Of all the works in the corpus of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio is frequently overlooked by scholars otherwise interested in his thought, and it has been criticised by social scientists who object to the way he uses social theory. But when read as part of a study of the church and not as an attempt to open up an academic dialogue with social theorists, claims Michael Mawson, it not only makes sense theologically, but makes a valuable contribution to contemporary ecclesiology.
Mawson notes that Bonhoeffer's theological engagement with social theory is framed by the thought of Ernst Troeltsch, who maintains that Christianity originally had little interest in the social world around it, and Karl Barth, who offers a dialectical understanding of revelation that preserves an ‘absolute qualitative distinction’ between God and all creaturely reality, and which is experienced solely as a negation of humanity's finitude and sinfulness. Bonhoeffer rejects Troeltsch's historicist conception of Christianity as a set of religious ideals essentially unrelated to social expression, and faults Barth for failing to reckon with the fact that human persons and communities are historical all the way down. Bonhoeffer's starting point is the church, which he claims is not ‘accidental’ to revelation, but the fully human, historical medium in which the crucified and risen Christ encounters humanity.
The lynchpin of Bonhoeffer's engagement with social theory, states Mawson, is the dialectic of the primal state (creation), sin and reconciliation. There is thus no abstract understanding of the human being; women and men exist concretely before God as those who are created, fallen and reconciled by Christ. Social reality and human persons are not conceivable as unified wholes, but stand fragmented before God and in isolation from one another, and must be examined in this threefold manner.
A Christian concept of the person and its basic social relations is key to the dialectical reworking of social-philosophical and sociological concepts. According to Mawson, Bonhoeffer contests the atomistic social philosophy of idealism, arguing that its construal of the reasoning subject is unable to acknowledge the freedom of God or preserve both the otherness and concreteness of other human beings. He offers instead a theological concept of the person as existing in an ‘I–You’ relation of ethical responsibility before God and with other humans
In the primal state human beings exist before God as both individuals and as social beings, simultaneously distinct from and related to one another. The pivotal concept, says Mawson, is ‘spirit’ (Geist), which designates the unity and coherence of human actions and intentions on both an individual and a corporate basis, such that neither personal nor social spirit can be reduced to the other. What Bonhoeffer calls the basic social relations that prevailed in the primal state of humanity were shattered in the fall, and now persons exist in complete isolation and solitude, existing ‘in Adam’ as both individuals and a sinful humanity. The ethical responsibility that formerly prevailed in the created state became a shared guilt and culpability.
Bonhoeffer's study of the sociology of the church concludes with an emphasis on the roles of Christ and the Holy Spirit in constituting it as the place where in freedom God encounters and redeems the human being. Mawson notes that the key concepts are, first, vicarious representative action (Stellvertretung), in which the crucified and rise Christ overcomes the logic of isolation and solitude of fallen human and then forms the basis of the new social basic relations in the church-community, and secondly, Christ existing as community (Christus als Gemeinde existierend), in which Christ constitutes the church as a new kind of collective person in contrast to the fallen collective person of Adam.
Mawson brings his careful examination of Bonhoeffer's dissertation to a close with a short but insightful chapter comparing his ecclesiology with those of Stanley Hauerwas, John Webster, John Milbank and Peter Ward. Bonhoeffer's dialectical approach better accounts for the reality of sin and its effects in the church while retaining its character as the place where God's self-revelation in Christ meets us.
Mawson's study is a reminder that Bonhoeffer writes and thinks as a dogmatic theologian who emphasises the centrality of the church, a fact often neglected by scholars who wish to read him as an ethicist in the mould of Reinhold Niebuhr. I suspect that many of the questionable interpretations of the mature Bonhoeffer can be attributed to the failure to take account of his early writings. For budding Bonhoeffer scholars and those interested in nineteenth- and twentieth century theological developments, this well-researched volume is a must.
