These two theologians are bonded, Kahl suggests, in that both turned toward a "non-religious" interpretation of faith as a commitment to life lived for others. Schweitzer, in the early decades of the twentieth century, turned his back on a career as a theological professor, obtained training as a medical doctor and established a hospital in West Africa.
Bonhoeffer, a professor and pastor in Germany, turned away from establishment Lutheranism and entered into active but secret resistance to Hitler. Before his execution in the closing days of World War II, Bonhoeffer penned prison letters, in which he speculated that authentic Christian life would be marked by prayer and "righteous action" and a new language "perhaps quite non-religious."
Schweitzer and Bonhoeffer, Kahl suggests, are representatives of her understanding of the Apostle Paul by their having discerned through faith, an activist ethic which invited daily service in the interests not of self but of others.
Kahl finds this activist impulse (1) in Paul, expressed in his cryptic Galatians letter (2) in Schweitzer, through an appreciation of Paul's mystical doctrine of being in-Christ and (3) in Bonhoeffer, by way of his insistence that the Christian life is lived for others, not for self.
The unstated premise here is that one can apprehend what Scripture meant by declaring what it means in the life of persons who lived long after Scripture came into being.
In Kahl, Paul's Galatians letter is taken to have meant certain things because it is taken to mean these things by subsequent readers. Here, Kahl proposes subsequent readers of Paul, two once-famous and still influential German theologians of the century past, as exponents of her understanding of Paul's mystical (cryptic?) doctrine of life lived for others.
Kahl invokes Schweitzer, specifically his book on Paul, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (1931) and suggests that Schweitzer's life in Africa as a physician amounted to a "second volume" (p. 285) of this investigation.
Looking to Schweitzer as a model for Christian faith in action, one perhaps ought to acknowledge his movement (intellectually if not emotionally) away from the Christian faith. This transition was expressed in other volumes, such as Indian Thought and Its Development (1936), in which Schweitzer states, "the commandment to not kill and to not damage is one of the greatest events in the spiritual history of mankind [. . .] so far as we know, this is for the first time clearly expressed in Jainism."
But Schweitzer also said: "The [Ahimsa] commandment [in Jainism] not to kill and not to harm does not arise, then, from a feeling of compassion, but from the idea of keeping undefiled from the world. It belongs originally to the ethic of becoming more perfect, not to the ethic of action."
Paul's Galatians letter is read, worried over, and is a source of solace today because it was taken up by the Catholic church as Scripture and retained in the Catholic canon by offshoots of Catholicism. Because Paul's statements are read as Scripture, his sentences are given innumerable applications by subsequent believers.
One may apply to one's own life the doctrine that life is lived for others. One may suggest, as Kahl does, that Schweitzer and Bonhoeffer lived admirable lives dedicated to the wellbeing of others and may even suggest, as Kahl does, though less persuasively, that Schweitzer (not Bonhoeffer) derived his life-for-others doctrines from Paul.
But do these assertions demonstrate what Paul meant?
We read Paul as Scripture, thereby attempting - expecting to be able - to apply what we read to our own circumstances.
But does reading Paul with the eyes of faith reveal what Paul meant?
What Paul meant - before his words were taken to be Scripture - is discerned by a rigorous examination of his words in their manifold contexts.
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