Peter Hooton’s gift to students of Bonhoeffer is a full-length programmatic consideration of Bonhoeffer’s notion of religionless Christianity. It’s programmatic not only because it is a book-length meditation on the topic but because Hooton considers the concept genealogically in relationship to Bonhoeffer’s oeuvre. He is committed to treating religionless Christianity as a “fully functional theology, rather than as fragment, or historical artifact.” ... A great strength of Hooton’s analysis is the way he shows connections from the beginning to the end of Bonhoeffer’s works.... By examining concepts introduced in his late prison letters and connecting the dots back throughout Bonhoeffer’s writings, Hooten demonstrates that they were not the late and suddenly clear thoughts of a theologian nearing his end but rather the culmination of much that had gone before. Tragically, Bonhoeffer did not have the opportunity to flesh them out with greater detail.
