Friday dose of Bonhoeffer

Tödt in Authentic Faith, discussing Bonhoeffer's theological ethic of the state, especially in regard to the pograms against the Jews in 1932:

Bonhoeffer confronts the tendency that prevailed in German theology at that time to shift the Kingdom of God to the beyond, or to a final eschatological future, or to inwardness. In a 1932 memoir on the “social gospel,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “Taking the kingdom of God seriously as a kingdom on earth is biblical, and is in the right, whereas an otherworldly understanding of the kingdom is in the wrong.” So Bonhoeffer sees the state commissioned, as an order of preservation, to guarantee law and external order and to provide neither too little nor too much of both. There would be too much law and order if the state would develop into a Weltanschauung state, and let its matter-of-fact activity become ideologically heated up. There would be too little of them if the state would not protect the rights of all sections of its population.