This should not be a religious confessional text. But on the whole, it cannot be overlooked that the religious confession is causing great problems today.
Islamism, Christian fundamentalism and Jewish ultra-Orthodoxism, which turn away from dialogue, are examples. They give a view of how religion divides people. Such a faith is blind, it demands violence and stands against reason.
Advent invites us to reflect on this.
Advent is traditionally understood as a time of waiting and preparation. While Immanuel Kant and Dietrich Bonhoeffer never met intellectually, their thought offers two radically different -- and deeply revealing -- ways of understanding what such preparation and waiting might mean.
For Kant (Enlightenment thinker; reason and moral autonomy): Advent is moral preparation.
Kant does not recognize Advent as a theologically decisive season. For him, religion has value only insofar as it strengthens moral responsibility. In Kant’s framework, Advent can only mean moral self-examination.
Key questions would be:
• Do I act from duty or from self-interest?
• Do I respect others as ends in themselves?
• Is my will guided by moral law?
Advent becomes a time of ethical self-discipline, not spiritual sentiment.
Preparation is not spiritual anticipation but rational discipline: the examination of one’s motives, the correction of moral failure, and renewed commitment to duty.
Advent is the time in which human beings prepare themselves - through reason and duty - to become morally better.
For Bonhoeffer (Christian theologian shaped by lived history): Advent is dangerous waiting.
Bonhoeffer understands Advent from the opposite direction. Writing much of his Advent theology from prison under the Nazi regime, he insists that Advent is meaningful precisely where human reason, morality and control reach their limits.
For Bonhoeffer, waiting is not calm reflection but existential tension. God does not come where people are strong and self-sufficient, but where they are powerless, threatened and exposed. Advent is not about improvement; it is about interruption. Advent, therefore, is not comforting. It is unsettling, dark and demanding.
Both thinkers reject sentimentality. Both insist that Advent must change how we live:
• Kant trusts human reason to carry moral responsibility forward.
• Bonhoeffer insists that reason alone is insufficient, and that hope must come from beyond human capacity.
A meaningful Advent to everybody.