This week’s question for our course is, “How are social media changing the ecology of our communities of faith?” Well, I have absolutely no doubt that they are; and yet at this point in time I have little real insight into the more adaptive ways that change is emerging because of social media. I’m wondering if my imagination, while considering this question, is still too colonized by a penchant for thinking change as technical change.

It was reading student blogs that got me thinking about Dietrich Bonhoeffer of all people, which got me wondering whether or not I was thinking about the word “changing” in our question through the concept of technical or adaptive change. (I’ve been teaching a course on Bonhoeffer for a dozen years, been researching and writing on him over the last 6 years or so, and am now working on a book on Bonhoeffer and Missional Church.) Here’s how Bonhoeffer’s got me wondering.

At the age of 21–yup, 21–Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote his doctoral dissertation on Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church. I’m starting to think about our course in a similar way, as a theological study of the sociology, or better, of the sociality of the church. Bonhoeffer used all of the sociological tools that were available to him in the early 20th century.

What drew him to this study was his own experience of “church-lite,” as I like to call it. When Dietrich was 12 his second oldest brother, Walter, was killed in World War I. Dietrich was very distraught. The church that he was baptized into and that he belonged to was missing-in-action for him. There was no church bearing the burden of his grief with him (Gal. 6:2). In his dissertation, and throughout his life he called this church-lite experience “bourgeois Protestantism,” and he discovered that this was the normative experience of people of his day. Bourgeois Protestantism was fraught with atomistic individualism, middle-and-upper-class concerns with little attention to the problems or interests of the working classes and the realities of the rapidly increasing numbers of poor and unemployed people. It was a Protestantism focused on thin rituals around the bare minimalist lifecycle concerns of hatching, matching, and dispatching.

When he was 18, Dietrich and his oldest brother, Karl, traveled to Rome. Day after day Dietrich kept going back to St. Peter’s Basilica and to the Vatican. He was captivated by the gravity architecturally expressed by the Basilica but troubled by the hierarchy embedded in a pre-Vatican II Vatican.

Bonhoeffer’s dissertation tried to open up an innovative, adaptive space for an ecclesial “life together” somewhere in between the thin atomistic individualism of bourgeois Protestantism and the thick hierarchical holism of Vatican Roman Catholicism. Karl Barth once called Bonhoeffer’s dissertation “a theological miracle.” Indeed, one could view Dietrich’s entire life, and even his martyrdom, as a living search for such a church where christologically bearing one another’s burdens was the deep ecclesial reality. The real miracle was that Bonhoeffer even attempted to discover such  a social space, such an ecclesial sociality of Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit to the glory of the Father.

Might thinking our course in such a light add some martyrological boldness to our undertaking together?