I am starting in on Gerhard Lohfink’s Does God Need the Church? Toward a Theologu of the People of God It was a highly recommended book by Bill Cavanaugh in his speech to the Ecclesia Project meeting a couple months ago.

I’m also plodding through some rather dense sections of the middle of Betge’s Biography of Deitrich Bonhoeffer. Lots of meetings of Church Councils hammering out who is going to meet with who; the rough times are about to start, though, since the section just ahead of where I’m reading (almost 2/3 of the way through the book) is entitled “The End of Finkenwalde” (Finkenwalde was the Seminary that was the training ground for the Confessing Church). The desne parts I’m about to complete now are covering some time in Bonhoeffer’s travels when things were relatively quiet regarding tensions between them and the Reich Church.