berlin that produced a theologian like this? And what happened to his last, unfinished thoughts after his execution?

Others came as pastors and leaders. They were carrying congregations through a moment that felt a lot like a slow-motion emergency, and they wanted to know how a working minister keeps their nerve and their faith when the institution they serve has already started making its peace with power.

So in 2027 we're running the trip twice, and we're asking a different question each time.

Session One thinks with Bonhoeffer. Where he learned, who taught him, and who picked up his last letters and ran.

Session Two walks with Bonhoeffer. Where he lived, where he resisted, where he was arrested.

They are back-to-back. You can do one. You can do both.

Bonhoeffer's Sources and His German Afterlife

June 12–17, 2027 · Berlin & Wittenberg

Bonhoeffer did not come from nowhere, and he did not stop when he died.

He was a Berlin theologian, trained in the most sophisticated theological culture in the world, at the exact moment that culture was coming apart. His teachers were the heirs of Schleiermacher and Hegel. Harnack lived down the street. Barth's bomb had just gone off in the playground. Luther had just been rediscovered — again — by a generation of German scholars who found in him a God hidden in suffering rather than a God available for national projects. Bonhoeffer read all of it, absorbed what he wanted, and broke with the rest.

And then he wrote a handful of letters from a cell that were never finished, never systematized, and never explained. Religionless Christianity. A world come of age. A God who is pushed out of the world and onto a cross. He died before he could tell anyone what he meant, and postwar German theology has been arguing about it ever since.

This session is a seminar with a passport. We read the texts in the places where they were fought over.

Wittenberg — Luther and the Luther Renaissance. A day trip out of the city to the ground where it started, and a serious engagement with how Luther was being re-read in Bonhoeffer's own moment. Karl Holl and the Luther Renaissance handed Bonhoeffer's generation a Luther of the hidden God and the theology of the cross — and handed them, in the same motion, the two-kingdoms inheritance that made the German church so catastrophically easy to capture. Bonhoeffer took the first and spent his life fighting the second.

The University of Berlin and Schleiermacher's Home — Hegel, Harnack, and Barth. Modern theology has an address, and it is here. We work through Schleiermacher's context-setting achievement, Hegel's long shadow, Harnack's liberal confidence and Bonhoeffer's affection for the man he could not follow, and the Barthian rupture that gave Bonhoeffer his opening.

The Bonhoeffer Haus — the prison letters and what came after. We read the letters slowly, in his house, and then we follow them forward into Moltmann's theology of hope and the crucified God, and Jüngel's God as the mystery of the world — the German theologians who took Bonhoeffer's fragments as a commission.

Between sessions: guided tours of Berlin, museums, and long meals where the argument keeps going.

Dr. Andrew Root and Dr. Tripp Fuller tag-team the teaching — two theologians who do not always agree with each other, working the same texts in front of you. That is the point. This is not a lecture tour.

This session is for the theologically curious. No degree required, no German required. What you need is an appetite for reading and a tolerance for being disagreed with.

Curated readings go out well before we travel, and we discuss them on the ground. Tripp will also record an audio version of the readings, so if you'd rather listen on your commute than sit with a book, you can arrive just as ready as everyone else.

Capped at 22 learners. A seminar only works if everyone in the room can talk.

A Pastor's Struggle in a Time of Resistance

June 17–22, 2027 · Berlin

Bonhoeffer did not become a martyr and then work out what to preach. He was a working pastor. He ran an underground seminary on a shoestring, wrote sermons for a church that had already folded, kept vigil over congregations that did not want to be kept, and argued with colleagues who thought he was overreacting. He made every one of his decisions without knowing how the story ended.

That is the part of Bonhoeffer that gets flattened when he becomes a quotation. And that is the part this session is built around.

We will spend our teaching days inside the Bonhoeffer Haus — the family home in Charlottenburg where the resistance was discussed at the dinner table and where the Gestapo came for him in 1943. Between sessions we walk: Grunewald, the Topography of Terror, the German Resistance Memorial, the Confessing Church neighborhoods of the old East, the book burning memorial across from the university where he taught. We eat together. We argue together. We give the days enough room that the questions can actually land.

We also go to Dahlem, to the Martin Niemöller House and the Confessing Church museum. Niemöller is the harder story, and the more useful one. He was a decorated U-boat commander and a nationalist who did not object to everything the new regime was selling — until it came for the church, and then he objected loudly enough to spend seven years in Sachsenhausen and Dachau. He was a pastor whose congregation became a front line before he was ready for it. He is also the man who, afterward, had to write down what he had failed to say and when he had failed to say it. Standing in his parish is a different experience than reading his most famous lines on a poster, and every pastor who comes on this trip will recognize the position he was in long before he understood it.

Dr. Andrew Root and Dr. Tripp Fuller tag-team the teaching all week. Andy leads us into Bonhoeffer's theology of place-sharing and what it asks of anyone who has agreed to be responsible for other people's faith. Tripp traces the spiritual arc — the confident young theologian of Discipleship, the exhausted and improvising man of the prison letters, and the question of whether those are two people or one.

This session is for you if you are the one who has to say something on Sunday or are in the trenches as a faith leader in these troubling times. Pastors, chaplains, church staff, denominational leaders, seminarians, and lay leaders who are tired of Bonhoeffer as a hero story and want him as a colleague.

Capped at 22 learners.

You will not leave with a strategy. You will leave having spent a week with someone who stayed faithful without any guarantee that it would work — which is, at the moment, the only kind of faithfulness on offer.

Six nights' hotel accommodation
Daily breakfast and two group dinners
All tours, admission fees, and gratuities
Use of the Bonhoeffer Haus Berlin
Welcome Pass for all city train transportation
All instruction from Dr. Andrew Root and Dr. Tripp Fuller
Curated readings sent in advance, plus a recorded audio version of the readings (Session One)
Rail travel for the Wittenberg day trip

Each session is capped at 22 learners.

You are responsible for flights, lunches, four dinners, and any taxis you take instead of walking.

Travel partner add-on: bring someone who shares your room, joins the tours and meals, and skips the class.

Dr. Tripp Fuller

Luther Theological Seminary, Hombrewed Christianity, Theology Class

Tripp recently moved back to North Carolina and started as Visiting Professor of Theology at Luther Theological Seminary after three years as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Theology & Science at the University of Edinburgh. He recently released Divine Self-Investment: a Constructive Open and Relational Christology, the first book in the Studies in Open and Relational Theology series. For over 15 years Tripp has been doing the Homebrewed Christianity podcast (think on-demand internet radio) where he interviews different scholars about their work so you can get nerdy in traffic, on the treadmill, or doing the dishes. Last year it had over 4 million downloads. It also inspired a book series with Fortress Press called the Homebrewed Christianity Guides to... topics like God, Jesus, Spirit, Church History, etc. Tripp is a very committed and (some of his friends think overly) engaged Lakers fan and takes Star Wars and Lord of the Rings very seriously.

Dr. Andrew Root

Luther Theological Seminary

Andrew Root (PhD, Princeton Theological Seminary) is Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker: A Theological Vision for Discipleship and Life Together, Faith Formation in a Secular Age, The Pastor in a Secular Age, The Congregation in a Secular Age, Churches and the Crisis of Decline, The Church after Innovation, and The End of Youth Ministry? Root is also the coauthor (with Kenda Creasy Dean) of The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry. He is a frequent speaker and hosts the popular and influential When Church Stops Working podcast.