Lexington Books / Fortress Academic
Pages: 222
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼
978-1-9787-0933-1 • Hardback • February 2020 • $100.00 • (£77.00)
978-1-9787-0935-5 • Paperback • August 2022 • $39.99 • (£31.00)
978-1-9787-0934-8 • eBook • February 2020 • $38.00 • (£29.00)
Peter Hooton works for the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture on Charles Sturt University’s Canberra campus.
Chapter 1 “We are approaching a completely religionless age”
Chapter 2 Bonhoeffer’s Critique of Religion
Chapter 3 Religionless Christianity in its Christological Context
Chapter 4 Non-religious Interpretation
Chapter 5 Mystery, Faith, and Wholeness
Chapter 6 Christ without religion
Peter Hooton’s gift to students of Bonhoeffer is a full-length programmatic consideration of Bonhoeffer’s notion of religionless Christianity. It’s programmatic not only because it is a book-length meditation on the topic but because Hooton considers the concept genealogically in relationship to Bonhoeffer’s oeuvre. He is committed to treating religionless Christianity as a “fully functional theology, rather than as fragment, or historical artifact.” ... A great strength of Hooton’s analysis is the way he shows connections from the beginning to the end of Bonhoeffer’s works.... By examining concepts introduced in his late prison letters and connecting the dots back throughout Bonhoeffer’s writings, Hooten demonstrates that they were not the late and suddenly clear thoughts of a theologian nearing his end but rather the culmination of much that had gone before. Tragically, Bonhoeffer did not have the opportunity to flesh them out with greater detail.
— Christian Century
Peter Hooton’s excellent book constitutes a significant contribution to the growing corpus of Bonhoeffer scholarship. It forensically probes the central notion of “religionless Christianity”— forensic in the sense of leaving no stone unturned but also in its search for answers, especially to the big questions, ‘What is left once Christianity is unburdened by religion?’ ‘What is left for the believer?’ ‘What is left for the world come of age?’ Finding answers to these Bonhoeffer-implied questions seems more urgent today than ever. Peter Hooton’s work takes us just a little closer.— Terence Lovat, The University of Newcastle, emeritus
Bonhoeffer's plea for a 'religionless Christianity' continues to intrigue and puzzle generations of new readers. Peter Hooton argues eloquently and with academic rigor that Bonhoeffer's prison theology can only be truly understood as an aspect of his abiding and central conviction of Jesus Christ as the truth of both God and humanity.— Rev. Dr. Keith Clements