This article explores how three Lutheran theologians have understood the relationship between the work of the Holy Spirit and the existing church. I argue that Robert Jenson and Reinhard Hütter both relate the Spirit to the church in ways that displace a full recognition of the church as sinful. In contrast, I suggest how Dietrich Bonhoeffer's early and neglected reflections on ecclesiology and pneumatology allow for just such a recognition. turn has clearly succeeded in securing and conveying the church in its holiness (i.e. as 'set apart'). What is less clear, however, is whether this turn has allowed for an adequate recognition of the church as sinful.What is even more surprising is the relative neglect of this question by some theologians appealing to and drawing on Luther directly. 4 In the first and second sections of this article, I shall indicate this in relation to two theologians in particular: Robert Jenson and Reinhard Hütter. 5 Jenson and Hütter both strongly emphasize the visibility and holiness of the church. In particular, they do so by identifying the work of the Holy Spirit with the communal spirit of the church (Jenson) or its core practices (Hütter). My concern, then, is that they in these ways subtly relinquish Luther's insistence that the church is sinful. In the third section, I shall identify an alternative in the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer's early work on ecclesiology has some deep resonances with Jenson and Hütter, 6 and includes much that is attractive in their work. Nevertheless, I shall indicate how he provides an account of the work of the Holy Spirit that more clearly allows for a recognition of the church as at once holy and sinful. The Holy Spirit as the spirit of the communityRobert Jenson's magisterial two-volume Systematic Theology displays a consistent emphasis on the concrete visibility and witness of the church. In his ecclesiology, Jenson sets out a general phenomenology of spirit as background to an account of the church as a community and polity:
John Milbank is one of the most recent and arguably most radical proponents of an understanding of nature as graced. This article critically examines Milbank's understanding of nature and grace, specifically as elaborated within his reading of Thomas Aquinas. In the first part I will outline Aquinas's most direct discussions of nature and grace in the Summa Theologica, drawing attention to several central, albeit subtle, distinctions that these contain. In the second and third parts, I will examine Milbank's reading of Aquinas in Truth in Aquinas, and examine whether it adequately reflects and negotiates Aquinas's distinctions. On this basis I will argue Milbank's reading, while drawing attention to some important and often neglected areas of Aquinas's thought, ultimately remains limited.
How can theologians recognize the church as a historical and human community, while still holding that it has been established by Christ and is a work of the Spirit? How can a theological account of the church draw insights and concepts from the social sciences, without Christian commitments and claims about the church being undermined or displaced? In 1927, the 21-year-old Dietrich Bonhoeffer defended his licentiate dissertation, Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church. This remains his most neglected and misunderstood work. Christ Existing as Community thus retrieves and analyses Bonhoeffer’s engagement with social theory and attempt at ecclesiology. Against standard readings and criticisms of this work, Mawson demonstrates that it contains a rich and nuanced approach to the church, one which displays many of Bonhoeffer’s key influences—especially Luther, Hegel, Troeltsch, and Barth—while being distinctive in its own right. In particular, Mawson argues that Sanctorum Communio’s theology is built around a complex dialectic of creation, sin, and reconciliation. On this basis, he contends that Bonhoeffer’s dissertation has ongoing significance for work in theology and Christian ethics.
This article reevaluates the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s widely criticized engagement with social theory in his doctoral dissertation Sanctorum Communio. On the one hand, it argues that there are specific theological concerns underlying Bonhoeffer’s initial decisions with respect to social theory, in ways that have not been sufficiently recognized. This is the case for both Bonhoeffer’s distinction between social philosophy and sociology and his related preference for formal (rather than historical) approaches to sociology. On the other hand, this article insists that Bonhoeffer did not simply draw or rely upon formal approaches to sociology uncritically. Rather, he carefully took up and reworked concepts and insights from social theory on the basis of a properly theological dialectic of creation, sin, and reconciliation.
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