70 Ducere Est Servire: THE LEADERSHIP JOURNAL OF DALLAS BAPTIST UNIVERSITY leadership, there are a number of leadership principles established in his work that explain how the biblical prophets led. Three characteristics articulated in Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination have been identified as being foundational to prophetic leadership. The first being, the biblical prophets recognized YHWH as the ultimate authority, under which all earthly authorities are subject.4 The second is, the prophets created a counter-cultural community based upon biblical standards.5 The third characteristic is, the prophets confronted errant, immoral, and amoral governing authorities.6 These three characteristics define prophetic leadership as, “the process by which a leader develops and nurtures a counter-cultural biblical community of followers with God as the ultimate authority and respectfully, yet assertively, confronts immoral and amoral earthly authorities and systems which would lay claim over the community.”7 This definition of prophetic leadership will be utilized to review the prophetic leadership of Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer and the First Characteristic Bonhoeffer’s worldview established Christ as the ultimate authority Who created earthly authorities according to His divine will.8 He preached to his German congregation in England on November 19, 1933, “Christ alone is the one whom no one can avoid, no one can pass by . . . Christ alone is the judge of us all, whose judgement is everlasting.”9 He taught that all peoples are to be respectful and obedient to the governing earthly authorities as they are representatives of YHWH’s authority in the finite world (Romans 13:1-7; 1 Peter 2:13-15). The limitations of a believer’s obedience to governing authorities will be reviewed in the third characteristic of prophetic leadership. For now, it is important to note that Bonhoeffer understood government to be part of God’s good creation, and when it acts according to YHWH’s will, it serves Christ by holding back the chaos of a fallen and sinful world and orders society in a manner that allows for the Church to act according to its own calling.10 Bonhoeffer taught that a leader’s authority was directly rooted in God’s good and ordered creation, as a blessing from above.11 The ordering of authority is a crucial aspect of leadership, and yet many leadership scholars are agnostic regarding the divine origin of authority. To Bon-
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