theological study of sociology of Church

"Bonhoeffer begins his “theological study of the sociology of the church” by constructing an anthropology and then articulating what a church is sociologically" ??

How did I miss this when reading for my thesis?

Read this and other reviews on my blog - Two Tack's Thoughts.

This book is my first attempt at reading Bonhoeffer. I had heard of him for a number of years, and recently viewed a PBS special on his life that piqued my curiousity. I decided to delve into his works and figured what better place to start than the beginning. Fortunately reading through Bonhoeffer's works in an orderly fashion is possible due to the publication of "Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works", the sixteen volume series in English. According to the web site of Fortress Press, the publisher of the series, it is "The definitive Englishtranslation of the Critical Edition. A comprehensive and thoroughly annotated sixteen-volume resource for the study of Bonhoeffer in thewider frame of twentieth-century thought and history." I am very impressed by the format, the footnotes, and the supplemental information, and would highly recommend that if you read Bonhoeffer you read from these editions.

Sanctorum Communio is the published revision of his Doctoral thesis. As a result the work is quite scholarly and spends most of its pages in conversation with other scholars and scholarly works. My comprehension of the book as a whole would have been greatly enhanced had I had more familiarity with the works of philosophers and theologians such as Luther, Barth, and Kant, as well as many others. The first four of five chapters are spent primarily laying a philosophical and socialogical setting for Bonhoeffer's view of the church and the Church. I couldn't tell you a single thing that I learned in the first four chapters, except that my knowledge of the works of the likes of those listed above is severely lacking! If I were to read this book again, I would at least familiarize myself with some basic understanding of the frameworks that Bonhoffer references. There are some interesting statements in these chapters however, including the following one which could apply today as easily as 70+ years ago:

"Vierkandt's concept of the invisible church expresses what the church has often become today, or rather what churches consider emancipated: religious theaters and lecture halls. The congregation is an audience, viewers who feel pleasantly edified by the music and the sermon. Each individual is happy to see many others who feel edified by the same spiritual food. And of course this feeling of shared joy is invisible... Yet shared emotion and knowledge of it, even a sense of belonging based upon this, are not enough to make a 'community'." - p.94.

The fifth chapter, which is approximately half the book, is where things start to get at least mildly interesting. In this chapter, appropriately titled "Santctorum Communio", Bonhoeffer rises from the theoretical intellectual constructs of the earlier chapters and delves into the reality of the church. At this point it becomes a historical document, written in a specific historical, geographical setting - the German Church in the early 20th Century. Excommunication and church taxes, for example, have never been part of my Church experience, but are assumed and referenced as part of the actuality of the church. From this perspective it is interesting, and there are also aspects that have given me some thoughts on a theological perspective of the church in a helpful way. However, there are many arguments he makes that I just don't agree with, including the following:

"Does this mean then that the Bible becomes the "word" only through church community? That is indeed true, namely as the church-community is created only through the word and sustained by it. The question as to what was first, the word or the church-community, is meaningless because the word inspired by the Spirit exists only where human beings hear it, so that the church-community makes the word the word, as the word constitutes the church-community as church. The Bible is the word only in the church-community, that is within the sanctorum communio." - p. 232.

In my mind, the Bible is the "word" regardless. Perhaps I am not sophisticated enough to understand his meaning. On a positive note, reading this book has inspired me to delve more deeply into both philosophy and church history, especially Luther and Protestant reformation - any recommendations? I still have to decide if I will continue reading Bonhoeffer; the next book in the series is Act and Being. Perhaps I will take some time and see if the compulsion strikes. I would also like to read a good modern study on the basis and purpose of the church as well as the Church.

In the "Editor's Afterword to the German Edition", Joachim Von Soosten sums it up nicely when he states, in translation:

"Comparing Bonhoeffer's dissertation with his later writings discloses the tendency of Sanctorum Communio toward over-systematization. This makes certain parts of it very difficult to understand, but later this sytematizing clearly decreases and the content of Bonhoeffer's arguments comes to the fore. In the later writings Bonhoeffer's language becomes more simple, dense, and concise; with the power of succint expressions Bonhoeffer skillfully carries his thoughts into the center of a given theological debate. in retrospect, he himself assessed his academic writings rather critically."

In conclusion, despite being an impressive work, I would NOT recommend this book unless you already have a level of familiarity with Bonhoeffer's writings and/or you are interested philiosophy and have a foundation in the referenced material. ( )