In a secular age, Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity” is evergreen

Many theologians have gestured toward Bonhoeffer’s late reflections on religionless Chris­tianity, and for good reason. In a secular age, the phrase is evergreen—and it’s all the more winsome because it was coined in the prison letters of an ascendant anti-fascist martyr theologian. The concept is almost endlessly generative. Even if more is made of it than is warranted, or even if those using it take it in directions Bonhoeffer might not have endorsed, many of those directions bear fruit.

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.”

In religionless Christianity, Hooton explains,