Richard Hall on Bonhoeffer and King...and their deaths.
If the contemporary church wants to claim the witness of their deaths, it must wrestle with the fact that both King and Bonhoeffer gave their definitive witness beyond the bounds of the churches of their time, apart from the great majority of Christians in their countries. If they found the body of Christ, it was through solidarity with a company of people representing many faiths and no faith. If they bear witness to God’s new reality breaking in from the cruciform margins, then their deaths also testify to a certain death of the official churches.
Stanley Hauerwas has written that “the church is a social ethic.” Receiving King and Bohoeffer makes that sort of statement difficult because their witness stands for the church’s social failure inasmuch as it represents the body of Christ in strange new forms. The lived social ethic of the official churches in their times was ambivalent at best and lifeless at worst, and the best possibilities for the gospel often seemed to form in alternative memberships. Aftter King and Bonhoeffer, then, what does church mean for Christian social ethics?
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From the "Connexions" Blog by Richard Hall
The blog of Richard Hall, a Methodist Minister in Wales.
