Does God Need the Church? An Essay on Prayer and Tradition

In 1986 Gerhard Lohfink resigned his professorship in New Testament at the University of Tubingen, moved to Munich, and put his theological expertise at the service of the Catholic Integrated Community. The community was founded by a group of young German lay Catholics who, at the end of World War II, met to discuss the meaning of Christian community and to grapple with their country's embrace of National Socialism. Members of the community were determined to rediscover, in the Jewish origins of the Christian faith, the authentic roots of what it means to be Catholic. From the beginning, the Integrated Community invited theologians and other intellectuals to join them. They strongly opposed the German cultural practice of identifying Catholics or Protestants simply by their birth heritage and enrollment in the government census. In short, the community wanted to discern their communal identity as Christians as opposed to their membership in what Germans called the Volkskirche.

Lohf...