Remembering Gerhard Lohfink

Gerhard Lohfink, a Catholic theologian whose ecclesiology resonated with North American Anabaptists, died on April 2. — Wolfgang Krauß

Gerhard Lohfink, a German Catholic New Testament scholar, died on April 2, 2024 in Ebenhausen, Germany. North American Anabaptists, including Mennonites and the Bruderhof, took interest in his work, especially his book Jesus and Community: the Social Dimension of Christian Faith.

The book was published in 1982 in German and is still in print. A translation into English appeared in 1984. From the evidence of the New Testament, Lohfink developed a biblical ecclesiology that is similar to the early Anabaptists’ understanding of the church.

According to Lohfink, the Jesus movement continues in a small, relationship-based community. Through the community’s witness, people come into contact with Jesus and are invited to follow him and live together. Here Jesus is present and lives with the community in contrast to the social and political relationships of power and violence.

Lohfink’s coining of the term “contrast society” for the social dimension of the community of Jesus was an extremely important, and indeed indispensable, contribution to the ecclesiological discourse. In the revised new edition from 2015, Jesus and Community included in the subtitle the words Church in Contrast.

Among Anabaptists, the term “contrast society” was probably also well received because it sounded like an echo from the Schleitheim Confession in 1527. The Confession’s fourth article is about separation. The community is not identical with the society as a whole. According to Jesus, it stands in contrast to many socially accepted or required positions and behaviors.

At the end of Article 4, the Confession says in anticipation of Article 6 about the sword: “So the unchristian, even devilish weapons of violence will undoubtedly fall from us, such as swords, armor and the like and all their use for friends or against them Enemies, by virtue of Christ’s word: You shall not resist evil [Mt 5:39].”

The community’s renunciation of violence in following Jesus is made possible by its isolation, its lived contrast to society. Lohfink and Michael Sattler appear as one in the spirit of Jesus. The former-Benedictine-turned-Anabaptist and the Catholic theologian see difference, separation and contrast as essential characteristics of a church that follows after Jesus. Both men are concerned with the liberation of the church from Constantinian captivity.

The talk of the contrasting society and its impressive exegetical derivation resonated particularly with those who remained skeptical about abandoning genuinely Anabaptist emphases. Lohfink had given the old Anabaptist concept, without referring to it, a new term that described exactly what separation originally meant: not a sect-like withdrawal from society, not geographical isolation, but a challenge to society and its members to metanoia, conversion in following Jesus.

Lohfink brought the debate into academic discourse. It was not always well received. But the term spread widely and did not remain confined to the academic ivory tower.

Four years after the publication of his book, Lohfink asked the bishop of his diocese of Limburg to be allowed to move to the Catholic Integrated Community of Munich as a priest. After the bishop’s approval and to the astonishment of the academic world, Lohfink gave up his professorship in Tübingen in 1987 and moved with his elderly parents to Munich, and later to Bad Tölz.

In the Catholic Integrated Community, which began as Junger Bund after World War II, Lohfink saw a serious attempt to live the community of Jesus. The last years of his life were overshadowed by the dissolution of the Integrated Community after former members reported clerical abuse and financial fraud.

Lohfink was still working on his last book a few days before his death. Why I Believe in God is scheduled to be published in fall 2024.

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