The Bonhoeffer Reader

3. Sanctorum Communio

18 3. Sanctorum Communio DBWE 1:21, 34, 44–65, 107–116, 122–128, 130–134, 141–161, 184, 192–193, 198–200, 215–216, 226–227, 230, 246–247, 280–281 Though sometimes described simply as a treatise on the church, Sanctorum Communio is much more—a far-reaching exploration of Bonhoeffer’s conviction that theology must be approached from a social perspective. As he puts it in the preface, basic Christian concepts “can be fully comprehended only in relation to sociality.” Already in his doctoral dissertation, Bonhoeffer strikes an independent and original course toward a theology of sociality. Driving Bonhoeffer’s turn to sociality is his rejection of the epistemological subjectobject relationship as a model for the relations of humans to one another and to God. Because the epistemological model ultimately reduces God and others to objects, “the attempt to derive the social from the epistemological category must be rejected.” Viewed polemically, Bonhoeffer’s argument for the sociality of theological concepts is an argument against their interpretation in merely epistemological terms. Despite the technical vocabulary and complex argument, the organization of Sanctorum Communio is straightforward, governed by Bonhoeffer’s stated aim of displacing epistemological accounts of “‘[p]erson,’ ‘primal state,’ ‘sin,’ and ‘revelation ’” with social ones. After the first methodological chapter dealing with definitions of social philosophy and sociology, the theological argument proper begins in chapter 2 with the critical concept of the whole book, “the Christian concept of person.” In contrast to the abstract and Kantian “epistemological concept of person,” Bonhoeffer defines the person as intrinsically social, the “I” of the “I”-“You” relationship. This social-relational understanding of the person implies for Bonhoeffer that the individual person is essentially related to the community, and therefore that God’s relationship to the individual is mediated through the community. Bonhoeffer’s summary of this point is axiomatic for his whole theology: “The concepts of person, community, and God are inseparably interrelated.” Chapter 3 examines this inseparable interrelationship in the context of creation, or the “primal state,” and chapter 4 traces the changes to it that are caused by “sin.” 19 Sanctorum Communio 21 1. [DBWE 1:1, editor’s introduction.] 2. [By “sociology,” Bonhoeffer refers not to influential contemporaries such as Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch but, rather, to a German school of “systematic sociology,” which was concerned with Especially noteworthy is Bonhoeffer’s analysis of sin in social terms. The interrelationship of individual and community allows Bonhoeffer to treat the traditional doctrine of original sin in a way that upholds both the culpability of the individual and the universality of sin: “Every deed is at once an individual act and one that reawakens the total sin of humanity.” The consequences of sin, too, are understood socially as the degeneration of the community as found in the primal state: love becomes egotism, giving becomes demanding, and community becomes isolation. Sanctorum Communio culminates in the long fifth chapter on the church, which makes good on Bonhoeffer’s opening statement that “revelation can be fully comprehended only in relation to sociality.” Revelation is not a past historical happening , nor information, nor doctrine, nor a holy book. Revelation is a person, Christ, who exists in social form as the church-community. The effect of revelation, then, is the creation of a new humanity. It is a new form of sociality “in Christ” that repairs the fallen form of sociality “in Adam.” This social definition of revelation is Bonhoeffer’s answer to an enduring theological question from the Enlightenment onward: how to speak about God, about divine transcendence. An epistemological subject-object approach to theology seems incapable of answering this question, since, Bonhoeffer argues, that model reduces God to an object. Bonhoeffer’s social approach departs from this well-worn path to argue that the otherness of another person is the suitable model for thinking about the relation with the transcendent God. In the process, he redefines God’s transcendence away from notions of remoteness and absence and toward the notion of presence in community. There can be no doubt that “[u]nderstanding the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer requires a thorough understanding of Sanctorum Communio . . . In this formative book Bonhoeffer articulates the concept of ‘person’ in ethical relation to the ‘other,’ Christian freedom as ‘being-free-for’ the other, the reciprocal relationship of person and community, vicarious representative action as both a christological and an anthropological-ethical concept, the exercise by individuals of responsibility for human communities, social relations as analogies of...