Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote Sanctorum Communio as a doctoral dissertation for the theology faculty in Berlin, presenting it in 1927 when he was twenty-one. It is a work of dogmatics rather than sociology, though it borrows sociology’s questions: what is a person, what holds people together, and how can the church be a real community rather than a pious idea? Bonhoeffer’s answer runs through social philosophy, a phenomenology of the I–Thou relation, an account of sin as a rupture of community, and finally a doctrine of the church as “Christ existing as the church.” The book appeared in print only after a delay of several years, its publication hampered by the inflation of the period, and it reached English readers decades later.
“It lives in very fact solely by the Word; but since it lives from it, it has the Spirit; it is the bearer of the Word, its custodian and instrument.”
The wager beneath the whole study is that sociality is not an accident of human life but the very medium in which persons come to be. Bonhoeffer insists that concepts like person, primal state, sin, and revelation are unintelligible apart from the question of how human beings stand to one another. His target is the atomistic picture he finds in formal sociology and in idealist philosophy alike: the picture of persons as self-enclosed centres who afterwards enter relations, as though community were something added to finished individuals.
From Social Philosophy to the Doctrine of the Church
The Genesis of a Sociological Theology
Eberhard Bethge’s foreword frames the whole enterprise: anyone hunting for the roots of Bonhoeffer’s later “religionless interpretation” and worldly Christianity must go back to this first book, presented in 1927, when its author was twenty-one, as a dissertation to the Berlin theological faculty. Bethge sets the young man between two camps that had nothing to say to each other—the sociological school around Troeltsch, in the Berlin atmosphere of the twenties, and dialectical theology, which insisted the church rests on revelation alone and then had no advocate at the university. Bonhoeffer worked in Harnack’s seminar but turned to systematic theology under Seeberg, and tried to fuse the two into a sociological theology of the church. Publication took three and a half years amid German inflation, at a ruinous price; the manuscript was shortened and subsidized, and a friend joked that Barthians would miss the book because of the sociology and sociologists because of the Barth. Bethge adds that Bonhoeffer never cared about making his writings known. The translation, based on the third German edition of 1960, folds the Appendix additions back into the main text, with R. Gregor Smith revising throughout.
Social Philosophy in the Service of Dogmatics
The preface of July 1930 states the program plainly: social philosophy and sociology are put to work for dogmatics, and the subject belongs to dogmatics rather than to the sociology of religion. Terms like person, primal state, sin and revelation become fully intelligible only in relation to sociality. Bonhoeffer thanks Reinhold Seeberg, the ministry, the Notgemeinschaft and the Seeberg foundation.
The opening chapter surveys a discipline in disarray, its chairs issuing wildly different statements of aim. Troeltsch’s distinction between a historical-philosophical-encyclopaedic sociology and an analytic, formal one is adopted, the latter having won the universities by taking “society” as the bearer of inwardly established interactions, with relation as its basic category—Tönnies, Simmel, Vierkandt and von Wiese in Germany, Durkheim and Tarde in France, McDougall in England. The historical-philosophical group, from Comte and Spencer onward, swells into a name for all the humane sciences and renders itself superfluous. Bonhoeffer accepts formal sociology’s concentration on society but rejects its atomist foundation, clearest in von Wiese and Vierkandt: persons treated as firm objects equipped with social capacities, each leaving an untouched personal kernel, a multitude of isolated I-centres. He likewise rejects the empirical method of merely enumerating interactions as so much gathered material. Social philosophy, he argues, is the normative science of sociality’s original and essential nature, prior to any empirical community; sociology studies the structures of empirical communities systematically, not historically, and works phenomenologically rather than morphologically. The sociology of religion is a phenomenological study of religious communities’ structural traits. His own work is theological, inside Christian dogmatics, because the church’s nature can be understood only from within, cum ira et studio, never from a disinterested standpoint. The plan: show that the Christian concept of the person is real only in sociality; then a social-philosophical account of man’s spiritual being; then a sociological account of empirical communities that refutes atomism; only then approach the sanctorum communio.
Four Philosophical Concepts of the Person
Every concept of community hangs on a concept of the person, and person, community and God stand in an essential, indissoluble relation. Four schemes pass in review. Aristotle: man becomes a person by partaking of reason, the collective ranks above the individual, the state precedes individuals by nature, and Aristotle’s God is impersonal. Stoicism: the ethical person through submission to universally valid obligation, a realm of reason in which the I is self-sufficient and like relates to like. Epicureanism, rising from Democritus’s atoms: society is utilitarian, grounded in συνθήκη, every man alien to every other—the Hobbesian war of all against all, all structures purely contractual. Descartes through Kant: the epistemological person, the perceiving I as starting point, the synthesis of transcendental apperception dissolving I-Thou and subject-object into the higher unity of mind. The first and fourth types are kin, both locating the subject’s meaning in entering general forms of reason, both resolving subject and object in intellectual intuition—Fichte’s ethical idealism, Hegel’s logical idealism. Idealism’s immanent spirit is the target: spirit as highest principle of form is formal law, and Kant’s ethical formalism cannot reach the concrete person.
The Barrier and the Birth of the Christian Person
The Christian person is created when a man is moved, faced with responsibility, caught up passionately in moral struggle and confronted by an overwhelming claim; concrete personal being arises from the concrete situation. The encounter still lies wholly in the mind, but mind means something else here: for Christian philosophy the human person comes into being only in relation to the divine person who transcends, opposes and subjugates it. The autonomy of mind in the idealist-individualist sense is unchristian, filling the human mind with a value ascribable only to God. The Christian person arises solely from the absolute distinction between God and man; only from experiencing the barrier does self-knowledge of the moral person grow, and the more clearly the barrier is recognised, the deeper the entry into responsibility. The person is not the bearer of the highest values; value attaches to his being as person, that is, to his creatureliness. Every philosophy of value, even one exalting the person’s value as supreme, as with Scheler, risks stripping the creature of worth, counting him a person only so far as impersonal value shows “in” him—which blocks any grasp of basic personal and social relations.
I and Thou
Once the concrete ethical barrier is acknowledged, the basic social relations come within reach. The barrier is not given in the relation between individual and universal. The person is not simply the individual, and the individual as such is not implicated in the fall and sin, as Schelling held. The metaphysical individual denotes immediacy; the ethical person denotes reflection, ethical and social. From the ethical standpoint man is not immediately mind in himself but only in responsibility to “another,” so the ethical individual is already the basic concept of social relations—the individual cannot be spoken of without the other who set him in the ethical sphere. The objection that “other” has so far meant God is answered from the opening connection between God, community and individual: the individual exists only through the other and is never solitary; for one individual to exist, others must exist.
What, then, is this other? If the individual is the concrete I, the other is the concrete Thou—but what is the philosophical status of Thou? Every Thou seems to presuppose an I immanent within it, without which it could not be distinguished from objects, so that Thou would equal “other I.” That holds only within limits. Beyond the limit set to epistemology lies a further limit set to ethical and social discernment.
The Social Basis of Religion
Bonhoeffer begins by granting that all spiritual life, religion included, rests on at least a mediate social foundation. The I-Thou relation between God and man, or God and community, becomes psychologically conceivable only through social experience; every religious content has its counterpart in the purely social process—dependence and free action, rebellion and conquest, repentance and reconciliation, mistrust and trust, insolence and reverence, distance from God and absorption in him, demanding and obeying, giving and receiving. Everything spiritual presupposes community, so even the original community cannot be derived from the spirit alone. Yet this archetypal connection does not imply a social intention in religion, for the communal intention is directed to God. Religion is the touching of the human will by the divine and the overcoming of the former by the latter, issuing in free action; the religious community makes itself the object of divine action and is itself active communally. The value of the Holy is not exhausted in social terms but is fulfilled also in solitary communion with God—the mystics had their religion too. In the general concept of religion, social community is not given but made possible, in a twofold sense—empirical form and collective basis—which must be strictly distinguished.
Religion is nonetheless a social matter. Whether it begins in primitive stirrings in the individual soul or in the biological social form of family and gens is uncertain, but wherever worship of divine or demonic beings appears, a community carries it on, keeping its private god and expecting protection for its communal life. Cultic life early produces communal practices alongside individual acts: dance, song, prayer, sacred meals, fertility orgies, sacred prostitution—the orgy, “the social form of ecstasy,” can be regarded as the primal form of religious community. Four modes of relation between religion and community emerge: mysticism’s radical rejection of outward and inward community; free religious societies held together by rational, purposive elements; groupings based on physical communities such as family and tribe, where the individual participates only as part of the whole, including the people of Israel; and free communities held together by divine services, without which each individual would wither religiously.
The motives for empirical grouping are various and accidental—utilitarian considerations, the need for communication, the power of a thought or experience with concrete communal intention—while physical and historical connections are regulated and sanctioned by religion. No objective or psychological necessity for the connection can be shown: neither Schleiermacher’s idea of the individual’s need to communicate nor Seeberg’s receptive-active spirituality establishes it, for a community resting only on the need to communicate is a purely individualistic association. A collectivist basis is found only in actual religions; the general concept of religion knows nothing of specifically social intentions. The sociology of religion’s task is not to study the arising of religious communities but to investigate their general structure, dealing with two basic types—the free charismatic community characterized by the sorcerer and the normative uncharismatic type characterized by the priest—both overcome by the third, prophetic type.
Understanding community only from the concrete religious form throws us back on the problem of the church. Communal intentions can be discerned from actual contents of Christian faith in empirical groupings, but this cannot reach the concept of the church; that is possible only when Christian revelation is believed and taken seriously. Once the church’s claim is accepted, proving its general necessity is as superfluous as it is impossible, just as Christological attempts to prove the necessity of redemption after its reality is comprehended. Only from reality can necessity be deduced in dogmatics. When dogmatics ends by presenting the church as necessarily following from Protestant faith, this indicates the inner connection between the reality of the church and the whole reality of revelation. Only if the concept of God is incomprehensible unless joined to the concept of the church can the latter be derived from the former for technical reasons of presentation; it would be good, Bonhoeffer suggests, to begin for once with the doctrine of the church rather than the doctrine of God.
A short outline of New Testament teaching follows. The New Testament has two concepts of the church: that of Jerusalem and that of Paul. The Jewish-Christian view, basis for the Roman Catholic view, held from the beginning a proper hierarchy, a divinely established order, divine church law, a church as institution into which individuals were taken up; a clearly defined group, the apostles—James and the Twelve—possessed lasting divine pre-eminence unattainable by others and were marked out for leadership. Paul overcame this view on the basis of his understanding of the gospel. Ekklesia is the Septuagint translation for ‘edhah, and in Paul also for qahal; the concept originally signified gathering, the congregation of the people.
Vicarious Action and the Spirit’s Work
The Christian idea of vicarious action regarding guilt answers the moral objection that a responsible person must answer to God for his own deeds: man cannot carry his guilt alone, God’s love offers the gift of its removal, and man ought to abandon his standpoint of moral self-responsibility, which counts for nothing in God’s sight. Vicarious atonement is therefore not a moral possibility or standard but a theological concept, valid only as God’s offer in Christ and his church; through it the new mankind is held together, and human community is established where communion with God is real. The Church is established in Christ through three basic sociological relationships: Christ’s death isolates individuals, each bearing his own guilt and conscience; in the light of the resurrection the church of the cross is vindicated and sanctified as one in Christ.
Christ himself “is” the church, not merely its representative, since only what is absent can be represented; he realised the church for eternity. Christ’s central place in the church’s temporal actualisation is given through the Word, impelled by the Spirit; the Spirit operates only through this Word, since an unmediated operation would dissolve the church individualistically. The Word is socially determined in origin and aim, intended for a plurality of hearers. The Spirit is solely the Spirit of the church, so no individuals were moved by the Spirit before there was a community; entry into the church forms the basis for faith, just as faith forms the basis for entry. The church does not arise through people coming together but through the Spirit effective in the community; the individual is possible only as a member of the church, and only in the church is personal life possible.
The Word acts in three ways, analogous to the three basic sociological relationships: as multiplicity of spirits, community of spirit, and spiritual unity. Under multiplicity of spirits, the Holy Spirit approaches each person in his singularity and leads him into loneliness—each believes, prays, and struggles to certainty of election alone; this loneliness is willed by God, not faith’s doing. The predestinarian idea expresses this structural and ethical singularity; from outside it seems to dissolve the church into single predestined persons. The concept of the numerus praedestinatorum can define the range of this individualistic dissolution but has no content; nothing essential about the church can be expressed from an individualistic starting-point.
The Word as Authority and the Church’s Relative Freedom
The church rests on the Word, the absolute authority present within it—though present only in the church’s own word, which is relative and representative, yet remains the norm directing the church. Absolute authority demands absolute obedience, which is absolute freedom; the church’s relative authority corresponds to a relative obedience and a relative freedom. This notion of relative authority and relative subjection strikes the Protestant ear as irksome, even a threat to freedom of conscience, but acknowledging its theological necessity marks the boundary between the gospel of the Reformation and fanaticism. We hear the Word of God in the word of the church, and that qualification is what keeps the church’s authority from hardening into something it is not. The church must speak authoritatively on preserving the purity of the Word—creed, dogmatics, exegesis, the order of public worship—and on its attitude to the world and contemporary events, but only after it has spoken clearly on primary things; where it cannot speak authoritatively it may have recourse to qualified silence. Once the church has spoken, the dogmatist enjoys only relative freedom within what has been said; he owes relative obedience, and the church may demand a sacrificium intellectus and even a sacrificium conscientiae. Only when confronted by the absolute authority of the Word does relative freedom become absolute, and then relative subjection to the church can be shattered if it obstructs absolute subjection to the Word. Otherwise the principle of social equilibrium collapses and the Christian idea of the church is demolished, reverting to the Roman Catholic conception. Councils and synods hold relative authority and should assert it vigorously, stating their standpoint toward Bible, dogma, creed, and doctrine; the church must know its authority is derived and reflected. The moment a member feels constrained to rebel is a matter for God alone, and the only valid motive for turning against church authority would be a perfect obedience rooted in the closest attachment to the church and the Word within it—never irresponsible wilfulness.
Testing the Sociological Types
The church must be fitted into earlier definitions of sociological relationship, not as a genetic question but one of essential nature. Two lines collide in its concept: it is founded by God, yet it is an empirical community like any other. The organized type suggests classing it as a society—atomistic wills, constructed as means to an end, entered formally, constituted by contract—or as an institution or an association. The institution is essentially independent of the people who come to it; the association disbands when its members disperse. Were the church an association it would resemble a music club: confirmation would testify that a person is interested or willing to submit to the rules, loss of interest would permit withdrawal and exemption from church taxes, and the association would disband by agreement of all. This seems illuminating but leaves loose ends. What meaning could accepting infants into an association have—no chess-player would make his child a member of a chess club? Every organized association is private and may refuse admission, whereas church meetings are in principle open to all. And the association’s objective spirit is conventional, practical, propagandist, dispensed with when usefulness ends and traditionless, whereas the church’s forms are symbolic, full of meaning, deliberately maintained even when dying. The association theory is demolished by the doctrine of the church—sin, grace, Christ, the Holy Spirit.
Max Weber and Troeltsch’s notion that the church is an institution, a trusteeship, comes next: essentially not a community of persons but an institution promising an efficacious gift to those fulfilling requirements, like a university where money is the condition and specific co-operation the means of effective reception. Members are enrolled, taxed, guaranteed salvation if they use the means of grace and submit to rules, commands, punishments; children may be subjected so they partake of salvation early. Baptism, confirmation, withdrawal, dues, gatherings, and objective-spiritual forms can all be read institutionally. The critical point is the authority on which the institution rests: if simply divinely based, as in Roman Catholicism, the institutional character is preserved and the definition is sociologically correct for Rome, where spirit, institution, and ministry belong together without necessary reference to the congregation. Catholicism affirms institution and community side by side, as in Augustine. The Protestant “institution,” by contrast, is not set up by God over the congregation but is an act of the congregation itself, since the ministry belongs to it and is conceivable only in connection with it. This disposes of the idea that the Protestant Church is an institution in the true sociological sense: there is no Protestant institution without a congregation, and its gifts are those God gave to a community of persons, confiding the Word of preaching. The association idea is more correct here, seeing the church as composed of persons; it sprang up on Protestant soil, doubtless in connection with study of the Protestant sects. The institutional interpretation of Protestant organizational forms must be dismissed as erroneous. Beginning with the church as a community of persons makes Protestant forms intelligible: only a community, not a society, can carry children, and infant baptism in an association is nonsensical. The association theory sees confirmation and reception as entry; we too see Communion as the first open act of profession, but agreement appears only to one confusing genesis with essence—a mistake at the root of Troeltsch’s entire distinction between church and sect.
The Church, the Proletariat, and the Refusal of the Masses
The church of the future will not be bourgeois, though its form is unknown; Dürer, Rembrandt, and Bach—not Thorwaldsen and Mendelssohn—can make the church’s serious message known. The author rejects the proletarian spirit as such and compulsory socialist doctrine, but wants to bring the church to the proletariat and turn masses into congregations. The church remains a community of individual persons knowing God in judgment and grace; Tillich’s holiness of the masses has nothing to do with Christian theology—only the holiness of the church of God is known, bound to the Word in Christ, personally appropriated. No absolute reveals itself in the formlessness of the masses; the mass is yielded to the deus absconditus, hidden in his pity. Hence extra ecclesiam nulla salus: the masses are pointed to the church, not the reverse. Socialism does not sociologically correspond to Christian community, nor does socialization mean the kingdom of God on earth, contrary to the religious socialists, though an affinity exists. Socialist equality is theologically and sociologically untenable; forced equalization is unchristian. Christian community rests on the innate inequality of persons yet on the priesthood of all believers; free man and servant remain distinct yet one in Christ. It rests on individual freedom; enslavement by the majority is unchristian since no earthly authority intervenes between the individual and God. Community and individual are held in equilibrium, and socialism and individualism genuinely go together. The Christian idea of community cannot be fulfilled in any political or economic organization, yet the church must dare the step into the life of the proletariat.
Faith, Not Experience, Constitutes the Church
On faith in the sanctorum communio, the inquiry has justified its method, elucidated church and religious community, and avoided solemn pronouncements about experiencing the church. The author kept to faith as comprising realities, not experience.
The Person Who Exists Only in Relation
Against the idealist tradition, Bonhoeffer argues that the human person is not constituted by participation in a universal reason. Aristotle makes the person through partaking of reason; Stoicism through submission to a universal obligation; Epicureanism through contract among mutually alien atoms; Descartes and Kant through the perceiving I that resolves the other into the unity of mind. In each case the individual is treated as a firm object with social capacities, an untouched kernel behind the relations. Bonhoeffer’s alternative is that the Christian person is created only in relation to the divine person who transcends and opposes him. The self-knowledge of the moral person arises from the experience of a barrier, a claim that cannot be absorbed into the self; the more sharply that barrier is recognised, the deeper the person enters into responsibility.
This is why the I–Thou relation carries so much weight in the book. The Thou is not simply another instance of the I, not an object immanent in my consciousness. It confronts me as a claim, a will that meets my will, and it can never be experienced by me as an I in the same sense that I am one. Bonhoeffer calls this a moral transcendence rather than an epistemological one: it is known only by the person who decides, never demonstrated to a spectator. The consequence is that all his talk of the Christian person is addressed to readers who are themselves involved in responsibility, not to onlookers.
Sin as the Fracture of Community
Sin, in this scheme, is never a private transaction between an individual soul and God. Bonhoeffer surveys the doctrine of original sin from Augustine through Luther, Schleiermacher, and Ritschl, and he is critical of biological accounts that make guilt a matter of inheritance. His own proposal is that the individual’s deed against God is at the same time the deed of the race: each of us is the first sinner, and every sin implicates the whole. This does not lighten anyone’s burden; it doubles it. The experience of common sinfulness, as in Isaiah’s cry of unclean lips, holds personal guilt and the people’s guilt together, yet the experience does not create sociality, which is already there beforehand. The separateness of persons is never dissolved, and the I–Thou relation can be overcome only in the concept of the church.
The church, then, is where the broken community is restored. Bonhoeffer develops this through vicarious action: Christ’s death isolates each person with his own conscience, and the resurrection vindicates the church of the cross as one in Christ. The Holy Spirit works only through the Word, and the Word is socially determined in origin and aim, meant for a plurality of hearers. Intercession, forgiveness, and the mutual bearing of guilt are the concrete forms this takes. One man can forgive another’s sins only because the church as a whole bears them; the church can bear more guilt than all its members together, which is why Bonhoeffer can say that being in Christ and being in the church are one and the same.
Unity That Does Not Abolish Difference
The unity of the church, as Bonhoeffer describes it, is not agreement in mood, opinion, or temperament. It is a primal synthesis willed by God, already posited rather than to be constructed, and it can shine more brightly in conflict than in concord. Where Jew and Greek clashed, the divine will established one new man in place of the two. The New Testament passages he cites speak of one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, not of one theology or one rite. Idealist philosophy failed here because its concept of spirit was supra-personal and identical in everyone, which destroys the concrete person and makes concrete community impossible. The church’s unity rests instead on the unity of the divine spirit, which unites multiplicity into one collective person without abolishing individual persons.
This is also why Bonhoeffer resists treating the church as a mere association or a mere institution. The association model, on which the church is a voluntary society like a music club, cannot account for infant baptism or for the openness of the church’s gatherings to all. The institution model, which he associates with Roman Catholicism and with Weber and Troeltsch, makes the church a trusteeship dispensing gifts to those who meet conditions, independent of the congregation. For Protestantism, the ministry belongs to the congregation and is conceivable only in connection with it; there is no Protestant institution without a congregation.
The Church Believed Rather Than Experienced
The book closes on a note of deliberate sobriety. Bonhoeffer refuses the language of “experiencing the church” that was current in the Youth Movement of his day. We live by faith and not by sight; no one knows whether the neighbour is elect or impenitent, and only the works, not the person, are perceptible. The church is impalpable and must be believed. What faith grasps is not an invisible ideal but the actual empirical church, where Word and sacraments are administered, believed to be God’s community and the Body of Christ. It is una, sancta, catholica, present wherever the Word is preached, and it remains impure so long as history lasts.
Bonhoeffer’s later readers, drawn to him by the prison letters and the idea of a religionless Christianity, are often surprised to find how thoroughly ecclesial his first book is. Eberhard Bethge’s foreword makes the case that the early writings are where the sources of that later thought lie. What the dissertation shows is a young theologian refusing both the individualism of idealist philosophy and the collectivism that would absorb persons into a larger whole. The church he describes is a community of wills held in equilibrium, each person sustained by the others’ vicarious love, and the whole resting on the Word. It is a demanding and unsentimental vision, and it sets the terms for nearly everything Bonhoeffer wrote afterwards.
