The Church as Eccentric Community

A Sermon Preached on the
Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, June 24th 2007
Church of the Epiphany, Sudbury, ON

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts and minds be pleasing unto You, O Lord our Saviour and Redeemer. Amen.

John the Baptist is certainly in the running for one of the strangest characters from scripture. True to the form of Old Testament prophets, John was, to say the least, an odd and peculiar person. He looked, and probably smelled, more like someone living on the street than any of us here today. In light of the reading from Luke’s Gospel this morning, where we are told that the one who will come to prepare the way of the Lord is the Prophet of the Most High, we are probably prone to expect something other than what we got in John the Baptist—someone important, well-connected, someone socially stable. But that’s not the way God works…He gave us John the Baptist—a man with animal skin for clothes, and with honey and locusts stuck in his beard; a smelly and grubby itinerant preacher from somewhere out in the wilderness. In a word, he gave us an “eccentric” witness.

Truth be told, we’d probably all rather not have him sitting next to us in church on Sunday morning. I’m sure that we can draw up all sorts of eccentric characters from the pool of our collective memories and experiences—someone who was always a little off-center—whether it’s a co-worker who doesn’t quite fit in, or someone from your childhood who was the class oddball, that weird kid that everybody picked on…or maybe you fell like you are the one of those people always sitting on the outside looking in.

What I would like us to consider this morning is that the church is called to be eccentric, much like John the Baptist was. Just so we’re clear here, I’m not suggesting that we are all called to wear ratty clothes and eat weird things and generally not look after ourselves. But what I do want to do is to play around with this word “eccentric”. What does this prophet have to teach us, gathered here this morning, about the church as an eccentric way of life?

First of all, the word eccentric carries with it the sense of being off center—to be out of center. In this way functions as the opposite of ego-centric: it means living ‘outside’ of ourselves in contrast to living a self-centered life. Karl Barth, the theological giant of the twentieth century, had a picture hung above his desk for his entire life. The picture, copied for you on the front of this week’s bulletin, was Matthias Grünewald’s crucifixion scene from his Isenheim altarpiece painted in the early 16th century. I want you to look at it and take it in. Barth was fond of this picture, not for the centrality of the crucifixion scene per se, but rather for Grünewald’s representation of John the Baptist. In this figure of the prophet, with the Holy Scriptures in one hand and the other, with finger outstretched toward the figure of the crucified, we have, Barth claimed, the very vision, the very identity of the church, of what it means to be a witnessing community.

It is the finger of the Baptist draws our attention. Elongated and outstretched, he doesn’t seek to attract attention to himself, but wants our gaze to be cast upon the crucified Lord. John is not interested in himself but in the One who has come to put all things right. John’s disregard for himself was not a product of a self-imposed humility. Rather, John had the task of preparing the way of the Lord and His salvation—it was a job that required taking notice of Jesus and not of himself.

As members of God’s church we are called to the same ministry as John the Baptist. We are called to be witnesses to Christ in our world—not as self-interested people but as selfless ones. Our job is, like John’s, to point to Christ so that the world may know that salvation has come and this requires, to put it rather bluntly, that our egos are checked at the door. The church is not a community focused in on itself, but it is called to be a community centered on others. The church only exists as her true self when she exists for others.

More often than not, the church’s actual posture is one of pointing to ourselves, seeking our own attention, rather than the posture of the Baptist who points away from himself. Our communal life can all too easily slip into self-centeredness when we get caught up with ourselves, with our own individual desires, our own plans, when I want it my way. When we live such a self-centered life, individually and as a community, we miss the boat. We exist for others, plain and simple. When we think that being the church is all about us, that all of this is here for us, we miss our call to be an eccentric, other-centered community. When we live with our egos at the center, with our fingers pointed to ourselves, we blur and confuse our witness. John knew this as we read this morning from the book of Acts, “What do you suppose that I am? I am not he. No, but one is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of the sandals on his feet.” John knew that to be self-centered meant obscuring his witness to Christ. In fact, in the sometimes overwhelming temptation to be overly concerned with ourselves, we block out the image of the crucified, which is another way of saying that we sin.

And this brings me to the second sense in which the church is called to be eccentric, and here I mean it in a more corporate and social sense: Christ calls the church to live, not as an important social club—as a place where membership gets you some sort of credibility amongst your peers, or where you come to feel important or to maintain some sort of status. No, in a very real way, Christ calls us to exist like those eccentric and strange figures in our lives, at the fringes of society, at the outside of the social margin where God’s peace and tender mercy are all but invisible. We live there because that’s where Jesus lives caring for the poor and the hungry, suffering with the sick and the rejected.

We may think that we’re cultured, and well-to-do and important, but we belong to a body where all are welcomed, especially those people who make us uncomfortable, those people who make us shift a little in our sometimes all too comfortable pews. The church is the place where those who don’t ‘fit-in’ in the world are welcomed and accepted. It is the place where we exist as God’s living alternative to a world gone awry—and that’s often an uncomfortable and unpopular place to be.

It’s not easy to live as God’s alternative in a world that worships the idols of capital, the health of the market and the bottom line; in a world that treats people like statistics and holds the poorest of nations in debt; in a world that teaches us to value and protect our own self-interest over that of others, that it’s okay to exploit others in the name of self-preservation. It’s no accident that the New Testament word for witness is martyr—the very giving up of the self—something John the Baptist knew all too well. No, it’s not easy to live as a community that is supposed to embody God’s way of life. It’s not easy to cry in the wilderness, pointing to the crucified, “Here is your God!” The light of the dawn that breaks over us, the light that Zechariah prophesied about in Luke’s gospel is the light of God’s salvation that has come to shine on us and our world. It is our job to selflessly share this light with the world, a world that sits in darkness and in the shadow of death.

So being witnesses to Christ doesn’t mean being prim and proper, important or self-sufficient, least of all does it mean ‘upwardly mobile’ or ‘normal’ or ‘socially functional’. John the Baptist is our great example of what it means to exist as a witness, not because he had it all together (he most certainly did not), but because he was transparent to Christ. True eccentricity, true selfless living in the interest of others in the name of Jesus Christ is what it means to be God’s witnesses. It’s not easy, but that’s what we’re supposed to be all about.

Not because ‘we’ have it all together…we don’t and that’s the point exactly. Living eccentrically means that we’re not just a group of isolated self-interested individuals looking out for number one who occasionally bump into each other at church, but it means living as a community that exists for each other, both inside and outside of the walls of the church. It means life together for others. It means living for others with each other and when we do that we live as transparent witnesses to Christ. We live off-centered, outside of ourselves when we open our doors to all people and invite them to participate in our peculiar and eccentric way of life where self-centeredness crumbles under the weight of God’s redeeming grace, where conflict and bitterness are transformed into living for the sake of others, where the strangeness of God’s love overwhelms the normalcy of our lives, where our inward pointing fingers are turned from ourselves to the life giving cross of Jesus Christ.


for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
to give knowledge of salvation to his people
by the forgiveness of their sins.
By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace. Amen.

W.H. Auden's Horae Canonicae

For those of you who enjoy the poetry of W.H. Auden, BBC Radio 3 had a reading of his marvelous lenten poem, Horae Canonicae (The Canonical Hours) read by Tom Durham with introductions by Archbishop Rowan Williams. You can listen here.

You can get the text of the poem here.

Maximus the Confessor

I'm currently reading the collection of Maximus the Confessor's writings, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ. As this is my first foray into Maximus, I'm wondering if any of you who may happen upon this post know of any top notch secondary sources that will help to place Maximus into his theological/historical/political environment.

As for secondary resources, I'm reading Hans Urs von Balthasar's The Cosmic Liturgy: the Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, Andrew Louth's Maximus the Confessor, and Meyendorff's Christ in Eastern Christian Thought (esp. chp. 7). I also know of Thunberg's work and will eventually look at it. I'm also open to French language sources. Any help you could give me would be greatly appreciated. As well, if any of you know any good patristic theology blogs, pass them along. Thanks.

Toward a Post-Liberal Theology?: The Architecture of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christology and Ecclesiology

Part IV: The Perils of Christus als Gemeinde existierend

Bonhoeffer’s contribution offers much in response to theological liberalism. Yet we are left with some nagging suspicions that, left on its own, the architecture of Bonhoeffer’s Christology and ecclesiology cannot fully afford what it wishes to purchase—a ticket to outbid theological liberalism.

We return to some of his early programmatic statements: "the church is the presence of Christ in the same way that Christ is the presence of God" (SC, 138, emphasis mine). He goes on to qualify this: "one must not think of a second incarnation of Christ…but rather of a form of revelation that may be called 'Christ existing as church-community'" (SC, 138, emphasis mine). The difficulty within Bonhoeffer’s description is that we are inevitably led—even against his best efforts to not think of the church as a second incarnation—to think of the church as, at the very least, an extension of the incarnation. Without parsing the discontinuity between the identity and presence of Jesus Christ as say Barth or more precisely as Hans Frei has done, we are left with a number of difficulties (both potential and actual). Here the danger is that the identity of Jesus is not only dislodged from its own unique narratively rendered description (which is a weighty, but different concern) but is so fused with his presence that his identity (his act and being) is too easily confused with a phenonmenologically rendered description—the visible and sociologically describable gemeinde, grounded earlier, within Sanctorum Communio, in a sociologically and philosophically describable “personhood” and “community”.

Take the following, from Discipleship, for example:

In his grace, [Jesus] has left something unfinished in his suffering, which his church-community is to complete in this last period before his second coming. This suffering will benefit the body of Christ, the church. Whether this suffering of Christians also has the power to atone for sin (1 Peter 4:1) remains an open question. What is clear, however, is that those suffering in the power of the body of Christ suffer in a vicariously representative action ‘for’ the church-community, ‘for’ the body of Christ (Discipleship, 222).

The issue here is not about the activity requisite of the church, for it is indeed called to follow Christ precisely in his suffering and so, it too suffers. The issue at hand is that Bonhoeffer missteps when he claims that we complete the work of Christ to the point of leaving the question of the vicarious and atoning suffering of the community for sin an open one—which is a clear outcome of not attentively distinguishing the identity of Christ from that of the church (here we have a deep division between Barth and Bonhoeffer). To speak of the community as “completing” the work of Christ introduces within that community’s activity a certain active promeity, which it shares with the promeity of Christ. We are close—and let me be clear here that this is against Bonhoeffer’s best intentions—to the ancient heresy of Pelagianism wherein human activity bears soteriological consequence. If Bonhoeffer wants a genuine human activity and at the same time to avoid Pelagianism, as I believe him to, he needs to delineate in what way human activity participates in divine activity without usurping that activity and domesticating it to a flat phenomenological account of divine activity. Furthermore, without fully considering the full and complete work of Christ, the work of Christ, as pro me activity is in danger of being evacuated of its full promeity. That is, the relation between the activity of Christ and the activity of the church is, on this score, a shared activity—and what’s more—a shared salvific activity, for the community becomes the Stellvertretung. The community thus does not correspond to the vicarious activity of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit but rather, in some sense, constitutes that activity in its own activity (which is but a form of ecclesiastical triumphalism).

This line of critique could be extended but what is at the root of the problem is an underdeveloped account of divine activity vis-à-vis the church, and such underdevelopment is but symptomatic of Bonhoeffer’s neglect of the doctrine of God proper—there is in fact no fully operative doctrine of God (doctrine of the Trinity) in Bonhoeffer’s corpus (for instance, a developed pneumatology would go a long way in avoiding the above problems).

To expand upon this critique, let us remember that “relationality” is derived, not from God’s relationality in se, but in an economy characterized and controlled by a phenomenologically achieved definition (an inheritance of 19th century liberal theology). That is, the problem that presents the difficulty with regards to Bonhoeffer’s Christology and ecclesiology is a neglect of the “relationality” of the Trinitarian economy. Barth offers us a keen assessment of the difficulty:

Theological thought is distinguished from philosophical thought by the fact that it does not regard the incarnation of the Word as the truth of a state, e.g., the truth of the unity of subject and object, of the man-relatedness of God or the God-relatedness of man, which is then an underlying principle of dogmatics that has to be exegeted…but regards it rather as the truth of a divine act. But if it is understood as an act, then the terminus a quo (‘God in Himself’) and the terminus as quem (‘man in himself’) must be differentiated and then interelated in the description of the act as such. What would ‘God for us’ mean if it were not said against the background of ‘God in Himself’?” (CD I/1, 170 emphasis mine).

Barth’s concern is that in order to properly take account of the divine economic activity ad extra, and so to appropriately gauge the human-divine relationship, proper attention must be paid to the activity of God ad intra. What indeed would it mean to say “God for us” without saying “God in himself”? This is essentially what Bonhoeffer does—he says “God for us” without taking account of “God in Himself”. The danger is that “relationality” and all of its correlates (“community”, “person”, “the other”) are read phenomenologically.

So we come full circle in that the methodology that ruled Sanctorum Communio, an arguably classic liberal methodology, was never really overcome even in spite of a rich and strenuously orthodox christological development. Not only that but this methodological move was never deemed necessary to overcome in the first place! That methodology, as we discussed earlier but which only now can be fully appreciated, asserted that a Christian concept of community (ecclesiology) is funded either via a concept of God or via a concept of person (which always has a concept of God in view), and that both are equally valid. This is precisely the classic liberal dichotomy within theological method precipitated by the turn to the subject in later nineteenth century theological discourse! This is specifically what funds his distressing paucity with regards to reflection upon the doctrine of the Trinity (let us remember what weight the doctrine of the Trinity held in Schleiermacher’s theology!). Not only that, but Bonhoeffer’s ontology from Act and Being is inadequate to the degree that it offers him little help in parsing the difficulty of taking account of divine and human activity (that is, the act and being of Christ and church) with regards to the identity of Christ and his church. Is Christ exhaustively identified with the community? Does the community partake in some sort of hypostatic union with Christ such that it has both a human and divine dimension? As we tentatively answered above, Christ and church are identified but not to the point that Christ is identified with the church without remainder—this is Bonhoeffer’s intention. Yet there is a tension here that is not adequately resolved and so the question of the fusion of identities and the consequences therein need to remain open as an extension or possibility inherent within Bonhoeffer’s theological contribution.

While Bonhoeffer gains mileage on the tradition of theological liberalism in his effort to outbid that tradition, he remains, in certain important respects imbedded within that tradition. Without a full-blown doctrine of God funding his ecclesiological and christological moves, especially an account of the activity of the Holy Spirit in relation to ecclesiological concerns, Bonhoeffer’s contribution remains an inadequate attempt to mount a successful response to the nineteenth century’s shortfalls. This is not to discount the ground that Bonhoeffer makes up in his Christology lectures—which is significant. In this sense Bonhoeffer is a legitimate forerunner of postliberal theology as many of his concerns in his Christology lectures parallel, to a great degree, the concerns of someone like Hans Frei. Yet he remains a precursor of postliberal theology who could not really shed his liberal skin completely (and this may indeed be why he is largely overlooked in contemporary postliberal theology). To do so, his contribution needs to be properly supplemented with a robust doctrine of God wherein he could properly take account of the human activity of the church without falling into the above problematique.

Toward a Post-Liberal Theology?: The Architecture of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christology and Ecclesiology

Part III: The Christology Lectures of 1933

Bonhoeffer, now a professor at Berlin, delivered these lectures in the summer semester of 1933. The text we have is not Bonhoeffer's own but a carefully reconstructed manuscript from the notes of the students present, edited and compiled by Bonhoeffer's closest friend, literary executor, and biographer Eberhard Bethge. Moreover, the lectures themselves are not complete as a third section, on "the eternal Christ", was planned but apparently never completed as no extant notes have been found.

Bonhoeffer begins the lectures in what at first glance seems to be an obscurely and piously enthusiastic manner:

Teaching about Christ begins in silence…. That has nothing to do with the silence of the mystics, who in their dumbness chatter away secretly in their soul by themselves. The silence of the Church is silence before the Word. In so far as the Church proclaims the Word, it falls down silently in truth before the inexpressible…. To speak of Christ means to keep silent; to keep silent about Christ means to speak. When the Church speaks rightly out of a proper silence, then Christ is proclaimed (CC, 27).

What at first seems to be a piece of subtle dialectical piece of rhetoric in fact reaches to the heart of the matter at the outset of the lectures. Speaking of Christ "rightly"—properly identifying Jesus—is done neither by the drumming up of sophisticated dogmatic formulae separated from the church’s worshipping posture ‘under’ the Word, nor by the search for some "inner Christ" (the Christ of faith) or an historical Jesus. Bonhoeffer knew all too well the cul-de-sac of that well-traveled road. The intellectual posture of 'silence' essential for engaging Christology (and to the discipline of theology in general) employed by Bonhoeffer is not a novel or erratic turn of phrase. Rather, what the diction of silence is meant to convey is that the only 'appropriate' approach to and description of the discipline of Christology is a dogmatic one and more precisely a dogmatic one employed in a doxological mode. Pangritz notes that for Bonhoeffer, "the meaning of 'dogma' is not so much 'doctrine', but rather praise of the 'doxa', the glory of the Lord."

Two significant material considerations fund this methodological move on Bonhoeffer's part and represent a crucial 'moment' in his Christology—a critical moment that clarifies just how extensive his response to and undercutting of theological liberalism is. First Bonhoeffer claims that the discipline of Christology is "the center of its own space"; it "remains unique. It has no proof by which it can demonstrate transcendence of its subject. Its statement that this transcendence, namely the Logos, is a human person, is presupposition and not subject to proof" (CC, 28). Second, for Bonhoeffer, theology and in particular, Christology, is concerned not with impulsive human utterance about Jesus, but with a Divine Counter-Logos: "When the Counter-Logos appears in history, no longer as an idea, but as a 'Word' become flesh, there is no longer any possibility of assimilating him into the existing order of the human logos" (CC, 30).

In the first instance, Bonhoeffer's claim that Christology “occupies its own space” is short form for the axiomatic theological claim that Jesus Christ cannot be classified or assigned a “place” within an accepted order of reality and actuality logical inquiry and not vice versa (Webster, Word & Church, 116). In the words of John Webster, Jesus is “that in terms of which all other reality is to be mapped” (116). The second claim, that Jesus is the “Counter-Logos”, is closely related to the first and is in essence an extension of the first point. In the incarnation Jesus comes as the Word who both disrupts and interrupts all speech and thought. This, as Webster notes, shapes christological inquiry profoundly because it repudiates “any idea that theological talk about Jesus is pure initiative” (116). Such talk is, in a most profound sense for Bonhoeffer, what the church must obediently engage in because in the first instance, it has been spoken to, and in a very real sense, silenced by the interruption of the Counter-Word in which all true words (christological reflection included) find their genesis and impetus—“when the church speaks rightly out of a proper silence, then Christ is proclaimed” (CC, 27).

Bonhoeffer here, at the outset of the lectures, offers his prolegomenal response to theological liberalism. In making the two claims noted above, Bonhoeffer is attempting to cut the feet out from under the edifice of theological liberalism and specifically of liberal thinking about Jesus which ultimately ends up in either of two equally distressing thought patterns about Jesus—the Jesus of history or the Christ of faith. Both are equally problematic because both uniformly disregard and violate the two above-mentioned rules of christological inquiry. In Bonhoeffer’s words, both errors have misconstrued the ‘who’ question by imposing upon the subject matter with questions of ‘how’, the question of demonstrability.

In this sense, all classical and formal epistemological questions are subsumed within and under the doctrine of revelation, the event of God’s salvific activity (his pro-me activity) in Jesus Christ. In this way, Bonhoeffer does not operate with an epistemology per-se but takes God’s activity as the basic criteria, especially within Christology. This is why, for Bonhoeffer, two questions can never enter christological discussion: 1) the question of whether or not the church is justified in its claims about Jesus—“this question has no basis, because the human logos can have no authority to doubt the truth of the other Logos. The testimony of Jesus to himself stands by itself, self-authenticating”; and 2) the ‘how’ question of how the truth of its christological assertion is possible—“in that way the human logos would be claiming to be the beginning and the father of Jesus Christ” (CC, 32). Both questions are formally apologetic ones and for that reason are suspect from the start. Yet they are also, at the material level, driven by the desire to speak, to engage in logos, and not keep silent before the Counter-Logos. In other words both questions are engagements in sinful disobedience. The only permissible question on Bonhoeffer’s account, is the question of ‘Who?’, to which he devotes the rest of the lectures.

The formal negotiation between legitimate and illegitimate questioning is not a trivial affair but of fundamental dogmatic importance. This is so simply because how the church speaks of Jesus, how it goes about answering the question of identity belies what it thinks about the one with whose identity it is concerned. In other words, method is informed and formed by the content, by the subject matter and not vice versa.

In filling out an answer to the question of ‘who’ it is that the church speaks of when it names Jesus Christ, Bonhoeffer offers us three interrelated claims: Christ is Word, Christ is Sacrament, and Christ is Church. In all of these Jesus Christ is ultimately the absolute and categorical expression of God’s freedom, which as noted above, is not a freedom from but a freedom for—a freedom constituted in Christ’s nature as the God-Man:

Christ is Christ, not just for himself, but in relation to me. His being Christ is his being for me, pro me. This being pro-me is not to be understood as an effect emanating from him, nor as an accident; but it is to be understood as the essence, the being of the person himself. The core of the person himself is pro-me (CC, 47).

Christ cannot be thought of other than in his being as pro-me. It is only by acknowledging Christ’s promeity that Christology can properly proceed to discuss him as “contemporaneous” and contemporaneously present only existing as Word, Sacrament, and Church.

Our interest here is obvious. Christ is present because, at core, he is only who he is in relation to me, there is no other Jesus. That is, his act informs his being and equally his being his act. While Bonhoeffer does not put it in these terms, he is essentially saying that Christ’s nature is exhausted (in the sense of fully defined) in relation to me or more specifically in relation to his church as such also to all of created reality, myself included. This is not by ontological necessity but by divine freedom—the freedom to be so defined. It is this Jesus who is freely present as Word, Sacrament and Church. While the first two forms of his existence are of vital importance to Bonhoeffer’s Christology, our interests, specifically the relation of Christ to Church, are animated by Bonhoeffer’s familiar assertions concerning the third form of his existence—as gemeinde—which receive renewed attention here. Bonhoeffer reiterates that “Christ is not only the head of the Church, but also the Church itself” but here adds the qualifier that “Christ is the Church by virtue of his pro me being”. He also further qualifies his ruling axiom, Christus als Gemeinde existierend, by offering this commentary: “Between his ascension and his coming again the Church is his form and indeed his only form. That he is in heaven at the right hand of God does not contradict this; on the contrary, this is what makes possible his presence in and as the Church” (CC, 58, emphasis mine).

George Herbert's Christmas

After all pleasures as I rid one day,
My horse and I, both tired, body and mind,
With full cry of affections, quite astray;
I took up the next inn I could find.

There when I came, whom found I but my dear,
My dearest Lord, expecting till the grief
Of pleasures brought me to Him, ready there
To be all passengers' most sweet relief?

Oh Thou, whose glorious, yet contracted light,
Wrapt in night's mantle, stole into a manger;
Since my dark soul and brutish is Thy right,
To man of all beasts be not Thou as a stranger:

Furnish and deck my soul, that Thou mayst have
A better lodging, than a rack, or grave.

The shepherds sing; and shall I silent be?
My God, no hymn for Thee?
My soul's a shepherd too; a flock it feeds
Of thoughts, and words, and deeds.
The pasture is Thy word: the streams, Thy grace
Enriching all the place.
Shepherd and flock shall sing, and all my powers
Outsing the daylight hours.
Then will we chide the sun for letting night
Take up his place and right:
We sing one common Lord; wherefore he should
Himself the candle hold.
I will go searching, till I find a sun
Shall stay, till we have done;
A willing shiner, that shall shine as gladly,
As frost-nipped suns look sadly.
Then will we sing, and shine all our own day,
And one another pay:
His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine,
Till ev'n His beams sing, and my music shine.

Toward a Post-Liberal Theology?: The Architecture of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christology and Ecclesiology

Part II: Christ and Church: Background and Development 1927-33

The Christology lectures of 1933 are but a small, incomplete, but rich snapshot of Bonhoeffer's robust and vibrant Christology that developed from his time under the tutelage of Harnack, Holl and Seeberg (developed in stark contrast, but with much reverence to the Christology of Harnack) on into the rest of his academic and ecclesial career. While Harnack certainly wielded much inspiration on the young Bonhoeffer at Berlin, the major influence upon his thought at this early juncture was the shift toward a "high" christological concentration initiated largely by the work of Karl Barth, whom Bonhoeffer first met in 1931 and subsequently lamented not meeting earlier. It was here, within the milieu of the project of nineteenth century theological liberalism's "turn to the subject"—a situation permanently interrupted by the second edition of Barth's Rommerbrief—that Bonhoeffer, no less than Barth before him, began to marshal his own unique riposte to the behemoth before him.

The Christology and ecclesiology of Bonhoeffer's early academic work is situated within a complex and intricate web of philosophical, historical, theological and sociological themes that makes it difficult to distill hisinitial thought, so we can hardly do it justice here. In Sanctorum Communio, Bonhoeffer is cycling many dogmatic loci through a re-formed and re-worked understanding of person, community and sociality: "'Person', 'primal state', 'sin', and 'revelation' can be fully comprehended only in reference to sociality." His stated purpose in Sanctorum Communio then, is to "understand the structure of the given reality of a church of Christ, as revealed in Christ, from the perspective of social philosophy and sociology." Claiming that all systematic loci of dogmatic theology are essentially and obdurately social and relational at their core—a claim that characterizes and spans his entire theological and ecclesial contribution—Bonhoeffer adds a new and unique voice to the chorus of early 20th century European theology. His first dissertation then can be read as a phenomenological/theological investigation into the nature and identity of the church and its Lord. Yet although Bonhoeffer develops a very profound and elaborate concept of person, community and relationality (developed in discussion not only with German Idealism but also in the context of the emerging existential/neo-orthodox theologies of Buber, Brunner, Gogarten, et all), our purpose in this survey is to examine his early Christology and ecclesiology. We may ask then, in considering the social and relational structure of all dogmatic loci, 'Who is Jesus Christ, and who and what is his church?'

Bonhoeffer answers with the rich but difficult, and as we will argue below, the ultimately problematic christological paraphrase of the Pauline "Body of Christ": "Christus als Gemeinde existierend"—"Christ existing as church-community". Christ, as the revelation of God, is the new collective humanity in response to the old Adamic collective of broken humanity and is thus the reconciliation of humanity to its primal reality (creation). Christ, as the Stellvertretung, ('vicarious representative action') is initiator of this new sociality and is (in the sense of being, constituting and circumscribing) its reality: "Adam's action is extremely egocentric…in Christ, however, humanity has been brought once and for all—this is essential to real vicarious representative action—into communion with God." As Stellvertretung, Christ exists eccentrically—that is, pro nobis. The anthropological counterpart of this reality, the church, is the concrete manifestation or bearer of this new reality.

It is an Irenaean-type of recapitulation or reversal but it goes beyond Irenaeus in its material claims. Bonhoeffer claims, according to Green, that "the person of Christ, exists in a social form: the church." Green claims that Bonhoeffer is aware of the difficulties with parsing this phrase in such a way as to allow the church to domesticate and possess its Lord: "the presence of Christ is not the essence of the church at human disposal; Christ is not a possessed attribute of his human community, frozen into a static being." Bonhoeffer nevertheless claims that, "the church is the presence of Christ in the same way that Christ is the presence of God." He goes on to qualify this: "one must not think of a second incarnation of Christ…but rather of a form of revelation that may be called 'Christ existing as church-community'".

Needless to say, this is a notoriously slippery claim and one that requires much doctrinal qualification—qualifications that are made explicit within his Christology lectures of 1933 (which we will investigate and consider below). In short form Bonhoeffer is claiming that Christ is the church but the church is not Christ insofar as the church is at once both the peccatorum communio and the sanctorum communio and is thus unable to claim of itself the status of 'revelatory'. That is, Christ and church are identified but not to the point that Christ is identified with the church without remainder. While it is not always explicit within Bonhoeffer's early work (owing, in some measure, to the nature of these writings as largely sociological and anthropological), Christ is the Lord of the community and as its Lord He is the One who calls that community into being (here Bonhoeffer has a pneumatology at work, however truncated, which we cannot herein entertain). Only by His own activity is Christ identified with the collective community. Christ exists as Gemeinde because he freely decides to do so. The relationship is then a dynamic one and not one that can be characterized as stagnant or fixed. The free Lord freely identifies Himself with the community in the concrete acts of Word and sacrament.

In his second dissertation, Act and Being, Bonhoeffer continues to develop a relational ontology but shifts his focus to mainly epistemological and anthropological concerns. The christological and ecclesiological themes present within Sanctorum Communio undergo no major formal changes but do gain material clarity within Bonhoeffer's main concern with expounding a theological ontology. Within this ontology, it is the doctrine of revelation that provides Bonhoeffer with the opportunity to capitalize and expand upon the themes within Sanctorum Communio. Here the theme of divine freedom leads into Bonhoeffer's social ontology and ecclesiology. God in Christ is not free from humanity but free for humanity. The freedom of God, His very being, is an existence for humanity. It is an existence marked and characterized by God's freedom to be bound to humanity in Christ:

In revelation it is not so much a question of the freedom of God—eternally remaining within the divine self, aseity—on the other side of revelation, as it is of God's coming out of God's own self in revelation. It is a matter of God's given Word, the covenant in which God is bound by God's own action. It is a question of the freedom of God, which finds its strongest evidence precisely in that God freely chose to be bound to historical human beings and to be placed at the disposal of human beings. God is free not from human beings but for them. Christ is the word of God's freedom. God is present, that is, not in eternal objectivity but…'haveable', graspable in the Word within the church.

Here Bonhoeffer is reacting to what he considered an abstract account of divine freedom on the part of the 'neo-orthodox' or 'dialectical' theology of his day, an account of divine freedom epitomized in the early work of Barth. This account was one-sided in the sense that in describing divine freedom the full weight of the depiction was made in reaction to the domesticated deity of Protestant liberalism.

While Bonhoeffer would agree that this was a necessary step, this picture of divine freedom did not follow its own christocentricity through to its full conclusion—that divine freedom is precisely God's binding of God's very own self to the contingent and historical reality of the world in Jesus Christ. No abstract deity here. God's identity is bound up with humanity's. God's mode of presence to the world is in Christ and Christ's mode of presence to the world is in and through his own community as himself—Christ existing as church-community: "the church is the presence of Christ in the same way that Christ is the presence of God." Indeed, we can agree with Hauerwas, who maintains that for Bonhoeffer, "that the church takes up space [in the world] is but a correlative that God in Jesus Christ occupies space in the world…. Bonhoeffer's ecclesiology is but the expression of his Christology, in which the reality of Christ determines all that is. For Bonhoeffer it is in Jesus Christ that the whole of reality is taken up." The themes of Bonhoeffer's early Christology and ecclesiology and the intricate relationship between these two dogmatic loci as developed throughout both his early academic dissertations is efficiently and simply summarized in a passage from Bonhoeffer's inaugural lecture at the University of Berlin, July 31st, 1930 entitled 'Man in Contemporary Philosophy and Theology':

It is the mystery of the community that Christ is in her and only through her reaches to men, Christ exists among us as community, as church in the hiddenness of history. The church is the hidden Christ among us. Now therefore man is never alone, but he exists only through the community, which brings him Christ, which incorporates him in itself, takes him into its life. Man in Christ is man in community; where he exists is community…. Therefore man can no longer understand himself from himself, but only from Christ, who exists as community…

Bonhoeffer's early work goes a long way in outbidding Protestant liberalism's truncated and docetic Christology and ecclesiology. However, it was not until Bonhoeffer turned his attention to Christology proper that these early themes gain the lucidity necessary to gauge Bonhoeffer's theology on the central theme of the identity of Christ and his community and to measure just how much ground he makes up in response to liberalism.