Abstract
Pastor, theologian, Nazi-resister, assassin, martyr. For the depth and daring displayed in these roles and others, the legacy and popularity of Dietrich Bonhoeffer has only grown in the decades after his death. But the intellectual seedbed of his doctoral dissertation Sanctorum Communio remains surprisingly unearthed. To be fair, there is good reason: it is arguably the most perplexing of Bonhoeffer’s writings. In Christ Existing as Community, Michael Mawson serves Bonhoeffer scholars and enthusiasts alike by rendering this opaque work more clear. What is more, Mawson provides a valuable resource for the community to which Lord Bonhoeffer dedicated his life.
Mawson begins by noting that a shift in scholarly winds has caught in Bonhoeffer’s sails. A renewed interest in the church as a social reality—stirred by theologians like John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, George Lindbeck, and William Cavanaugh—has prompted theologians to consider how to deploy secular disciplines in studying the church’s concrete form without renouncing the church’s divine dimensions. Cue Bonhoeffer’s promising example.
Bonhoeffer completed his doctoral dissertation Sanctorum Communio in 1927, at the age of 21. In his own words, Bonhoeffer aims to make ‘fruitful for theology the fundamental insights . . . from social philosophy and sociology’ (p. 2). Despite these lofty intentions, Bonhoeffer’s first published writing is not immune to critique. Some find his use of social theory wanting. Others accuse him of failing to distinguish the person of Christ from the work of the church. Mawson determines to elucidate Bonhoeffer’s writing while allaying both these criticisms, energized by the conviction that Sanctorum Communio makes a promising contribution for contemporary ecclesiological reflection. His central claim? That Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology is organized by a dialectic of creation, sin, and redemption that explicates the church’s concrete social reality with both theological and sociological integrity.
In chapter one, Mawson situates Bonhoeffer as the intermediate between the thought of two German Protestant contemporaries: Ernst Troeltsch’s overly historicized account of the church, and Karl Barth’s overly abstract and relativized one. Bonhoeffer charts a middle course that takes seriously the church’s humanness in time without dismissing its divine origins. Chapter two details the setup of Bonhoeffer’s social theory, foregrounded by his distinction between social philosophy and sociology. Key here is Bonhoeffer’s favoring of formal over historical approaches to sociology, a choice for which he has received much criticism. Mawson explains that formal social theories—unlike historical ones—allow the theologian to avoid importing secular claims about time. Bonhoeffer opted to use formal social theory in order to incorporate sociological insights with his theological dialectic, structured by salvation history. A key footnote in this chapter explains how Bonhoeffer’s dialectic differs from Barth’s, which is so logical that it risks neglecting Jesus’ historicity.
Chapter three centers on a key concept which looms large throughout Bonhoeffer’s corpus: personhood. Using Bonhoeffer scholar Clifford Green as a foil, Mawson spells out how Bonhoeffer rejects idealistic and atomistic conceptions of personhood, which often take their cues from post-Cartesian philosophers who conceive of the individual subject as capable of their own mediation. For Bonhoeffer, after the fall God encounters and judges individual humans primarily through an ‘other.’ God’s address to humans resounds through sociality itself. The human subject is thus not primarily a reasoning subject, but a relational one.
Chapter four steps back to explore the prelapsarian primal state of creation. Here Bonhoeffer develops his sociological distinctions between community and society. While for a society the harmonization of human wills serves another end, for a community this harmonization is an end in itself. The church is such a community. Chapter five distils Bonhoeffer’s hamartiology. For Bonhoeffer, sin is both universal and personal. Although sin disrupts the sociology established in the primal state, it does not fully dismiss it.
Chapter six engages head-on one of the heftiest theological critiques leveraged against Bonhoeffer: that he fails to satisfactorily distinguish Christ from the church. According to Mawson these critics not only fail to sufficiently understand Bonhoeffer’s engagement with social theory, they also fail to grasp the significance of two key Bonhoefferian concepts: vicarious representative action and—as the title highlights—Christ existing as community.
Bonhoeffer’s theological and sociological conclusions culminate in chapter seven to directly resist common Protestant claims of an ‘invisible’ or ‘ideal’ church. Bonhoeffer, by contrast, contends that ‘The real church is not something that stands above or apart from the actual church in its concrete, empirical form’ (p. 151). For a church that remains in the thick of sin, God’s work in such a church can only be approached with faith. Bonhoeffer insists that ‘It is not the experience of Christian community, but firm and certain faith within the Christian community that holds us together’ (p. 154).
This insistence on faith allows Bonhoeffer to account for the reality of sin in the church in a manner often overlooked by other ecclesiological accounts. At the same time, his appropriation of social theory equips Bonhoeffer to coordinate doctrinal loci such as Christology, pneumatology, and eschatology while grounding them in the concrete, lived experience of the church’s life of faith.
Throughout Christ Existing as Community, Mawson serves as both devoted defendant and able guide to the most enigmatic of Bonhoeffer’s works. Mawson’s handling of Bonhoeffer’s critics is both charitable and deft. His work neither requires the reader’s familiarity with Sanctorum Communio nor fails to satisfyingly engage the reader who is. His analysis throughout is clear, accessible, and organized. Gentle interrogatives interweave the work to lead the reader through Mawson’s careful examination.
Whether for a seasoned Bonhoeffer scholar or an enduring fan, Mawson serves as an invaluable resource for exploring the foundation of Bonhoeffer’s corpus. But perhaps above all, this work will be of great interest for any scholar, leader, or layperson who wishes to serve the church of which it writes. Ultimately, Bonhoeffer’s resolve to confront the church’s sinful reality while armed with a faith that confesses that it is just this church which operates as the unlikely site of God’s redemptive work in the world, forms a well-tempered ecclesiology which has much to offer the church today. Mawson leaves to his readers to determine how Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology might be applied. But he convincingly relays how Bonhoeffer offers equal and urgently needed measures of realism and hope. Indeed, a church which is only beginning to navigate the tectonic shifts accelerated by a global pandemic may require Bonhoeffer’s sociological and theological bearings more than ever.