Date of Award
9-6-2024
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Theology
First Advisor
Colby Dickinson
Abstract
Understood comprehensively, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s legacy offers contemporary American Catholicism a contextual approach to theological ethics that can meaningfully inform the development of an ethics of resistance to totalitarian and pseudo-religious forces that dominate U.S. politics today. Unfortunately, Catholic scholarship on Bonhoeffer overall has failed to grasp the full scope of his work and to incorporate his biography and the historical and theological context in which he lived. This dissertation brings Bonhoeffer into dialogue with modern and postmodern American Catholic theological contexts, specifically engaging Bonhoeffer’s concept of analogia relationis, his incarnational Christocentrism, and his embrace of contextual ambiguity. This dissertation is also a project of constructive theology insofar as the method and structure used throughout this dissertation suggest that the task of theology in Twenty-First Century America is the task of sifting through fragments of failed Christian systems to distinguish the essentials of these systems from the incidentals. In so doing, such a theological method seeks to discover the valuable fragments that must take part in theology’s future, and to emancipate this theological future from fragments that are broken beyond reprieve. Thusly, this dissertation dialogues with fragmentation and ambiguity as both an object of contemporary theology and a theological method. Bonhoeffer’s work provides a particularly cogent dialogue partner for such a constructive project because contextual ambiguity forms much of the foundation of his own theological anthropology and ethics.
Recommended Citation
Toomey, Meghan, "The Meaning of Life’s Broken Fragments: A Constructive Theology of Fragmentation Grounded in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Theological Ethics" (2024). Dissertations. 4141.
https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/4141
