In communities, often it is difficult to distinguish between doing things in God’s way, for the glory of God, and going things in our way for our greater glory.

Bonhoeffer gives us two concepts to correct against this imposition of the human will in place of God’s will. First of all he emphasises the importance of “responsibility”, which is the translation for the German Verantwortlichkeit. This means so much than merely being answerable or accountable. For Bonhoeffer, verantwortlichkeit was the constant encountering of one ethical agent against another: we achieve maturity as human beings when we realise that the boundaries and limitations of our will are defined against the boundaries and limitations of another’s will. Here we see an echo in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s lecture on ‘The Christian Priest Today’, in which Dr Williams describes the church as being the “‘responsible’ community, answering to what is there before it”¹, called into being by the witness of the Scriptures and ordained ministry. In other words, for Bonhoeffer, and for Christian communities, “responsibility” allows us to find out who we are when we find the limits of our will and our scope for autonomy.

The second idea is that of Stellvertretung. This means, literally, ‘standing in the place of another’, but it has a much deeper resonance than a simple translation like “proxy” or “deputy” can convey. For Bonhoeffer, the ‘vicarious representation’ of Jesus’s actions (his passion and death) are means by which God takes human culpability seriously, and by which sin is punished and overcome. Humanity can only abandon ethical responsibility for ourselves in the face of this loving offer by God:

Through the Christian principle of vicarious representative action the new humanity is made whole and sustained. This principle gives Christian basic-relations their substantive uniqueness… [and] unites the new humanity with Christ, but also links its membership to each other in community.²

Christ’s free, self-giving and other-loving actions are the basis of this new community. Bonhoeffer says that it has (or should have) two modes of being, ‘being-with-each-other’ and ‘being-for-each-other’, each depending on the other. Bonhoeffer traces an expression of the former in the work of Martin Luther, most beautifully in the latter’s Fourteen Consolations:

Therefore, when we feel pain, when we suffer, when we die, let us turn to this, firmly believing and certain that it is not we alone, but Christ and the church who are in pain and are suffering and dying with us… We set out upon the road of suffering and death accompanied by the entire church.³

‘Being-with-each-other’ cannot happen without ‘being-for-each-other’: “Since I as a Christian cannot live without the church, since I owe my life to the church and now belong to it, so my merits are also no longer my own, but belong to the church.”⁴ Bonhoeffer points us to Scriptures to understand this: Christ is the measure and standard of our conduct. In John 13.15 we are told:

For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.”

and in 1 John 3.10:

The children of God and the children of the devil are revealed in this way: all who do not do what is right are not from God, nor are those who do not love their brothers and sisters.

He sets out the Pauline teaching on the unified Body of Christ:

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. [1 Cor 12.12]

and that one unified Body is differentiated and interconnecting:

For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness. [Romans 12.4ff]

and in doing so, we show the power of the love of Christ.

So, throughout Sanctorum Communio, Bonhoeffer has argued that the Church, the holy community called into being by God, is not a human society like all other human societies, a disparate group of people with something (or one thing) in common, who have gathered together to advance general interest in the something / one thing, and who, in the memorable phrase of Rowan Williams, become “a chaotic mass trying to apportion jobs”⁵. Rather, the Church is the place in which human being subject themselves to the ‘ethical other’, God and fellow humans, and in which we find ourselves under the rule of serving and being served, through mutual love:

Community with God is not an individualistic possibility, but is actual and real in the community of God’s creatures with each other; to serve and love God is simultaneously to serve and love God’s creatures, one’s fellow human beings. Community with God is simultaneously the community of co-humanity.⁶

It is all summed up in Bonhoeffer’s memorable phrase: the church is Christus als Gemeinde existerend, Christ existing as community⁷. And from this we can say that “the word of the Church to the world is the word of Christ spoken with the same authority as words spoken during his earthly life.”⁸

1. Williams, ‘The Christian Priest Today’. [↩]
2. Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, pp. 156-157. [↩]
3. Martin Luther, ‘Fourteen Consolations for those who Labour and are Heavy-Laden’ (1520), in Luther’s Works, Vol 42 (Devotional Works 1), edited by Martin O. Dietrich, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), pp. 121-166. Quoted in Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, note 47, p. 180. [↩]
4. Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, p. 183. [↩]
5. Williams, ‘Christian Priest’. [↩]
6. Clifford Green, ‘Human sociality’, p. 120. [↩]
7. See, for example, Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, p. 121. [↩]
8. Stephen Plant,’The Sacrament of Ethical Reality: Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Ethics for Christian Citizens’, Studies in Christian Ethics, 2005 18: p. 78. [↩]