Meet Dorothee Soelle

The woman who rewrote theology

Dorothee Soelle was a teenager in Germany when the Holocaust shattered her image of God.Christians prayed in church; outside, their Jewish neighbors were loaded into trains bound for death camps.She carried a burning question:If God is all-powerful, why didn’t God stop this?

As an adult, her answer would stun the theological world:God is not an all-powerful king. God is the One who suffers in us, with us, and through us—and who needs our hands to heal what breaks.Prayer, for Dorothee, was never passive. It was partnership. It was solidarity with the God who refuses to abandon the world.

Her theology won’t let us hide behind piety or detach into meditation.It calls us back—into our bodies, our streets, our neighbors’ lives.And in this moment of global upheaval, her vision feels nothing short of urgent.

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But here’s what makes Dorothee extraordinary: she didn’t just write about this theology—she lived it.

Every morning she opened a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, asking:Where is God in the suffering of the world? And what does love require of us here?

From that question, she forged a new kind of Christianity—one that wove together mysticism, feminism, and political theology into a single, embodied path.

New to Dorothee? Here are 4 reasons I’m telling everyone about her—and why you may want to, too.

1. She democratized mysticism.

Dorothee identified five places of mystical experience: nature, eroticism, suffering, community, and joy. The stuff of everyday life! Notice what's not on that list—not ecstasies, monasteries, nor even silence! For her, mysticism wasn't for special saints. It was for everyone, found in the raw, embodied, political places where life actually happens.

"Theology must be active and relevant,” she insisted, “or it does not exist at all."

2. She reimagined God beyond patriarchy.

Dorothee had witnessed firsthand how a white, male, authoritarian God-image could be bent to justify violence.

So she reached for something more liberating.

Her feminist theology spoke of a God who does not dominate but accompanies;not an omnipotent king, but a vulnerable, suffering God birthing a new world—and inviting us to be its midwives.

This wasn’t merely a critique of the old images.It was the discovery of a God expansive enough to hold every human being, every wound, every hope.

3. She made theology earthy and embodied.

Dorothee refused abstract God-talk.

The Holocaust taught her to keep her ear close to the ground—and close to those who have been marginalized. 

Her mysticism was what she called “borrowing the eyes of God.” (I love this.) How would it change the way we see the wounded, the rejected, the overlooked—if it was from behind God’s tender eyes?

Tender love is a fierce love. Dorothee was frequently heard quoting Teresa of Avila: God has no hands but ours.

Dorothee took this quite literally, and believed that we are the answer to our own prayer. God inspires action in our hearts and hands.

This is why she famously wrote: “To pray is to revolt.”Not because prayer is loud, but because real prayer changes us—and changed people cannot tolerate injustice.

4. She turned suffering into resistance.

Dorothee never spiritualized suffering or asked anyone to accept it passively.She saw suffering as a summons to solidarity.

Christ on the cross, for her, is not meant to be the gateway of individual salvation—but the living symbol of God’s union with all who suffer political violence, oppression, or trauma.

This is what she called mysticism of resistance:a spirituality born from the world’s pain and committed to transforming it.

And somehow, after staring unflinchingly at the worst of the 20th century, Dorothee arrived at a theology of profound hope.

How did she do it?

That’s what Matthew Fox—who knew Dorothee personally—will help us uncover. Matthew and Dorothee shared a vision of mysticism that was democratic, embodied, and unafraid to touch the wounds of the world.

In this session, Matthew will offer a friend’s-eye view into Dorothee’s raw, earth-honest spirituality and invite us to respond to suffering with the same courageous tenderness Dorothee carried into the world.

May her boldness inspire our own, that we may see and love each creature through the eyes of God.

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