this position of a “church” that led the way for all else, it was difficult to imagine how avant-garde these statements about the church as the source of theology and ethics sounded in 1932. Here, beside the identity (not identification) of Christ and church (“Christ existing as church-community”), Bonhoeffer formulated its counterpart. In a way they would never forget he impressed on his students that this “church” always meant the actual church in a specific place—in this case within the Old Prussian
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