Christ Existing as Community: Bonhoeffer’s Ecclesiology by Michael Mawson (review)

Bonhoeffer was twenty-one when he defended his dissertation Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church. Karl Barth later called the work a “theological wonder.” Mawson argues that the dissertation has been largely ignored by secondary literature on Bonhoeffer and the few attempts to treat it often mis-read or misinterpret its argument. Mawson’s work seeks to correct misreadings through his careful exposition, by exploring the various academic disciplines Bonhoeffer carefully deployed when writing the dissertation, and by placing it in the context of Bonhoeffer’s theological trajectory.

Dialogue with Ernest Troeltsch’s liberal theology, and Karl Barth’s dialectical theology informed Bonhoeffer’s early theological work. Because the Holy Spirit was active in the church, Bonhoeffer rejected Troeltsch’s claim that one could understand the church simply by looking at its historical circumstances. Unlike Barth, Bonhoeffer believed that the church’s life revealed truth about God, so one could not restrict the search for truth about the church to scripture alone.

Mawson argues that Bonhoeffer’s use of sociological theory is not reductionistic because Bonhoeffer used sociology and sociological theory for descriptive rather than for explanatory purposes (42). Bonhoeffer valued sociological insights, but also believed such theories could not explain God’s action in a social body. In the same way, Bonhoeffer also believed that philosophy was of limited use because it tried to explain human understanding apart from God. This notion of humanity’s fallenness and sin before God makes it impossible to sustain a common social philosophy because humanity exists in sinful and redeemed states. Hence, for Bonhoeffer, humans exist in three states: the primal state (Adam and Eve as depicted in Genesis), the sinful state, and the reconciled state. No social theory can capture these three theological states of individuals.

After these preliminaries about Bonhoeffer’s relationship to social theory, Mawson explores Bonhoeffer’s concept of person-hood, developed as a reaction against philosophical idealism. For Bonhoeffer, to approach another subject through the dictates of human reason automatically turns human beings into objects that are related to individuals in I-it ways. Bonhoeffer argues that we exist in relation to God who offers us an I-thou relation. This is both a critique of philosophical idealism, and a restating of human relationships within a Christian framework. God can address a human being through the words of another human, without simply making that human a conduit of a divine word in a way that would devalue that person’s humanity.

From that notion of personhood, Mawson traces Bonhoeffer’s arguments about primal sociality, which is to say, what Bonhoeffer believes scripture says about the nature of human relationality before the fall. He notes that Bonhoeffer argues that humans were meant to exist as individuals in community, neither alone nor indistinct from the crowd. Bonhoeffer continues to use this theological account of humanity to critique sociological and theological notions that reduce humanity to simple products of a distinct historical time. God’s presence and the work of the Holy Spirit mean that human community cannot be simply explained by historical circumstance. While the length of this review prevents detailed analysis of the arguments, the book’s subsequent chapters explore how the fall influenced human community in disordering ways. Bonhoeffer gives careful attention to the church as a community where relationality is restored in the Holy Spirit.

Mawson also corrects what he sees as a major error in the appropriation of the work, namely, the failure to understand the nature of the church within the context of Bonhoeffer’s larger arguments about personhood in the states of primal, sinful, and reconciled humanity.