Christ Existing as Community

For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. 1 CORINTHIANS 12:12

Bonhoeffer’s first book was about the church. He wrote it at twenty-one, as a doctoral dissertation, and gave it a Latin title from the Apostles’ Creed: Sanctorum Communio, the communion of saints. It is a demanding book, full of the sociology and philosophy of its day, and most readers will not begin there. But the idea at its centre became one of the fixed points of his life. He summed it up in a phrase that has become famous: the church is Christ existing as community.

Not a club

Most people, if they think about the church at all, think of it as a voluntary association. People who share certain beliefs choose to meet together, as members of a society or a club might, and the church is the sum of those who have joined. Bonhoeffer did not deny that the church has a human, social shape; he spent a good part of his dissertation analysing it. But he insisted that this is not what the church most deeply is. The church is not something we create by gathering. It is something God creates, in Christ, by his Spirit, and into which we are gathered.

Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular. 1 CORINTHIANS 12:27

Paul does not say that the church is like a body, or that it ought to behave as one. He says, ye are the body of Christ. Bonhoeffer took that seriously. In Adam, he argued, humanity is one — one in its fall, its guilt, its isolation. In Christ, a new humanity has been created, and it too is one: one body, with Christ as its head, living by his life. The church is not a collection of saved individuals who happen to share a building. It is the new humanity already present in the world, the place where Christ is really, bodily, among his people.

For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous. ROMANS 5:19

The Christ who is persecuted

There is a striking moment on the road to Damascus. Saul has been persecuting the followers of Jesus. Jesus confronts him — and says, not why persecutest thou my people, but why persecutest thou me?

And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? ACTS 9:4

Christ so identifies himself with his church that to strike them is to strike him. That is the heart of what Bonhoeffer meant. And it has two consequences, one comforting and one sobering. The comfort is that no believer is ever alone; the church is Christ’s own body, and he bears what it bears. The sobering truth is that how we treat our fellow believers is how we treat Christ.

Persons for one another

Bonhoeffer was fascinated by what it means to be a person. We become persons, he argued, only in relation — above all when we are confronted by another who is not ourselves, who stands before us with a claim we cannot simply absorb. The other person is a kind of boundary to me. I cannot make him into an extension of my own wishes. And in the church, that meeting with the other is taken up into God’s purpose. My brother is not only a boundary but a gift, and Christ meets me in him.

From this came a theme that ran through all his later work: members of Christ’s body stand in for one another. As Christ acted in our place, bearing our sin, so his people, in a lesser but real way, act for one another. Bonhoeffer named three ways in which this happens. We work for one another, giving up our own advantage for the good of the other. We pray for one another — and intercession, he said, is one of the most powerful acts of love in the church. And we forgive one another, declaring God’s forgiveness to each other in Christ’s name.

I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men. 1 TIMOTHY 2:1

And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it. 1 CORINTHIANS 12:26

This is not sentiment. It is a description of how the body actually works. When one member suffers, the others suffer too, whether they notice or not. When one prays, the others are carried. When one forgives, the whole body is healed a little.

The real church and the sinful church

Bonhoeffer was no romantic about the church. He knew it was full of sinners, including its ministers, and he wrote his dissertation in a German Protestant church that was already, in many places, lukewarm. How can a body so obviously flawed be Christ existing as community?

His answer was that the church is both at once. It is a real, historical, often disappointing human community, and it is at the same time the body of Christ. We do not find the true church by leaving the actual one in search of a purer version somewhere else. We find it by faith, in the midst of the actual one. The communion of saints is a communion of forgiven sinners. It is holy not because its members are impressive but because Christ is present in it.

Unto the church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints. 1 CORINTHIANS 1:2

Paul wrote those words to the most troubled congregation in the New Testament — quarrelsome, immoral, proud and confused. And he called them saints. Not because they deserved it, but because Christ had claimed them.

What this changes

If the church is Christ existing as community, several things follow.

First, Christian faith is never merely private. There is no such thing as a solitary disciple who needs no one else. The individual believer is joined to others in Christ, whether he feels it or not.

Second, the local congregation — with its awkward members, its dull meetings and its unfinished business — is not to be despised. It is the place where Christ has chosen to be.

That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. JOHN 17:21

A caution

Some readers will hear in this language an echo of Roman Catholic or high-church teaching, which identifies Christ very closely with the institutional church. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran, and he did not mean that the church is Christ in such a way that its decisions are Christ’s decisions or its hierarchy beyond question; the German church of the 1930s gave him ample reason to know otherwise. He meant that Christ is truly present among his people and gives himself to them in word and sacrament and in one another. The church remains under the word, not above it. Held in that way, his teaching can enrich Christians of every tradition.

From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love. EPHESIANS 4:16

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Think of the congregation you belong to. Is it, in your mind, more like a club you have joined or a body into which you have been placed? What difference would the second make?

2. Choose three members of your church whom you do not know well. Pray for each of them by name every day this week.

3. Ask where one member of your church is suffering. Find one practical way to share that suffering.

4. If you have been drifting from the church because of its faults, bring those faults to God in prayer — and then go back.

5. Name one person in your church you need to forgive. Tell God, and if it is right, tell them.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You are the head of the body, and You have made me a member. I confess that I have often treated Your church as a club I could leave, or a service I could shop for.

Forgive me for despising those You have joined to me. Teach me to see You in my brothers and sisters, and to treat them as I would treat You.

Make me one who stands in for others — who works for them, prays for them, and forgives them in Your name.

And make Your church one, as You and the Father are one, that the world may believe that You were sent. Amen.