Unconscious Christianity in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Late Theology: Encounters with the Unknown Christ [Hardcover]

In the last years of his life, Dietrich Bonhoeffer began work on an idea that he called unbewu?tes Christentum, unconscious Christianity. While Bonhoeffers other ideas from this period have been extensively studied and are important in the field of theology and beyond, this idea has been almost completely ignored. For the first time in Bonhoeffer scholarship, Eleanor McLaughlin provides a definition of unconscious Christianity, based on a close reading and analysis of the texts in which Bonhoeffer mentioned the term. From a variety of surviving texts, from a scribbled marginal note in his Ethics manuscript to the fiction he wrote in prison, she constructs a detailed definition of unconscious Christianity that sheds light not only on Bonhoeffers late work but his theological development as a whole.Eleanor McLaughlin is lecturer in theology and ethics at Regents Park College, University of Oxford, and research associate at the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture.

Bonhoeffer scholars and all theologians interested in the churchs relationship to post-Christian secular culture will find in McLaughlins study much food for thought. Studies in Christian Ethics

Bonhoeffer used the phrase unconscious Christianity four times. The first time was in the margin of his Ethics essay, Ultimate and Penultimate Things. From Tegel Prison he began to develop the idea through works of fiction. Bonhoeffer then used the term in a letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge, and it appears in two notes for a potential book, found in Letters and Papers from Prison (1953). McLaughlin carefully studies these texts and puts them in the context of Bonhoeffers life and developing theology. She sees this concept as opening up new ways in which Bonhoeffers theology can be used by the Church to make sense of its present situation (p. 2). Basically, she argues that it is possible for people to be Christians while not identifying themselves as Christians. They act compaslÓ7