'religionless interpretation of biblical concepts in a world come of age', the worldly Christianity of the letters from prison, will have to turn to Bonhoeffer's early writings. There he will find both the basis and the starting-point for the ideas in the letters. The letters, it is hardly necessary to say, read more easily than those early works.Sanctorum Communio is Bonhoeffer's first work. He was only twenty-one when he presented it, in 1927, as a dissertation to the Theological Faculty in Berlin. Difficult and overloaded though it is, in many respects unclear and youthful in style, nevertheless it moves clearly across the continental map of theology of that time into new country. It begins from two conflicting bases. First there is the sociological school, which had a powerful effect on Berlin theology of the twenties by way of Troeltsch. Bonhoeffer had studied in this atmosphere and learned its language. He worked in Harnack's seminar, but under Seeberg he turned to systematic theology. The second base was dialectical theology. Though it was making stormy advances in Germany, it had not then found a single advocate in Berlin University. Its concern was not with the sociological and statistical understanding of the church, but with its strict and sole source in revelation. In spite of Harnack and Seeberg it was this theology to which the young Bonhoeffer now became attentive. He was attracted by the impossible. What he tried to give in Sanctorum Communio was a sociological theology of the church, or a theological sociology. He turned to this task with immense self-conscious power.Both these bases, the sociology and the theology of the church, have by no means lost their pressing importance for us to-day in, our view of the church, whether we regard them as reconcilable or not.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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