"the [very] center of theological thinking"

"To pursue the problem of church discipline to the depth of its rootedness and the breadth of its branchings out is to be referred to the [very] center of theological thinking.  Indeed, of all of the questions that beset the church today and demand resolution, I know of none upon which the themes of theology converge so decisively, none whose resolution is so urgent and would be of such fundamental and far-reaching significance, as that of church discipline."

     Gerhard Ebeling, a member of the Confessing Church that opposed Hitler, in a lecture (Kirchenzucht (1947)) delivered first in Berlin in 1943, as quoted by Dorothea Sattler, in her "Sündige Menschen in der Gemeinschaft der Heiligen?  Alte und neue Frage nach der Kirchenzucht in ökumenischer Perspektive," Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 127 (2005):  272, as translated by me.