Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Secular Ecclesiology
Through a careful analysis of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s entire written corpus, Paul O. Bischoff places Bonhoeffer’s radical views on the doctrines of Word and Sacrament within the context of traditional Lutheran theology, and the current Finnish dialogue with Eastern Orthodoxy. A definitive concept of the church is constructed upon: 1. the relational structure of human existence, the dialectic of individual and communal being, and the historic dialectic of the community of God and others 2. the concrete unity of the reality of God and the reality of the world 3. the responsible community (the church) as a means and an end 4. God’s self-disclosure in Jesus of Nazareth Derived from theologia crucis rooted in Maximus, and interpreted by Luther, a “scandalous” definition of church is proposed whose God is crucified, and whose Savior is simultaneously the vicarious representative and the maximus peccator (the greatest sinner), and whose Holy Spirit indwells the bodies of sinners. Contrary to Western Christianity’s preference for an individualist soteriology, Bonhoeffer emphasizes the communal being of God through his programmatic “Christ-exists-as-church-community.” Special reference is made to Eastern Orthodoxy’s trinitarian doctrine of perichoresis—being-in-relation. Paul O. Bischoff holds the PhD in Theology from the Lutheran
School of Theology at Chicago.
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