Elasticized Ecclesiology: The Concept of Community after Ernst Troeltsch

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This study confronts the current crisis of churches. In critical and creative conversation with the German theologian Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), Ulrich Schmiedel argues that churches need to be elasticized in order to engage the other. Examining contested concepts of religiosity, community, and identity, Schmiedel explores how the closure of church against the sociological other corresponds to the closure of church against the theological other. Taking trust as a central category, he advocates for a turn in the interpretation of Christianity-from propositional possession to performative project, so that the identity of Christianity is done rather than described. Through explorations of classical and contemporary scholarship in philosophy, sociology, and theology, Schmiedel retrieves Troeltsch’s interdisciplinary thinking for use in relation to the controversies that encircle the construction of community today. The study opens up innovative and instructive approaches to the investigation of the practices of Christianity, past and present. Eventually, church emerges as a work in movement, continually constituted through encounters with the sociological and the theological other.