Ebook: God’s Church-Community: The Ecclesiology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

David Emerton provides a provocative but rigorous account of Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology – an account which establishes, permanently, the pneumatological and eschatological interests of a theologian who is often considered to be christomonist, and identifies the critical significance of Bonhoeffer’s ecclesial thought for contemporary ecclesiological discourse.
The book argues that Bonhoeffer understands the church as a pneumatological and eschatological community in space and time, and that his ecclesial thought is thus built on pneumatological and apocalyptically eschatological foundations which give rise to a unique methodological approach to ecclesiological description – an approach that enables Bonhoeffer to proffer a genuinely theological ecclesiological account in which both divine and human agency are held together through an account of God the Holy Spirit: both God’s own being and the being of the church’s socio-historical or human empirical form are spoken of appropriately with due concern for appropriate dogmatic ordering and proportionality in ecclesiological description.
Critically, the book considers Bonhoeffer’s pneumatological and eschatological ‘both/and’ ecclesiological methodology therapeutic to an endemic ‘either/or’ problematic present in contemporary approaches to ecclesiological discourse: that of attending in an account of the church either to the socio-historical or human empirical church-community ‘ethnographically’, or to the life of God ‘dogmatically’; and to each (problematically) at the expense of the other. The book suggests, therefore, that Bonhoeffer’s ecclesial thought breaks open a necessary ‘third way’ in ecclesiological description between the Scylla of ‘ethnographic’ ecclesiology and the Charybdis of ‘dogmatic’ ecclesiology, and thereby establishes a programmatic theological grammar for ecclesiology per se.