Bloomsbury God's Church-Community: The Ecclesiology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology)

David Emerton provides a provocative but rigorous account of Bonhoeffer s ecclesiology 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 ecclesiology. Emerton argues that Bonhoeffer understands the church as a pneumatological and eschatological community in space and time, and that this understanding is thus built on eschatological and pneumatological foundations. These foundations, in turn, give rise to a unique methodological approach to ecclesiological description an approach that enables Bonhoeffer to proffer a genuinely theological account of the church in which both divine and human agency are held together through an account of God the Holy Spirit. Critically, Emerton considers this approach therapeutic to an endemic problematic present in contemporary accounts of the church: that of attending either to the 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 that Bonhoeffer s ecclesial thought therefore 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. For the ecclesiologist and church practitioner alike, the book therefore acts as a clarion call towards genuinely theological ecclesiological speech which is allied to genuinely theological ecclesial action.