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THE

COMMUNION

OF SAINTS

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

THE

COMMUNION

OF SAINTS

A DOGMATIC INQUIRY INTO

THE SOCIOLOGY OF

THE CHURCH

HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND EVANSTON

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Pub- lishers, Incorporated, 49 East 33rd St., New York 16, N. Y.

This translation is published in Great Britain under the title, Sanctorum Communio.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER:

64-10749

Foreword

The student of Bonhoeffer who wishes to know the sources of his 'religionless interpretation of biblical concepts in a world come of age', the worldly Christianity of the letters from prison, will have to turn to Bonhoeffer's early writings. There he will find both the basis and the starting-point for the ideas in the letters. The letters, it is hardly necessary to say, read more easily than those early works.

Sanctorum Communio is Bonhoeffer's first work. He was only twenty-one when he presented it, in 1927, as a dissertation to the Theological Faculty in Berlin. Difficult and overloaded though it is, in many respects unclear and youthful in style, nevertheless it moves clearly across the continental map of theology of that time into new country. It begins from two conflicting bases. First there is the sociological school, which had a powerful effect on Berlin theology of the twenties by way of Troeltsch. Bonhoeffer had studied in this atmosphere and learned its language. He worked in Harnack's seminar, but under Seeberg he turned to systematic theology. The second base was dialectical theology. Though it was making stormy advances in Germany, it had not then found a single advocate in Berlin University. Its concern was not with the sociological and statistical understanding of the church, but with its strict and sole source in revelation. In spite of Harnack and Seeberg it was this theology to which the young Bonhoeffer now became attentive. He was attracted by the impossible. What he tried to give in Sanctorum Communio was a sociological theology of the church, or a theological sociology. He turned to this task with immense self-conscious power.

Both these bases, the sociology and the theology of the church, have by no means lost their pressing importance for us to-day in, our view of the church, whether we regard them as reconcilable or not. The revelatory character of the church points to its raison d'etre, its sociological character points to its reality and

FOREWORD

concreteness. Both elements, the raison d'etre and the this- worldliness, were to be constant motives in Bonhoeffer's develop- ment. They may be discerned even in his later formulations concerning religionless Christianity.

For his first effort, which was so much more diligently worked over than his last, Bonhoeffer found at that time no readers. It took him three and a half years to get Sanctorum Communio pub- lished, in the midst of the German inflation, at an impossible price. The work had to be shortened, and he had to subsidise the publication himself. The publisher reproached him for not helping to make the work known. A friend wrote to him that few would see what he was after. The Barthians would not see, because of the sociology, and the sociologists likewise because of the Barth. It was the bold individuality of the letters from prison, following the individuality of The Cost of Discipleship , which forced attention back upon his first work.

In fact Bonhoeffer was never interested in making his writings better known. He never drew the attention of his students to them. The book Sanctorum Communio soon disappeared from his view, because he was too heavily engaged with the thing itself, the sanctorum communio. He was always ready to describe the thing itself in a new way. For this very reason it is both exciting and rewarding for us to read how Bonhoeffer regarded the church when he began his work, and to see what his answers were then. Both continuity and discontinuity can be seen.

If we are attracted by Bonhoeffer's later views, and want to find the answers to his questions, then we are on more solid and controlled ground if we add to our considerations this pre- cocious and astonishing essay.

Eberhard Bethge

Contents

author's preface page 13

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION 1 4

I TOWARDS A DEFINITION OF SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY

AND SOCIOLOGY I 5

II THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF THE PERSON AND THE CONCEPTS OF BASIC SOCIAL RELATION

A The four schemes for the concepts of basic social relation in the light of the Christian concept of the person and of basic relation 22

b The concept of God and basic social relations

and the concept of the I-Thou relationship 36

III THE PRIMAL STATE AND THE PROBLEM OF COM- MUNITY

A Preliminary 38 B The theological problem: the original com- munity 39 c The socio - philosophical problem : human

spirituality and sociality 44

1. Personal being as structurally open 44

2. Personal being as structurally closed 48 d The sociological problem 53

1 . Social community as community of will 53

2. Typology of social communities 55

3. Objective spirit 65

IV SIN AND THE BROKEN COMMUNITY 71

A Original sin 72

b Ethical collective persons 82

CONTENTS

V SANCTORUM COMMUNIO

a Basic principles

i. Conclusion of the discussion in the concept

of the church: retrospect and prospect 86

2. A brief outline of the New Testament view

of the church 97

b Positive presentation leading to the basic

problems and their development 103

1. The church established in and through Christ — its realisation 106

2. The Holy Spirit and the church of Jesus Christ — the actualization of the essential church 115 a Multiplicity of spirits 117 b Community of spirit 118 c The spiritual unity of the church — the

collective person 137

3. The empirical form of the church

a The objective spirit of the church and

the Holy Spirit 144

b The logical relation between the em- pirical and the essential church 1 50 c Sociological forms and functions of the empirical church i The worshipping congregation 155 ii The Sanctorum Communio as bearer

of the ministry 1 60

iii The sociological context of the acts of the ministerial office and the congregation, the three concentric circles 163

iv The sociological problem of the care

of souls 171

CONTENTS

V SANCTORUM COMMUNIO [contd.]

d Authority and freedom in the empirical

church 173 e The church as an independent socio- logical type and its place in the order of

sociological types 175

i Church and sect 1 85 f The individual form of the objective

spirit in the church of to-day 1 90

i Church and proletariat 190 g Faith in the Sanctorum Communio and

'experiencing the church' 194

4. The church and eschatology 1 98

notes 205

index of scripture references 247

index of names 249

index of subjects 252

Preface

This study places social philosophy and sociology in the service of dogmatics. Only by this means did the structure of the Christian church as a community seem to yield itself to syste- matic understanding. The subject under discussion belongs to dogmatics, not to the sociology of religion. The inquiry into Christian social philosophy and sociology is a genuinely dog- matic one, since it can be answered only if our starting-point is the concept of the church. The more theologians have con- sidered the significance of the sociological category for theology, the more clearly the social intention of all the basic Christian concepts has emerged. Ideas such as 'person', 'primal state', 'sin' and 'revelation' are fully understandable only in relation to sociality. The fact that every genuinely theological concept can be correctly comprehended only when set within and supple- mented by its special social sphere is proof of the specifically theological nature of any inquiry into the sociology of the church.

This book was written more than three years ago. I was un- able completely to revise it before it went to press, but had to be content with rewriting it in parts. In view of the course the subsequent debate has taken, this is a defect. My justification for publishing the book in its present form is the basic approach adopted in dealing with the problem, which now as then seems to me the right and profitable one.

I should like particularly to thank Herr Geheimrat Reinhold Seeberg, who from the outset has shown a most friendly interest in this work. My thanks are due also to the Minister for Science, Art and Education for the help accorded me in getting the book printed. It was the Notgemeinschaft fur deutsche Wissenschqft, together with a grant from the Reinhold Seeberg foundation, which made publication possible. For this too I should like to express my thanks.

July 1930

A note on the translation

This translation is based on the third German edition of i960. That edition had substantial additions, printed in an Appendix, which had not appeared in the earlier editions. They had been removed partly at the wish of the publisher, partly to please Reinhold Seeberg, Bonhoeffer's teacher in Berlin. In this translation these additions have been incorporated in the main text. This version therefore corresponds more closely to the original text of the author than even the latest German edition.

The task of translation has passed through various hands. However, the undersigned undertook to revise the entire text, and must take responsibility for the final version.

R. Gregor Smith

THE

COMMUNION

OF SAINTS

CHAPTER I

Towards a definition of social philosophy and sociology x

If this introductory chapter were to present and criticise the many different attempts at solving the problem of these defini- tions, it would swell to a monograph. As our concern is with the material and not the method of sociology, we shall not develop the whole problem of method. Moreover, a discussion of method may be found in most of the larger sociological works.2 It will suffice if we discuss the problem briefly and give our own attitude to it.

It is characteristic of the situation that when chairs of sociology were asked for by the universities, and the ministry of education requested statements about the aim and the object of the science of sociology, the statements were so varied that no uniform picture emerged. It is further characteristic that almost every new work on the subject suggested a new goal, or a modification of a pre- vious goal; and the number of works increased enormously. And if we examine the principles of the great 'classic' works, we are appalled at the confusion even in the most fundamental matters. The historical and psychological reason for this seems to me to lie in the fact that the chief material interest of most sociologists is to be found in the political and economic or historical field. Sociology has therefore a particular relation to these disciplines. But this means that a clear view of the real object of sociology is lost; yet this real object does not seem to me to be too difficult to define. Economic politics, comparative religion and the philosophy of history were all presented as though they were sociology. The word 'sociology' was used, but the concept was quite unclear. A dozen different things from all

'5

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

sorts of fields of knowledge were named as the real object of sociology, instead of one which might be held to constitute its essence.3 In this confusion it might seem impossible to find any uniform lines. Nevertheless I think that certain clearly emerging types may be distinguished at least among the chief sociological works.

In a well-known essay Troeltsch4 has made such a distinction, into two groups, the first 'historical-philosophical-encyclopaedic', and the second 'analytic and formal'. It is the latter, the more recent, which has established itself in the universities as scientific sociology.5 It deals with the 'relations and connections within the group and its products'.6 Its object is 'society', not as con- stituted of elements, that is, individual persons, but 'so far as it is the bearer of inwardly established interactions between its individual members'.7 The basic category of sociological thought must therefore be relation.8 And questions must be asked concerning social forces as well as kinds of relation.9 Since the time of Simmel 'social forces' are taken to mean such con- stitutive concepts as love, subordination, mystery, conflict, etc. By 'kinds of relation' is intended, for example, the classic dis- tinction made by Tonnies between community and society.10 On this basis there arises the question of the products of society, such as culture, economic life, and 'materialising of the objective spirit' (see below).

So far we have looked at the problem of the object of sociology. But the significance of sociology is equally that it is also a funda- mentally new method (similar to induction in its time), for the investigation of historical, psychological and political problems, which it believes it can solve only by knowing inter-human relations. The method is applied to the problems of language, of religion, of the state, and takes the ground from under the theory that all these goods were invented by individuals. It is true that as a method sociology always presupposes the concept of the object, on the basis of which the linguistic problem must be considered. Basically, this means that in order to grasp a great number of historical problems a consideration of the social form is important. That is, sociology adds something to

16

SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY

the other disciplines. For this concept Simmel coined the term 'sociological method'.11

The chief representatives of this analytic and formal study are Tonnies, Simmel, Vierkandt and von Wiese12 in Germany, in France Durkheim13 with his great work, Totemism as a Social Phenomenon, Tarde with his discovery and account of the imitative instinct in its significance for sociology,14 and in England McDougall.15

The historical-philosophical group acknowledges Comte16 and Spencer17 as their originators. Among them may be named Schaffle,18 Spann,19 Oppenheimer20 and Muller-Lyer.21 This group aims at describing the historical course of social life, and its historical and philosophical basis. Sociology here becomes a collective name for all the humane sciences, and thus without being aware of it renders itself superfluous. In seeking too many objects it fails to find one. Thus in Oppenheimer22 sociology simply becomes a universal science. For a dis- cussion of this matter Troeltsch's essay is the most convenient locus.

In opposition to this weakening of the concept formal sociology takes as its object the 'forms' of society.23 Though we are in formal agreement with this limitation of the problem, we feel bound to define the content differently. We cannot regard the problem as solved by the method of formal sociology. We agree, so far as it concentrates on the problem of society ; we disagree, so far as it regards the content as consisting simply of relations and interactions, we disagree also in respect of its normal method. Our first disagreement concerns the social and philo- sophical basis on which formal sociology builds, namely, the theory of atomism. This is most clearly expressed by von Wiese and Vierkandt, in their teaching about relation.

As might be expected it is their concept of persons which we must oppose. There are here two apparently different courses of thought. Starting from the fact of change brought about by the environment (an officer on duty, and in his family, a scholar in his profession, and, say, in politics, or a child with a weaker and stronger child), first the conclusion is drawn that the person is

*7

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

not a unity, and the decisive emphasis is laid upon the power of relationships. Man is regarded as a product of social relation- ships, to which, it is true, he contributes his little share.24 Along- side this idea25 there is a second, that distinguishes man, as an isolated structure, at rest, from the 'forces which play between persons in relative independence from them'.26 At first glance this seems to involve sheer contradiction; but there is unity of view here. Basically, persons are here regarded as firm objects, whose social 'capacities' permit and establish relations with other persons. Man as a person is therefore not of interest. What is of sociological interest is the forces which play between persons. These forces can transform the person's social sphere, but the personal kernel is untouched. If such an isolated personal kernel is once granted, the whole investigation remains in the sphere of an atomist and individualist theory of society, how- ever carefully the idea is worked out of a mutual penetration within the social sphere. In this Vierkandt is more cautious than, for example, von Wiese.27 But basically they are agreed: we are presented with a multitude of isolated I-centres, which can enter into an outward connection with one another through some stimulus.

Now it would be quite wrong to identify the philosophical individualism of this social theory with the atomist theories of the individual, say of the Enlightenment. Formal sociology does recognise and evaluate positively the basic significance of man's living in society for his whole spiritual life. It is only the social and metaphysical ordering of the social phenomenon which fails to carry conviction. It is not sociology itself, but the social philosophy which underlies it, which is atomist. Nor is this state of affairs equally clearly expressed by all formal sociologists. But when these matters of principle are discussed, the con- clusions are plainly as I have described them.28

When the social and philosophical insights are deepened, the object of sociology takes another form. But the concept of the object in this teaching involves a method which we must like- wise reject, namely, the empirical and scientific method. The procedure is to enumerate and to arrange the many possible

18

SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AMD SOCIOLOGY

interactions. Most typical is von Wiese. But in fact this is not a sociological achievement at all, but at most the gathering of material for sociological study. In saying that a proper grasp of the concept of the object in sociology depends on the most profound social and philosophical insights into the nature of the person and of society, we realise that the view we shall give of this concept, and of sociological method, can only be confirmed as our concrete study of the problems proceeds.

All the same, we give here the concept of social philosophy and sociology with which we shall work. Social philosophy and sociology, being two disciplines with different subject matter, should be strictly distinguished.29 If this is not done, there arises a hopeless confusion of terms, though of course individual results may be largely correct. The two disciplines are related through sociology building on the results of social philosophy. The sociologist may be unaware of these results. Moreover, the permanent norm of sociology is found in social philosophy. Neither discipline is a natural science; they are both humane sciences. As independent disciplines they have their own subject-matter.30

Social philosophy investigates the ultimate social relations which are prior to all knowledge of and will for empirical com- munity, and the 'origins' of sociality in man's spiritual life and its essential connection with it. It is the science of the original and essential nature of sociality. It is a normative science in so far as its results supply the necessary corrective for the inter- pretation of actual social conditions. Sociology is the science of the structures of empirical communities. Hence its true subject is not the laws governing the origin of empirical social groupings, but the laws concerning their structure. Thus sociology is not a historical but a systematic science. In principle it is possible to do sociology without a basis of social philosophy, so long as this limitation is kept in mind. What is meant by the structure of a community will be fully clarified as we proceed with our investiga- tion. It is sufficient at this point to say that it is not exhaustively expressed by relations or interactions, although these do sustain social activity. Sociology is concerned with tracing the manifold

*9

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

interactions to specific spiritual and intellectual acts of our being which are the peculiar characteristic of the structure. Personal units, however, as centres of action, belong just as much to the structure of a community as the unit of the group as a 'forma- tion'. The general structure of an empirical social grouping is determined by all three.

This state of affairs has its consequences for the method : the sociologist's approach is not morphological and descriptive (as in Durkheim), but is that of the humane studies, concerned, that is, with the essential structure of the spiritual phenomenon of the group. The phenomenological method is derived from the systematic nature of sociology. It seeks to grasp in empirical acts the essential constitutive acts.31 This method is the only one which can overcome the genetic approach which turns sociology into a mere branch of history.

The sociology of religion is therefore a phenomenological study of the structural characteristics of religious communities.32 But to avoid misunderstanding it should be noted that the present work on the sanctorum communio is theological rather than socio- logical. Its place is within Christian dogmatics, and the insights of social philosophy and sociology are drawn into the service of dogmatics. We wish to understand the structure, from the standpoint of social philosophy and sociology, of the reality of the church of Christ which is given in the revelation in Christ. But the nature of the church can be understood only from within, cum ira et studio, and never from a disinterested standpoint. Only by taking the claim of the church seriously, without relativising it alongside other claims or alongside one's own reason, but understanding it on the basis of the gospel, can we hope to see it in its essential nature. So our problem has to be attacked from two, or even from three, sides: that of dogmatics, of social philosophy, and sociology.

In the next chapter we shall show that the Christian concept of the person is real only in sociality. Then we shall show, in a social-philosophical section, how man's spiritual being is likewise possible and real only in sociality. Then in a purely sociological section we shaft consider the structures of empirical communities,

20

SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY

being by that time in a position to refute the atomist view of society. Only then, through the insight we have acquired into the nature of community, shall we be able to come near to a conceptional understanding of Christian community, of the sanctorum communio.

21

CHAPTER II

The Christian concept of the person and the concepts of basic social relation

A. THE FOUR SCHEMES FOR THE CONCEPTS OF BASIC SOCIAL

RELATION IN THE LIGHT OF THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF THE

PERSON AND OF BASIC RELATION

Every concept of community is related to a concept of the person. The question about what constitutes community can only be answered by asking what constitutes a person. Since the aim of our inquiry is to understand a particular community, namely, the sanctorum communio, we must investigate its particular concept of the person. Concretely this means that we must study the Christian concept of the person. In understanding the mean- ing of person and community, we shall also have said something decisive about the concept of God. For the concepts of person, community and God have an essential and indissoluble relation to one another. It is in relation to persons and personal com- munity that the concept of God is formed. In principle, the nature of the Christian concept of community can be reached as well from the concept of God as from the concept of the person. In choosing the latter as our starting-point, we cannot reach a soundly based view of it, or of community, without constant reference to the concept of God.

We shall now discuss the Christian concept of the person and its concept of basic social relations in the light of the four schemes for the concepts of basic social relations in philosophy. The question is not about some social area in man which might have a religious or other origin, nor about empirical communities of will or merely social acts; but about basic ontic relations of social being as a whole. It is these which establish the norm and

22

THE PERSON AND SOCIAL RELATION

the limit for all empirical sociality, and this proposition is of the utmost significance for the concept of the church. Since it is basic ontic relations which are to be discussed, it is not the types of social theory but their philosophical precursors which we shall adduce.

i . In Aristotle man becomes a person only in so far as he par- takes of reason. The collective form, as more nearly approaching the genus, is therefore ranked higher than the individual person. Man is a £wov ttoXltlkov^ the state is the highest collective form, preceding by its nature all individuals. The individual only partially achieves identity between the vov<$ ttolOiitlko^ and noirj-LKos, just as in Plato's Timaeus only the reasoning, that is, the universal, part of the soul is immortal.1 Essential being lies beyond individual and personal being. The antithesis between man and his destiny is the antithesis between the individual and the universal — or, in the language of social philosophy, between the individual and the race. Aristotle's concept of God is thus impersonal.2

2. It was Stoicism with its concept of f]yep.oviKov which for the first time in the history of philosophy formed the concept of the ethical person. A man becomes a person by submitting to a higher obligation. This obligation is universally valid, and by obedience to it persons form a realm of reason, in which each soul, submissive to the obligation, is at one with eternal reason and thus also with the soul of other persons.

But here too, in spite of the emphasis upon the ethical and 'personal', that which really makes a person goes beyond the individual. It is the ethical and reasoning life of the person which is his essence, and it is so in abolishing him as an individual person. 3

The first difference in principle between the Aristotelian and the Stoic teaching is that for the Stoic the I is self-sufficient, and reaches the full height of reason without any other; whereas with Aristotle it is the genus, presented in the idea of the state, which possesses the height of reason, so that the individual can be thought of only as a part of the genus. One man enters into connection with another only as he approximates to the genus

23

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

and transcends individual life. The genus is opposed to the individual as something absolutely superior and conceptually primary. For the Stoic the concept of the genus offers nothing new in principle. The existence of a realm of reason merely indicates the existence of a realm of like beings. Thus for the Stoic the person is something finished in itself, complete, and final. The realm of reason is still thought of as a realm of persons. What is important for us in this is that the basic scheme is not a metaphysical and intellectual one of the individual and the universal, but that the individual and the universal are closely interwoven, and the person is regarded as somehow ultimate. Hence the relation of moral person to moral person is always thought of as a relation of like to like, and this is the basic relation of social philosophy.

3. Epicureanism, with its starting-point in Democritus's atomic theory, which it applies to the social and ethical spheres, maintains that life in society serves only to heighten the pleasure of each individual. Social life is thus purely utilitarian, based on a (rvv6i']Ki], and is inconceivable as a natural community. Each individual is completed by the individual pleasure which separates him from every other individual. Each person con- fronts the other as alien and unlike, since each is aiming at the highest pleasure. Here nothing remains either of the ethics of Stoicism or of Aristotle's intellectual philosophy of mind. Epicurean teaching reappears during the Enlightenment. It is characterised by a defective concept of spirit, a negative descrip- tion which can be interpreted as a theory of basic relations, in which no original, significant or essential relation of spirit exists between men; the connecting threads are sheerly utilitarian. Basically, every man is alien to every other. Status hominum naturalis est helium omnium contra omnes (Hobbes).4 On this basis all social structures arise, and are thus purely contractual. In this and the following two chapters this theory is implicitly criticised.

4. Descartes's transformation of the metaphysical question into an epistemological one also changed the view of the person. In Kant the development of the epistemological concept of the person has made the perceiving I the starting-point for all

THE PERSON AND SOCIAL RELATION

philosophy. His synthesis of transcendental apperception resolved both the I-Thou relation and the opposition of subject and object in the higher unity of mind, of intellectual intuition. This meant a fresh attempt in philosophy to master the problem of basic social relations.

In this historical survey our only purpose is to show how various philosophical approaches deal with the problem of social re- lations, and how the relation of one man to another, or to the genus, have been conceived. We emphasise that we have so far not committed ourselves about a possible social province in man, or said anything about empirical social relations. But we have looked at the possible relations of person to person from the standpoint of the various philosophical concepts of the person. We have met with four basic approaches: i. the Aristotelian scheme of the universal and the individual, the genus and the individual, 2. the Stoic and Christian, of person and person, 3. the Democritean, Epicurean and Enlightenment view of an atomist society and 4. the view of German idealism, expressed in the subject-object relation of epistemology.

It is now possible to show that between the first and the fourth type, despite their different starting point, there is a basic kinship. Both types see the meaning of the subject to consist in its entering into the general forms of reason. What is additional in the epistemological view of the individual (in idealism) is its regarding all that is opposed to the object as an object of know- ledge; this is basic both to Fichte's ethical idealism and to Hegel's logical idealism. But subject and object are not final opposites, but in being recognised as such they are resolved in the unity of intellectual intuition.

This brings us to our first systematic question, concerning the philosophical basis of a Christian doctrine of person and com- munity, in which we must criticise the basic schemes we have described. The need to have some concept of the person arises, as we have already said, from the very nature of our task, which is to understand the specifically Christian community of persons, the sanctorum communio.

It is a precondition of this investigation of the Christian

25

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

concept of the person and the basic social relations that neither should be somehow abstracted from empirical social structures. But both must be conceived of quite generally, in order to be applied to the special case of empirical relations with basic social relations. Empirical relations extend across a social realm, a group of social acts, which are not our immediate concern. We are asking, rather, whether a person must neces- sarily be thought of in relation to another person, or whether a person is conceivable in an atomist fashion ; and this leads to the question of what are the basic relations between persons. That is why in our historical introduction we discussed the philosophical background of each social theory, and not the history of the social theories themselves. In brief, we are dealing not with the empirical fact of communities of will, and the specific sociological problem of the interaction of wills, but with basic ontic relations of social existence. Our problem, therefore, is the metaphysic of sociality.

This part of our investigation is therefore not sociological, but theological and philosophical. In this way we hope to find a norm in these basic matters for empirical sociology. It is the basic ontic relations which provide the norm for all empirical social life. This is of the greatest significance for a concept of the church.

In thus presenting basic social relations from the standpoint of Christian dogmatics we do not mean that they are religious ; they are purely ontic, but seen as such from the Christian perspective. This provides us with the conditions for a positive presentation of the philosophical basis of the Christian doctrine of persons and basic relations. We must look for the scheme by which basic Christian relations are to be understood.

We first ask whether the philosophical schemes are satisfactory. The metaphysical scheme involves a basic overcoming of the person by absorbing it into the universal. The epistemological subject-object relation does not advance beyond this, since the opposition is overcome in the unity of mind, in intellectual intuition, but there is no distinction between the subject-object and the I-Thou relation; but the latter is absorbed in the

26

THE PERSON AND SOCIAL RELATION

former. Fichte makes no advance on Kant when he speaks of the self-conscious I as arising from the Not-I. For his Not-I is not I, but an object. Both are in the end resolved in the unity of the I. Hegel, too, sees the I as arising at the point where it is drawn into objective spirit, and reduced to absolute spirit. Thus here too the limit set by the individual person is in principle overcome. Basically it is the concept of spirit which unites all these systems, and indeed the concept of spirit as immanent. Such a concept is bound to lead to the consequences which idealism in fact drew.5 The I is a person so far as it is spirit. Spirit, however, as Kant says, is the highest principle of form, comprising and overcoming all material, so that spirit and the universal are identical and the individual loses its value.

Immanent spirit as the highest principle of form is formal law. This holds true of ethics as well. Any exposition of Kant's ethical formalism which claims to find in it the basis for the freedom of a material ethic is in error.6 For the reasoning person the supreme principle of action is universal validity. This definition of the person was taken over by Fichte. But though he has much to say about individuality, he makes no advance on Kant. The goal of reason is satisfied by the individual accom- plishment of his task, his duty. One I is like another. Only on the basis of this likeness is a relation between persons conceivable at all. Admittedly, this is true only in regard to basic relations; for empirical social relations Kant recognised the decisive importance of antagonism.7 It is the destiny of the human race that it should disappear in the realm of reason, in which persons, completely like and unanimous, are separated only by their different activities, and determined by universal reason or by one spirit. But this union of like beings — and this is the chief point — never leads to the concept of community, but only to that of sameness, of unity. But this is not a sociological concept. Thus it may be seen that the subject-object scheme never leads to a sociological category.8

With this conclusion we have formed the presuppositions for a positive presentation of the specifically Christian view. But we do not wish just to present this view; we wish to suggest a Christian

27

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

philosophy in place of the idealist philosophy of immanence. And we hope we may offer results which might determine the direction of a Christian social philosophy.

The Christian concept of the person may now be defined as constitutive of, and presupposed in, the concept of Christian community; that is, in theological terms, the concept of the person as found in primal man, but in man after the Fall, and that means, not in man living in unbroken communion with God and his fellow-men, but in man who knows good and evil. This concept necessarily builds upon the fact of man's spiritual nature, upon its structural and individual personal nature; but of this we shall speak later. In this general concept, too, the Idealist concept must be overcome by a concept which preserves the concrete individual concept of the person as ultimate and willed by God (cf. next chapter) . We must first discuss the specifi- cally Christian concept of the person, in order to make clear the difference from Idealism.

We must reject the derivation of the social from the epistemo- logical category as a jue-d/^acng ei? aAAo yevo$. From the purely transcendental category of the universal we can never reach the real existence of alien subjects. How then do we reach the alien subjects?9 By knowledge there is no way at all, just as there is no way by pure knowledge to God. All idealist ways of knowledge are contained within the sphere of the personal mind, and the way to the Transcendent is the way to the object of knowledge, to grasp which I bear within me the forms of mind : thus the object remains an object, and never becomes a subject, an 'alien P. Certainly a subject can also become an object of knowledge, but in this case it is transferred from the social to the epistemological sphere. These spheres can be in principle so separate that in epistemological realism no social sphere may be recognised, and in radical epistemological idealism, that is, solip- sism, the social sphere may be fully recognised. This means that neither sphere can be reduced to the other. We have now to show what we mean by the social sphere.

So long as my mind is dominant, and claims universal validity, so long as all contradictions that may arise with the perception of

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THE PERSON AND SOCIAL RELATION

a subject as an object of knowledge are thought of as immanent in my mind, I am not in the social sphere. This means that I enter this sphere only when some barrier of principle appears at some point to my mind. This can happen in the intellectual sphere, but not in the epistemological-transcendental sphere: the idealist's object is not a barrier. What matters is not the nature of this barrier, but that it should really be experienced and acknowledged as a barrier. But what does this mean ? It is the concept of reality which must be discussed, the concept which idealism has failed to think through exhaustively but has identi- fied with self-knowing and self-active mind, involving truth and reality. The person has command of his own ethical value, possesses the dignity of being able to be ethical, and — so far as he is a person — having to be ethical. The boundary between obligation and being does not lie on the boundary of man as a whole, but in idealism the dividing line runs through man. Of course, in so far as every obligation, taken seriously, postulates ethical transcendence, idealism could at this point have paused for reflection. But with Kant's 'You can, for you ought' it moved from ethical transcendence to the immanence of a philo- sophy of mind.10 From this it followed, as the necessary conse- quence of a one-sided epistemological philosophy, that the reasoning person had command of his own ethical value, entered by his own strength into the ethical sphere, and bore his ethical motives within himself, as a person equipped with mind. The real barrier was not acknowledged. This is possible only in the ethical sphere; this does not mean, however, that the barrier must have only an ethical content. As we have already said, it can be purely intellectual, that is, it can be experienced, for instance, in the conflict of perceptions. But the experience of the barrier as real is of a specifically ethical character. But we have still to say, in criticism of idealism and its implications, what we mean by reality. This brings us to the problem of time.

Kant taught that the uninterrupted flow of time should be understood as a purely intuitive form of our mind. As a result his thinking, and that of the whole of idealism, is in principle timeless. In Kant's epistemology this is obvious; but in ethics,

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too, he did not consciously get beyond this view. The same starting-points which could have led to the perception of the real barrier might also have overcome timeless thinking in ethics, without prejudicing the absolute ethical claim. Fichte, with his conception of individual duty, came nearer to it, but he too was a long way from the radical change which was required. Despite their constant emphasis upon the primacy of ethics, both are under the persistent influence of their epistemology. We do not dispute the epistemological view of time as a pure intuitive form. But we start from other considerations. Like Fichte and Kant we emphasise the absolute nature of the moral demand, and relate it to the person faced by it. At the moment when he is addressed the person is responsible, or, in other words, faced with a decision. This person is not the idealist's reasoning person or personified mind, but a particular living person. He is not divided in him- self, but it is the entire person who is addressed. He is not present in timeless fullness of value and spirituality, but he is responsible within time, not in time's uninterrupted flow, but in the value- related — not value-filled — moment. In the concept of the moment the concept of time and its relations of value are in- cluded. The moment is not the briefest part of time, as it were a mechanically conceived atom, but the time of responsibility, of relations of value — let us say, of relations with God — and essentially it is concrete time, where alone the real moral claim is realised. And only in responsibility am I fully aware of being bound to time. It is not by my having a reasoning mind that I make universally valid decisions, but I enter into the reality of time by relating my concrete person in time in all its particul- arities to this obligation, by making myself morally responsible. Just as sound for the musician and sound for the physicist lie in different spheres of knowledge, so with time for idealist epistem- ology and the Christian concept of the person, without the one sphere abolishing the other.

Thus from our concept of time there follows an idea which is quite meaningless for the idealist: the person is continually arising and passing in time. It is not something timelessly exist- ing, it has a dynamic and not a static character; it exists only

30

THE PERSON AND SOCIAL RELATION

when a man is morally responsible ; it is continually recreated in the perpetual change inherent in all life. Every other concept of person cuts through the abundance of life of the actual person. The ultimate reason for the inadequacy of idealist philosophy to grasp the concept of the person lies in its having no voluntarist concept of God, and in its lack of a profound concept of sin (as we shall show) ; and joined to these defects is its attitude to the problem of history. The idealist conception of the person does not indicate an accidental logical defect, but is inherent in the system. Idealism has no conception of movement. The move- ment of the dialectic of mind is abstract and metaphysical, whereas the movement of ethics is concrete. Further, idealism has no understanding of the moment in which the person is threatened by the absolute demand. The idealist moralist knows what he ought to do, and, what is more, he is always in principle able to do it, just because he ought. Where is there room for distress of conscience, for infinite Angst in face of a decision ?

This brings us close to the problem of reality, of the real barrier, and thus of basic social relations. It is a Christian recognition that the person, as a conscious person, is created in the moment when a man is moved, when he is faced with re- sponsibility, when he is passionately involved in a moral struggle, and confronted by a claim which overwhelms him. Concrete personal being arises from the concrete situation. Here too, as in idealism, the encounter lies wholly in the mind. But mind means something different in each case. For Christian philosophy the human person comes into being only in relation to the divine person which transcends it, opposing and subjugating it. The autonomy of the mind, in the idealist individualist sense, is un- christian, since it involves the human mind being filled with absolute value, which can only be ascribed to the divine mind. The Christian person arises solely from the absolute distinction between God and man ; only from the experience of the barrier does the self-knowledge of the moral person arise. The more clearly the barrier is recognised, the more deeply the person enters into responsibility. The Christian person is not the bearer of the highest values, but the concept of value is to be related to

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THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

his being as a person, that is, to his creatureliness. Every philosophy of value, even one which makes the value of the person the supreme value (Scheler), is in danger of depriving the person as such, as God's creature, of his value, and of regard- ing him as a person only so far as objective, impersonal value is apparent 'in' him. But this prevents any understanding of basic personal and social relations.

When the concrete ethical barrier is acknowledged, or when the person is compelled to acknowledge it, we are within reach of grasping the basic social relations, both ontic and ethical, between persons.

The concept of the barrier is decisive here. We must now examine its form and structure, as experienced by the person. It is not given in the relation between the individual and the universal. The person is not simply the individual, and the individual is not as such involved in the fall and sin (Schelling). But the metaphysical concept of the individual denotes immed- iacy, unlike the ethical concept of the person, which denotes ethical and social reflection. From the ethical standpoint man is not 'immediately' mind by and in himself, but only in responsi- bility to 'another'. It is in this sense that we think of the ethical concept of the individual as the basic concept of social relations; for the individual cannot be spoken of without the 'other' also being thought who has set the individual in the ethical sphere. It might be objected that the 'other' has hitherto meant God, but now we have suddenly introduced a concept of social relation, and speak of the 'other' as another man.

We must, however, recall what was said at the beginning about the connection between God, the community and the individual. Moreover, the individual exists only through the 'other'. The individuaf is not solitary. For the individual to exist, 'others' must also exist. But what is this 'other' ? If I call the individual the concrete I, then the other is the concrete Thou. But what is the philosophical status of 'Thou' ? First, every Thou seems to presuppose an I, which is immanent in the Thou, and without which a Thou could not be distinguished from objects. Thus Thou would seem to be equal to the 'other I'. But this is only

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THE PERSON AND SOCIAL RELATION

correct within limits. Beyond the limit set to epistemology there is a further limit, set to ethical and social knowledge, or discern- ment. The other may be experienced by the I simply as Thou, but not himself as I, that is, in the sense of the I that has become I by the claim of a Thou. In the sphere of moral reality the Thou- form is fundamentally different from the I-form. But since the Thou, too, confronts me as a person, as a thinking and effective mind, it must be understood as an I in the general sense, that is, of self-consciousness and so on (cf. next chapter) . But the two I-forms must be strictly distinguished. The Thou, as a form which has reality, is independent in principle, over against the I in this sphere. Its essential difference from the idealist object- form is that it is not immanent in the mind of the subject. It is a barrier to the subject, it activates a will with which the other will comes into conflict, as an I for a Thou. If it is objected that the other is the content of my consciousness, and immanent in my mind, then the point has been missed about the different spheres, of which we have spoken above. The transcendence of the Thou has nothing to do with epistemological transcendence. This is a purely moral transcendence, which is experienced only by the man who makes a decision, which can never be demonstrated to someone standing outside. Thus all that is to be said about the Christian concept of the person can only be grasped by one who is himself involved in responsibility.

I and Thou are not just interchangeable concepts, but they comprise specifically different contents of experience. I myself can become the object of experience for myself, but I can never experience my own self as a Thou. It is perfectly possible for another man to become for me an object for the contemplation of his life as an I ; but I can confront him only as a Thou. I can never become a real barrier for myself, but it is equally impos- sible for me to leap over the barrier to the other. My I as a form of Thou can only be experienced by the other I ; my I as a form of I can only be experienced by myself. Thus in the experience of a Thou the I-form of the other is never immediately given. This means that I can be shown limits by a Thou which is not an I in the sense of the I-Thou relation. So the Thou-form is to be

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defined as the other who places me before a moral decision. With this I-Thou relationship as the basic Christian relation we have left the epistemological subject-object relationship behind. Similarly with the concept of the Thou as the other I. Whether the other is also an I in the sense of the I-Thou relation is some- thing I can never discover.

The important question arises, how the I-Thou relationship may be thought of along with the concept of God. Is the idea of God to be included in the category of the Thou ? I know of no philosophical system which has completely taken over the Christian I-Thou relationship between God and man. In the age of classical philosophy even the concept of God as personal was rejected. Omnis determinatio est negatio, said Spinoza, and his words were determinative for a long time. And if in dog- matics, in more recent times, it was found possible to make a philosophical application of the concept of person to the concept of God, this may have reacted on philosophy, when you find the attempt, as for example in Max Schelei , to do the same thing. But it is interesting to note that where a personal concept of God is advanced, there is always an effort made to keep it from being too concrete and specific. In theology, too, this may be seen happening not infrequently. Scheler is equally emphatic about the personal nature of God (on the basis of a 'sociological proof) and about the impossibility of God's relation to man being an I-Thou relation. Can we nevertheless maintain the I-Thou relation? We know God as the absolute, that is, however, also as self-conscious and spontaneously active will. This expresses formally and metaphysically the personal nature of God as pure mind, whose image is present in every man, as the remnant of God's likeness. Now it does not conflict with such a concept of God that he may be experienced by us as a Thou, that is, as an ethical barrier; further, this experience of God as Thou has a priori no effect on his I, either as being individually limited or as itself ethically addressed. If God is for us — that is, is active will over against us — this does not mean that we are a barrier for God. This has its application for the concept of God. God is impenetrable Thou, and his metaphysical personality, conceived

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of as absolute self-consciousness and self-activity, does not affect what we have said about his being as I.11

We might be accused of great one-sidedness. What of all that might be said about the philosophical concept of the person ? In fact we have not left the ethical situation. But our intention has simply been to confront the Christian concept of the person with the concept of idealist metaphysics. The positive gains of the idealist concept will be made clear in another context. Meantime we must maintain that the centre of the Christian concept of the person lies elsewhere than in idealism. The at- tempt of the former to reach the concrete reality of the other was bound to fail, for we have to do with two spheres which are qualitatively different. On the idealist path, from the idea of the universal we come at best to the possibility of the other. The other is a postulate, just as the entire conception of the historical element in Christianity is a postulate for idealism (Christology) . On the epistemological and metaphysical path one never reaches the reality of the other. Reality cannot be derived, it is simply given, to be acknowledged, to be rejected, but never to be established by proofs, and it is given only to the moral person as a whole. The Christian concept of the person rightly sees itself as a view of the whole person. Every idealist construction uses the concept of mind in order to cut through the living entirety of the person. The Christian concept affirms the whole concrete person, body and soul, in its difference from all other beings in its moral relevance.

What form do these basic relations of persons now assume ? Does the proposition that the Thou is not necessarily an I, not conflict with the concept of community based on persons ? Is not the person in the last resort completely isolated? For it is only with the Thou that a person arises, and yet the person is com- pletely isolated. It is unique, separate, and different from other persons. In other words, the person cannot know but can only acknowledge the other person, 'believe' in him. There is the limit for psychology and epistemology, for the personal being of the other is a moral reality which cannot be grasped by psychology as a fact or by epistemology as a necessity.

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B. THE CONCEPT OF GOD AND BASIC SOCIAL RELATIONS AND THE CONCEPT OF THE I-THOU RELATIONSHIP

The problem is the relation between the person, God, and social being. The I arises only with the Thou; responsibility follows on the claim. 'Thou' says nothing about its own being, but only about its demand. This demand is absolute. What does this mean? It claims the whole man in his claimlessness. But this seems to make a man the creator of the other's moral person, which is an intolerable thought. Can it be avoided ? The person- forming activity of the Thou is independent of its personal being. Now we add that it is also independent of the will of the human Thou. No man can of himself make the other into an I, into a moral person conscious of responsibility. God, or the Holy Spirit, comes to the concrete Thou, only by his action does the other become a Thou for me, from which my I arises. In other words, every human Thou is an image of the divine Thou. The character of a Thou is in fact the form in which the divine is experienced; every human Thou has its character from the divine Thou. This is not to say that it is not a Thou, but a quality derived from God. But the divine Thou creates the human Thou, and because God wills and makes it this human Thou is real, absolute and holy, like the divine Thou. Here we might speak of man as God's image in virtue of his effect upon ihe other man (cf. below, the discussion of community of sr jrit, where one man becomes Christ for the other). But since one man's becoming Thou for another does not in principle alter anything about the Thou as a person, it is not his person as an I that is holy, but the Thou of God, the absolute will, here visible in the concrete Thou of social life. The other man is Thou only in so far as God makes him this. It is only in God that the claim of the other resides ; but for this very reason it is the claim of the other.

To sum up: the person in his concrete life, wholeness and uniqueness, is willed by God as the ultimate unity. Social

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relations must therefore be understood as built up interpersonally upon the uniqueness and separateness of persons. The person cannot be surpassed by an a-personal mind, or by any 'unity' which might abolish the multiplicity of persons. The basic social category is the I-Thou relation. The Thou of the other man is the divine Thou. So the way to the other man is also the way to the divine Thou, a way of recognition or rejection. In the 'moment' the individual again and again becomes a person through the 'other'. The other man presents us with the same problem of cognition as does God himself. My real relation to the other man is oriented on my relation to God. But since I first know God's T in the revelation of his love, so too with the other man : here the concept of the church finds its place. Then it will become clear that the Christian person achieves his true nature when God does not confront him as Thou, but 'enters into' him as I.

Hence the individual belongs essentially and absolutely with the other, according to the will of God, even though, or even because, each is completely separate from the other.12

It could be objected that we have not come to grips with the real problem of idealism, in that (i) we have not inquired about the essence of the person, but have dealt with its origin, and (2) so far as we have discussed the content of the personal we have been biased in the direction of the ethical, and have ignored man's 'spirituality', as though it were not an attribute of the person. To (1) we reply that it was no mere accident that we were driven from the question of the essence to the origin of the person. The Christian person — though not only the Christian person — consists in this continual coming into being. To (2) we reply that man's 'spirituality', with its moral and religious capacities, is certainly indispensable as a presupposition for moral growth as a person. This has already been affirmed, and it will be further developed in our discussion of the primal state.

Thus what follows in the next chapter must be regarded as also containing the presupposition for what has been said so far.

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CHAPTER III

The primal state and the problem of community

A. PRELIMINARY

Three main groups of ideas provide us with the doctrine of the primal state. First, in contrast to the ethical and ontic relations which have just been discussed, we shall show the real com- munity of God and man in statu integritatis. Second, we shall discuss the relation of human spirituality and sociality in general. Third, we shall investigate the essential social forms. Our task therefore falls into three parts, a theological, a socio-philo- sophical, and a sociological. If the first part gives the original image of the church, the second and third parts provide the criteria for the sociological problem of the church. And before we reach the church's concept of community the primal com- munity must be broken by sin, and quite new ontic relations established as basic. These have been to some extent described in the previous chapter, so far as they are not directly connected with evil will and are still real in the community of the church. We shall then have to show the remarkable intentions towards community which are found in the concept of sin, and how these were overcome in the revelation in Christ and yet are still active in the church. The concept of Christian community appears as determined by its inner history. It cannot be grasped 'by itself, but only in a dialectic of history. In itself it is broken. Its inner history becomes clear in the concepts of the primal state, of sin, and revelation, all of which are fully understood only when seen as aiming at community. It is therefore impossible to present the concept of the church without placing it in this inner dialectical history. It is of its essence that it still bears

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within itself the community of sin and is real only by the constant overcoming of this community of sin.

B. THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM: THE ORIGINAL COMMUNITY

The theological doctrine of the primal state can serve only one purpose, to construct dogmas about man's original spirituality in a state of integrity. Moreover, what is of interest is the original state of man's religious and moral life. If we regard man as a free spiritual being created by God, then we must combine this idea with the idea that God created man in a direct relation with himself, in the direction of himself. There can be no objection to describing this freely affirmed direction as morality and religion. The person, then, as a freely created spiritual being, can be defined as the unity of a self-conscious and spontaneously active spirit.1 This concept of the person, in contrast to the ethical, may be termed the universal-spiritual-metaphysical. Clearly the person is considered as a structural unity, so that there is no possibility of absorbing the structures in sociality. We have already seen that the person is willed by God as the ultimate unity, purely as a concrete person in absolute uniqueness and separation from other persons, as the creation of God. To this we now add the structural closed entity of this metaphysical concept, so that we reach a pure concept of the person, in which sociality is based purely on persons. The relation of sociality and persons will be discussed in the socio-philosophical section. The reason why we cannot define the person solely in the uni- versal-spiritual sense is that while this definition is necessary, it is insufficient. All that we have said did presuppose the person in the sense of this definition, but it is insufficient because it is formally so universal that it includes man in his original state, in his natural state, as well as in his sinful and redeemed state. In other words, from the Christian standpoint it is irrelevant, and does not penetrate to the sphere of reality. It lifts man out of the animal world, makes it clear that he is not to be regarded as a

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truncus ; but the definition is possible only when the limits are seen which are set to it by the Christian concept of the person. Our aim is to present the concept of the person which holds true within history, that is, after the Fall. This aim is justified because (i) in a real sense history only begins with sin, in that the factor that makes history possible, namely death, is bound up with sin, and (2) if our chief question concerns real Christian com- munity then the metaphysical concept of the person yields noth- ing; we need a definition of the person which has a Christian content. The whole of idealism is unaware of any cleft between the primal state and the Fall, or of the significance of this cleft for the person and the view of community. It is this recognition of the inner history of the concept from the primal state to sin, that is, in the depths where we ascribe to sin a qualitative reality in connection with history, that we make a fundamental separa- tion from idealism. Origin and telos are an unbroken continuum for idealism, and are synthesised in the concept of 'essence'. All that interferes with this, on the one hand sin, on the other hand Christ, cannot disturb this essential and necessary con- tinuum. This straight-line conception of the history of the spirit abolishes anything specifically Christian. Neither sin nor salvation can alter the essence of this history.

To return : if the metaphysical concept of person is taken in a positive Christian sense, that is, in the direction of God, then we have the concept of person which belongs to the primal state. Is there any connection with a concept of community ? Undoubt- edly man in the primal state must be thought of as being in immediate community of service with God, as we find in Genesis 1 and 2. It is the concept of the church which first makes it clear that this immediate community means something more than the ontic I-Thou relation. This community is a real connection of love between an I and an I. In the Christian concept of God, known to us from the revelation in Christ, but also from the church of Christ, the community of God and social community belong together. We shall have to give our reasons for this assertion later. So we maintain that the immediate community of God demands also the immediate community of man, that the

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THE PRIMAL STATE AND COMMUNITY

latter is a necessary correlate of the former, and that it is no

accident that we read in Genesis 2.18: 'It is not good that the

man should be alone.' The immediate community of God is

documented in the immediate community of man. But what

does immediate community mean ? In the community of God it

clearly means, first, the absolute identity of purpose of the divine

and the human will, within the relation of the creative to the

created, that is, the obedient will. In other words, within the

relation of ruling and serving. The idea of a community of love

and of this connection of ruling and serving appear together here,

in this image of the primal state, anticipating their connection

and distinction in the ideas of the kingdom of God and the rule of

God. In religious language, certainly, this community is built

upon immediate and mutual love; but because love rules when it

serves we have the problem here of a pure association of authority

(Herrschaftsverband) : by limitless serving God rules limitlessly

over men. In that God establishes this law for community, man

serves him limitlessly in fulfilling it, and God rules over men.

Among men, therefore, immediate love must take other forms,

since the absolute ruling character of a creative will over a

created will falls away, and mutual service is a common service

under the rule of God. But since all persons are created unique,

even in the community of love the tension between wills is not

abolished. This means that conflict as such is not the consequence

of the fall, but arises on the basis of common love for God, in that

every individual will strives to reach the one goal of serving the

divine will, that is, serving the community, in its own way. Let

this suffice for the present. When we consider the concept of the

church we shall be able to disclose the wealth of relations in this.

In the last resort we can speak of these things only because we

know the church of Jesus Christ. In the logic of a complete

dogmatics the source of these ideas is to be found in the concept

of the church, whereas in the logic of the doctrine of the primal

state they are a necessary consequence of man's religious and moral

disposition in relation to God.

As a supplement to these findings we attempt a biblical exegesis. This must not be regarded as the source for what we

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have said, which in the last analysis comes from the revelation in Christ, and is valid even if the biblical exegesis is faulty.

It is certain that the chief motif in the story of Genesis 1-3 is the individual perfection of Adam in his primal state. But we think we find traits which indicate the basic social relations of this state: Adam is created as the crown of creation. He is lord of the beasts and of all created things. But he does not come to a full development of his spiritual nature. So the woman is created as his companion : 'it is not good that the man should be alone' (Genesis 2.18). We learn only indirectly, from the Fall, some- thing of the nature of this community. The woman is seduced to disobedience by the serpent, and the man by the woman. Scarcely has the step been taken to the conscious act of dis- obedience when the man and the woman realise their sexual difference, and are ashamed in one another's presence. A cleavage has entered their hitherto unbroken and childlike community of obedience and innocence. With the loss of im- mediate communion with God the immediate social community is also lost. Between man and God, as between man and man, a divisive power has come, the power of sin. The medieval symbolism for the Fall puts a tree in the centre, with the serpent coiled round it, and on either side the man and the woman, separated by the tree from which they disobediently ate.

That the narrator sees sexuality as the power which now stepped between human beings, had a devastating effect upon the doctrine of original sin. But this result is not our immediate concern. What is important is that the narrator sees some kind of separation arising through the Fall, that is, through the moral act of rebellion against God, by which the original community of God and man is lost to man. Nor is this separation removed by the following sentence : 'And they became one flesh.' Rather, we perceive here the extremely complicated dialectic of human community, of which more later. The narrator thinks of divine and human community as in some way belonging together; since this community is destroyed by moral failure it clearly has moral character originally, and is part of the divine image in man in the narrator's view. It is sufficient to note that divine

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and human community are in some way part of the original moral and spiritual life of man, and that means, part also of his future life, in accordance with the parallel between Adam and Christ, the primal state and the last things. And this points us to the church.

It has always been recognised that man in his primal state must be thought of in communion with God. But it has very seldom been noted that this belongs with social community. In speaking of the church in Adam's time there was no thought of any communal relation, but only of the preaching of the divine word at mankind's beginning, in the sense of Augustine's words, ecclesia, quae civitas Dei est, cui ab initio generis humani non defuit praedicatio (De Civ. Dei. xvi.2). So far as I know, Schleiermacher was the first to speak of the communal relation in the primal state (The Christian Faith, para. 60.2). But even he says only that 'the inner union of the race-consciousness and personal self- consciousness' forms part of man's original perfection. This is intended to ensure the possibility of mutual communication and of the communal relation in religion ; for it is only in the race- consciousness that men meet one another, and without it they could not have a communal relation. This must be an original relationship, since outside community we are not given any 'living and vigorous piety'. But the idea disappears after Schleiermacher. So far I can see, it was not till Reinhold Seeberg, in his Christliche Dogmatik (1, para. 22.1), in his teaching about man's innate spirituality, that the idea of sociality was suggested as belonging to man's original nature, thus restoring to dog- matics an important doctrine, without which the ideas of original sin and of the church cannot be fully understood.

This brings us to the second problem of the doctrine of the primal state, to the question of the connection between original, innate human spirituality and sociality. Our attention must be directed not to the Christian and moral fulfilment of empirical community, but to the meaning of the proposition that it is not good for man to be alone, to the meaning of the creation of woman, that is, of life in sociality. It will appear that all Christian and moral content, as well as the entire spirituality of

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man, is possible and real only in sociality. Not only do the concepts of sin and of the church become more profound, but a way opens up to a Christian evaluation of community life.

C. THE SOCIO-PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM: HUMAN SPIRITUALITY AND SOCIALITY

The problem of this section is the relations between man's spirituality and sociality. We shall show that man, as spirit, is necessarily created in a community, and that his general spiritu- ality is woven into the net of sociality. This is extremely im- portant in providing a clarification of the relation between the individual and the community, and the right background for the typology of community ; on this basis we can clarify the problem of the religious community and the church.

i . Personal being as structurally open

First a general matter. In speaking in what follows of I and Thou and their relations we shall be using the words in a basic- ally different sense from that of the preceding chapter. T is not the person summoned up or awakened by the Thou. 'Thou' is not the unknowable, impenetrable, alien other. But we are now moving in a different sphere. Here we have to show that man's entire so-called spirituality, which is presupposed by the Christian concept of person and has its unifying point in self- consciousness (which must also be discussed in this context), is so constituted that it can only be seen as possible in sociality. If we have also to show that self-consciousness arises only with the other, we must not confuse this with the Christian I-Thou relation. Not every self-conscious I knows of the moral barrier of the Thou. It knows of an alien Thou — this may even be the necessary prerequisite for the moral experience of the Thou — but it does not know this Thou as absolutely alien, making a claim, setting a barrier; that is, it does not experience it as real,

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but in the last resort it is irrelevant to its own I. It is in this sense that I have now to speak of this general spiritual pre- supposition.

There is no empirical social relation of a specifically human kind which does not have a community appropriate to its nature. Thus the typology of social structures, too, is based upon a phenomenology of sociality which is established in spirit. Our first question, therefore, is not about the person with a social will, but about the spiritual person as such, and the way he is bound up in sociality.

Material spirituality in each person is bound up with self- consciousness and self-determination as the authentication of structural unity, and these can be formally defined as the prin- ciples of receptivity and activity. Material spirituality is effective in the acts of thinking, self-conscious willing and feeling.2 These acts are only conceivable as resting on man's sociality, arising from it, and also with it and in it. So this first section deals with the structural openness of the personal unit to sociality, while the following section will analyse the structural closedness of personal being, showing the basic relationship of person and community.3

Man is embedded in an infinite abundance of possibilities of expression and understanding. By a million arteries a stream of spirituality has entered him, before he was aware of it, and he can only notice it when he is in the midst of it.

He knows that he understands, expresses, and is understood. The three experiences go together. They are present, potentially at least, in every spiritual act, and all spiritual acts are thus potentially bound up with sociality. In the life of feeling, too, where man thinks he is most isolated, he is certain of being able to express — if not fully, at least to some degree, which provides the limit to any expression — what he feels. This means that he is also certain that he can be understood and can understand the feelings of others. Thus sociality is involved here too.

At this point the concept of basic relations, and the supple- mentary concept of interaction, are in danger of being confused with empirical theories. It is only in interaction with other spirits

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that self-conscious thinking and willing are possible and meaning- ful. This we shall have to verify. First, the social phenomenon of speech, which is so closely connected with thought that it may well be said that it largely makes thinking possible, and has been given precedence over thought, the word over mind.4

Speech unites within itself the intention of objective meaning and subjective disposition, as well as empirical objectifying (acoustically and graphically), in which latter the mind simul- taneously acknowledges and overcomes nature in speech. This affirmation of nature (that is, of the sense- world) , by means of which communication between persons is made p ..sible (cf. 'the new body', 2 oof.), does not imply that nature is the con- stitutive element in the social character of our impulses to speak and write. But it is the material which the formative spirit, which is given in social intention, makes fruitful objectively and subjectively. And there is such a close connection between the two that spirit is inconceivable without nature, and human nature inconceivable without the social spirit. The phenomenon of language would be meaningless if the understanding of the hearer or reader were not potentially co-ordinated with every word.5 With language a system of social spirituality is set within man; in other words 'objective spirit' has become effective in history.

Will must not here be regarded as will to communion, but purely phenomenologically, if serious misunderstanding is not to arise.

In contrast to impulse, will is the united activity of self- determination and self-consciousness. Will is always self- conscious ; that is, in carrying out an act I myself am the centre and the unity of the act. This act of the individual person is possible and real only in sociality. There is no self-consciousness without community, or rather, self-consciousness arises together with the consciousness of being in community. And the will is by its very nature dependent on other wills. The first proposition has been maintained frequently in recent philosophy, and I should say has been essentially solved by Paul Natorp.6 It is an unsolved riddle just how and when self-consciousness arises,

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genetically, since a study of one's own person is in this case excluded by the nature of the problem. All we can do is try to interpret aright the fact of self-conscious spirit, and this seems possible only within spiritual sociality. In knowing myself as 'I', I lift myself out as a unity from the vegetative spiritual state of the community ; and simultaneously the being of the 'Thou' as the other self-conscious spirit rises up for me. We could turn this round and say that in recognising a Thou, an alien conscious spirit, separate and distinct from myself, I recognise myself as an T: I become aware of my self-consciousness.7

The consciousness of the I and the consciousness of the Thou arise together, and in mutual dependence. 'Self-consciousness, and with it self-conscious willing, develops solely in and with the communion of one consciousness and another.'8 Thus the will, too, as an activity arising from self-consciousness, is possible only in sociality. Further, it is of the nature of the will as an activity that it is effective in community. Will arises where there are 'oppositions'. And strictly only another will can be an opposition of this kind. When it is a matter of removing a natural obstacle, it is not really the will which experiences opposition, but one's natural strength (or the will's means of organisation) . The will itself experiences opposition only in the will of a person who wills something different. It is only in the struggle with other wills, in overcoming them and making them part of one's own will, or in being oneself overcome, that the strength and wealth of the will are deployed. Such a struggle takes place in miniature wherever man lives in the community of the I-Thou relation. For where person meets person, will clashes with will, and each struggles to subdue the other. Only in such encounters does the will reach its essential determination. As an isolated phenomenon the will is without meaning. Here again we come upon the basic significance of sociality for human spirituality.

A brief glance at man's emotional life shows that here too, where he is most isolated, there is a certain consciousness that expression is both possible and required, that is, that under- standing by others plays a part. In addition, there are certain acts of feeling, experiencing, and rejoicing along with others,

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which direct the individual's life to that of others. Acts of pleasure, of sympathy, and of erotic love have also this social direction.

To sum up, man's entire spirituality is interwoven with social- ity, and rests upon the basic relation of I and Thou. 'Man's whole spirituality becomes evident only along with others: the essence of spirit is that the self is through being in the other.'9 The I and the Thou are fitted into one another in infinite near- ness, in mutual penetration, for ever inseparable, resting on one another, in inmost mutual participation, feeling and experienc- ing together, and sustaining the general stream of spiritual inter- action. Here the openness of personal being is evident. But the question arises: is there any point in still speaking of I and Thou, if everything is now apparently one ? Is not every appar- ently individual phenomenon just a participation in the one supra-individual work of the spirit ?

2. Personal being as structurally closed

The idea of personal openness threatens to turn into that of an a-personal spirit. With the beginnings of spirituality the I plunges into a sea of spirituality. It awakens and finds itself existing in the midst of this sea. It can only live in this context, and it knows that every Thou it meets is borne along by the same stream. But the characteristic form in which all this takes place is the form of the Thou. That is, man knows that his I is real only in the relation with the Thou. Clearly, then, he is not just the reservoir for a certain amount of objective spirit, a receptive organ, but an active bearer and member in this whole context of relations. Otherwise there would be no I-Thou relation, and no spirituality. The more the individual spirit grows the more it plunges into the stream of objective spirit,10 sustaining it; and out of this movement the power for individual spiritual life is increased.

Thus the person's openness requires closedness as its correlate, if we are to be able to speak of openness at all. So the question whether there is an individual being which is untouched by social

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links must in a certain sense be answered affirmatively, if the idea of the I-Thou relation is not to be abandoned. On the other hand there is a danger that in trying to save the idea of an a- social core of personal being we might be thinking atomistically. A basic change of this kind would matter a great deal for our view of the church.

The tragedy of all idealist philosophy was that it failed to break through to personal spirit. But its tremendous merit (and that of Hegel in particular) was its recognition that the principle of spirit was something objective, reaching beyond everything individual, and that there was an objective spirit, the spirit of sociality, which was something in itself as opposed to all indi- vidual spirit. It is our task to affirm the one without denying the other, to keep the insight without joining in the error.

That the personal unity is closed is attested by self-conscious- ness and self-determination : in both there is complete separation from everything social, and both consist of introversive acts. The structural unity of the I is established as an experience in the experience of the Thou ; it cannot be constituted by acts ; acts rather presuppose it, and are directed towards it. We recall the distinction of principle we have made between structure and intention.11 Here the basic synthesis between social and indi- vidual being comes to light. The individual personal spirit lives solely by virtue of sociality, and the 'social spirit' becomes real only in individual embodiment. Thus genuine sociality leads to personal unity. One cannot speak of the priority either of per- sonal or of social being. We must hold firmly to the fact that alongside those acts which are real only in sociality there are also purely introversive acts. It is clear that the latter are also possible only in a person living in full sociality — than which there is indeed no other kind of person. So far as experience is con- cerned these acts isolate the I from the Thou completely;12 but on the other hand it is not the intimate act which constitutes the person as structurally closed. Rather, no social intention is con- ceivable without this structural closedness, just as no intimate act is conceivable without the corresponding openness. On the other hand, the social intention is directed towards openness of the

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person, and the intimate act towards his closedness. But it is wrong to distinguish in the person an inaccessible, completely isolated core and a completely open layer surrounding it. The unity and the closedness of the whole person are presupposed together with sociality. No Thou can be experienced except by an I, which means that the Thou can never be experienced in a purely epistemological context. Thus the only question asked in idealist philosophy concerning the I and the Thou — the question of Fichte concerning the synthesis of the world of spirits — is wrongly put. For it proceeds from the assumption that I and Thou can be thought of as entirely unrelated, and then questioned about the point of unity, which somehow must exist. The ques- tion about the other soul, about being with the other, is not sufficiently filled with the knowledge of the unity of all spiritual happenings. The question starts with the individual, thought of as isolated and somehow seeking connection with others.13 So we hold to our conclusion about the equilibrium between personal and social being.

Does the social unity, then, extend beyond the personal inter- actions? In what way is this conceivable? Or is it completely contained in them ? In theological language, does God mean by community something that absorbs individual man, or is God solely concerned with the individual ? Or are the community and the individual both willed by God as having their own signifi- cance ? Is objective spirit nearer to God than subjective spirit, or is it the other way round ? Or do both stand side by side beneath God's will?

If the equilibrium between social and personal being is to be maintained, what meaning does the community acquire as a metaphysical unity in relation to the individual? We maintain that the community can be understood as a collective person, with the same structure as the individual person. To think of the community as man on a larger scale, rather in the style of modern organology,14 that is, with the aim of subordinating the individual to the whole, is an idea known since the time of Plato. This subordination must be rejected, as contrary to the equil- ibrium we have spoken of; but the question remains whether,

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besides the individual, there is not an individual collective person in which the individual participates, which goes beyond the individual but is incomprehensible without the correlate of individual personal being.15 The question is the metaphysical possibility of such an assumption, the idea of equilibrium or of the monadic image in sociality. With the concrete application we shall deal later. In my empirical consciousness I myself represent the community, and I do not hypostatise the community in this way: my consciousness does not wish to ascribe to the com- munity any being outside myself. But this empirical view must be overcome. Social unity is experienced as a centre of acts from which the social unity operates. It is self-conscious, and has a will of its own, though only in the form of its members. To conclude from this that the collective person is impossible is a typically empirical objection. A community is a concrete unity. Its members must not be thought of as individual : the centre of action does not lie in each member, but in all together. This unity is the starting-point for our thought, for one does not reach the one from the many, and an individualist starting-point precludes understanding of the situation. It is not that many persons, coming together, add up to a collective person, but the person arises only through being embedded in sociality. And when this happens, simultaneously the collective person arises, not before, yet not as a consequence of the arising of the indi- vidual. That is, the collective person exists only where individual persons exist. But since the collective person as a centre of acts is possible only as a concrete purposive community, it can only be possible where the individual person is a real part of the concrete community. The question of the 'body' of this collective person, and whether the ascription of a body to it has any meaning, will be discussed later. Litt's objection that in inter-personal relations one cannot jump from individual to collective persons, and that all social being is exhausted in I-Thou relations, is not in my opinion conclusive. I-Thou relations are also possible between a collective person and an individual person. For the collective person is in fact also an individual person. It is only when collective persons are included in social intercourse that the

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richness of this can be properly grasped. To grant the collective person, then, does not limit the basic sociological category of I-Thou relations; rather, in the eyes of God, the all-embracing Person, collective and individual persons have the same structure, both closed and open, with mutual completion, and social and introversive intentions within a structural unity. Yet we still shrink from asserting the reality of the collective person. As the problem of reality can be solved only from the ethical standpoint, the question must first be discussed how far ethical, personalist categories are applicable to a collective person. Clearly this will be important for the idea of the church.

We now have the basis for a theory of the formation of empirical communities. They must all be built on those basic relations which are given with the personal life of every man. This net of sociality in which man lives is prior to all will for community: the real relations in this sociality are still to be found even if empirical community is consciously and entirely rejected. Clearly, Leibniz's doctrine of the monad will be of help in understanding these basic social relations: individual beings, completely closed — 'monads have no windows' — and yet representing, reflecting and individually shaping the whole of reality, and so finding their own being.

What is the theological significance of these observations? Man is not conceived of by God, the all-embracing Person, as an isolated, individual being, but as in natural communication with other men, and in his relation with them not satisfying just one side of his otherwise closed spiritual existence, but rather discovering in this relation his reality, that is, his life as an I. God created man and woman, each dependent on the other. God does not desire a history of individual men, but the history of the community of men. Nor does he desire a community which absorbs the individual into itself, but a community of men. In his sight the community and the individual are present at the same moment, and rest in one another. The structures of the individual and the collective unit are the same. Upon these basic relations rests the concept of the religious community and the church.

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D. THE SOCIOLOGICAL PROBLEM

I . Social community as community of will

Where men are brought together by sheer impulses it is not possible to speak of human society. The impulses of imitation, subordination, sociability, and in particular of hunger and sexuality, man has in common with the animals. Specifically human community is present only when conscious human spirit is at work, that is, when community is based on purposive acts of will. Human community does not necessarily arise from such acts of will, but it has its being in them.16 Human com- munity is by nature a community of will, and as such it gives meaning to its own natural form. Sociology may therefore be defined as the study of the structures of communities and the acts of will that constitute them; it is a phenomenological and systematic science. The subject-matter is not the origins of the state, of marriage, the family, or religious community, but the acts of will at work within them. Human community is a com- munity of self-conscious beings who have wills.17

We must first describe the nature of social grouping in general, and then the concrete types of social acts of will and 'structures'.

It is characteristic of communal acts of will that they are not necessarily directed towards an object outside the person, but that they all point in the same way, that is, towards one another. The one man must in some way intend and will the other, and be intended and willed by him, whether purely for their association with one another, or for some purpose beyond them both. 'Agreement' which lacks this reciprocal relation is simply parallel- ism, and this is not overcome by the knowledge that the other will is running the same course.18 The agreement must have this two- way traffic, and only then can we speak of 'unity' of will: it rests upon the separateness of persons. Community is not having something in common — though formally this is found in every community — but it is constituted by reciprocal will. Gommun-

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ities which are founded on merely formal agreement (an audience in a lecture-room, etc.) are not communities of will, but come into the category of the mass or the public (see below). 'Unity' of will means that the content which is intended and willed is identical for all. Here a further distinction arises. 'Unity' must exist absolutely in the will of the community, that is, as formal unity in the sense of 'agreement' ; at first it will exist as absolute unity in regard to content as well, that is, in regard to the aim which is beyond the pure will to community. But in the historical development of every community differences of opinion arise concerning the realisation of the aim. These differences often lead to differences regarding the content of the aim, so that the unity of content can only be described as relative. So, too, the formally absolute unity of the empirical community of the church shows in regard to content only a relative unity.

One must never conclude, however, from the unity of will, whatever its nature, that there is some kind of unity of persons, that is, some fusion of persons. Community of will and unity of will are built upon the inner separateness of I and Thou. We have already rejected the idealist argument that the identity of what is willed demands the homogeneity and unity of persons. The man who is united with me in what we intend is structurally just as separate from me as the man who is not so united with me. Between us there is the boundary of those who have been created as individual persons. Only with this conception of community is the Christian idea of a divine community possible. Otherwise such a communion with God becomes unification in the sense of overstepping the boundary of the I-Thou relation, a mystical fusion.

To see the individual person as an ultimate unit, created by God's will, but as real only in sociality, is to see the relations of one with another, built upon difference, as also willed by God. This means that strife is the basic sociological law. Concretely this means that in every social relation there must be an element of partisanship. Only in the conflict of wills does genuine life arise, only in strife does power unfold. This insight is by no means new.19

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Since the Fall there has been no concrete strife in the genuine sense. Hence the very idea of it has been condemned as evil. But even in the strife that has become unholy through evil, will the inmost social links of the human spirit be visible. For it does not mean that the other will is ignored or denied, but it is forced into one's own will and so overcome. Only in the co-operation of wills is their opposition dissolved. This is the 'social synthesis which triumphs over all antitheses of the will and of nature', in which 'the sociality of the human spirit is revealed as a primal force ... a tremendous reality, which teaches us to understand the mystery of mankind and its history, and to have hope for its future'.20 This truth is valid not only for the relation between man and man, but also for that between God and Man. Man's sinful will is forced in this struggle into the will of God, and thus community is established.

Community is community of will, built upon the separateness and the difference between persons, constituted by reciprocal acts of will, with its unity in what is willed, and counting among its basic laws the inner conflict of individual wills. This definition is incomplete until we have discussed the theory of objective spirit. But first we must consider the content of what con- nects one will with another. Only then can the nature of concrete community and the concrete form of objective spirit be clarified.

2. Typology of social communities

Bonds between wills can be regarded from the standpoint of the relation between the goal that is willed and the will to com- munity, that is, the direction of the wills. This analysis provides us with an understanding both of the closeness and the looseness of the bond. The other way of looking at the matter is to study the relative strength of the wills. From these two approaches it seems to me that we can get at the nature of every bond between wills, even though in any particular case the analysis may be made more difficult by the presence of a combination of several types.

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We begin with the first approach. Every will strives to reach a goal. There are two possibilities for the relation between this goal and the will to community, and in each the will has a different form.21

Wills may be 'with', 'beside' and 'against' one another. Only the first leads to empirical social formations. The second is sociologically irrelevant (but see below on the sociological con- cept of the mass) . The third, when developed in a completely pure form, does create real social vitality, but cannot form a social structure. We are left, then, with the first form. When wills are willing with one another, what is willed can be two things. To be with one another can be willed as an end in itself (and this would include willing for one another) ; or it can be willed as a means to an end. The first we call the 'will for a meaning', the second the 'rational purposive will'. The first we describe in this way because its form of community has no material rational purpose, but it is meaning that is willed and affirmed. Corresponding to these two concepts of will are a 'structure of meaning' and a 'structure of purpose'. Com- munity can therefore be constituted either as a means by a rational will with a pure purpose, or by a will for meaning which acknowledges the value of community as such. In the structure of purpose the unity of what is willed establishes the reciprocal movement of the wills ; in the structure of meaning the unity of what is willed is itself represented in this movement. The latter, too, can throw out certain purposes, but they are not constitutive of the structure. When Aristotle says, in the Politics, -dcra. KOLvoiVLo. aya9ov rtvds eveKz (TvvecrTrjKev, he is expressing the tele- ological character of all social structures, for clearly ayiOov here means the good, and a good which is outside the community itself. We dispute the proposition in this form, since it corresponds to a eudaemonist ethic and mistakes the natm*e of the meaning of community as such. A structure of meaning is not constructed with a purpose, nor can it be explained by means of a purpose. We shall speak of this later.22

According to modern terminology — in Tonnies's creative definitions — the first would be called 'community', and the

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second 'society'. We shall keep his terminology. It would be easy to identify this distinction with the genetic one of associations which have 'grown' and those which have been 'made', between those already existing and those which are willed.23 The family, the nation and the church would be among the first, limited liability companies, clubs, and perhaps sects (as in Weber and Troeltsch) among the second. But this identification is basically false. A nation is a community in the special sense, but it has not grown, but has been willed, moreover as an end in itself, having its own value, for every community is a community of will. The task of a sociological inquiry is not to disclose the thousands of motives which give rise to a social structure — one may recall von Wiese's chart of relations — but to study the acts of will of which this structure consists. Of course associations which have grown do often coincide with the type of a community, but both methodologically and logically it would be incorrect to identify them. In discussing the psychological differences between the life of a community and the life of a society, we shall discuss the close- ness and the looseness of the bond between wills. That is to say, we do not think that the psychological differences actually con- stitute the types, but that the different acts of will have different psychological consequences.

Scheler is to some extent right to call all communities life- communities, not because the whole of life necessarily runs its course in them, but because man can live in them in the form proper to his vital personal being. The first act of affirmation that he belongs to a community is usually set within a concrete, living, non-formal act, say, conscious participation in the work of the community. Thus children, in love, or trust, or obedience, can belong in this way. For a community, unlike a society, can carry children too. This is not the genetic concept of a com- munity, but the children are in the community as a piece of their parents' will, until they have their own will — an idea which would be meaningless in a society. This is important for the sociological concept of the church. Common feeling, willing and responsibility are the forces of inmost cohesion. The basic attitude is mutual inner interest.

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If community is essentially life-community, a society is an association in rational action. It appeals to man to make the greatest possible use of his intelligence, as we see in the search for the most suitable means for the end desired, and the use of the society itself for the man's own ends. This procedure is not un- ethical only because it is agreed, and mutually applied. More- over the other man has to be treated with the great consideration, precisely in order that he may be exploited. This is the basis of the inner self-preservation of a society. The act of will by which a man enters a society must be explicit, and contractually agreed. There is no intimate personal element in this. Along with the communication between purposive wills in a system of means, there is complete spiritual isolation. Each man makes himself responsible for the society only in his own interest. A society has in principle no tradition. The basic spiritual attitude is mutual inner indifference, strictest caution towards the other, leading to reserve and self-assurance, and finally to a conventional amia- bility, so far as this consorts with your purpose. The organised structure of purposes is based on contract as the origin and criterion of the association, and develops into a comprehensive system of means, which are fixed in records and agreements.

From this it is clear that the directness of the bond between persons is expressed in a community by closeness, and in a society by looseness, both in the form of their life and in their psycho- logical attitude. It must, however, be emphasised that no pure type actually exists. There is no community without acts of will which are those of a society, and no society without acts of will which are those of a community, because society is by nature based on community.24

So far we have spoken of the way in which the direction of the will is determined, about its purposive intention and its intention of meaning. The question now arises of the relative strength of wills. This can appear as a relation of power and as a relation of authority. In the former the dominated will is activated mechani- cally by the will in power, whereas in the latter there is pre- supposed an understanding of the command by the one who obeys. This is sociologically significant in so far as in an associa-

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tion of power there can be no community, whereas in one of genuine authority community is not only present, but for the most part realised. This is most important for the concept of the church.

Corresponding to the disbalance of strength in an association of authority there is the balance in the 'co-operative association'. This brings us to Otto von Gierke's famous distinction.25 The concept of a 'co-operative' is applicable only to relations of strength, and is not identical with the concept of community. A co-operative is in this sense a legal and not a sociological concept, since what it expresses is the legal equality of its members. It cannot be applied to living social relations. Concretely, as has been often shown in sociological studies, there is no pure balance of strength between the members of a social structure. In every community which seems to rest upon the dynamic co-ordination of wills there is in fact subordination. We should agree, but with the qualification that where there is an absolute authoritative will there is real co-ordination with those who are ruled. This co- ordination is included in the idea of equality before the law, as in the idea of the rule of God, as we shall show later. But this transforms the concept of the co-operative. It has no socio- logical significance as a necessary correlate of the concept of authority. The only sociologically new structure is therefore the association of authority. This means that the scheme of com- munity and society is joined to the concept of this association, which may be either a community or a society.26 The relevance of this for the concept of the church will be discussed later. A discussion of the closer relations between these three sociological types belongs to a detailed sociological study. Empirical social structures such as the army, the school, etc., are to be under- stood as combinations of these three types.

There is still another social structure which does not fit into the general concept of community, and which can be described as human only because it is formed of conscious beings : namely, the concept of the mass. 'The mass is not real' (Rosenstock) . In the mass there is no real social bond between wills, but the wills are regarded as mechanical forces, as it were reacting to stimuli.

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That is, they are not bound together by their direction or strength, but in an objectively operative relation, in which their reaction to stimuli is necessary, while their bond with one another is accidental.

Thus the 'mass'27 in the sociological sense is not just any aggregate of men, but the structure, called into being by external stimuli, which rests upon the parallelism of will of several persons. In the mass the boundary of the personal disappears, the indi- vidual ceases to be a person, and is only a part of the mass, drawn along with it and led by it. The mass is a unity which is not supported by the differences between persons and which there- fore cannot have any duration. It is the simplest social structure and it gives rise to the most powerful experiences of unity.28

What Vierkandt means by the invisible church expresses some- thing that the church to-day has often become — a religious theatre and auditorium. The congregation are the audience, the 'public', they are pleasantly elevated by music and sermon, everyone is pleased to see many others who feel themselves exalted by the same spiritual enjoyment. And of course this feel- ing of shared joy is invisible, an idea which would be superfluous if it did not intend to say more than this. Vierkandt goes on to quote Goethe in the Urmeister: 'Where is there a more pleasant bond in society, where else must men confess that they are brothers, than when they hang on the lips and the features of a single man, and they are borne aloft in a common feeling?' But a common feeling, and knowledge of it, do not make a 'com- munity'. This can be present, but sociologically it is sui generis, and the public is no more than a subordinate concept which refers to the mass with its parallelism of wills. The other socio- logical structures, with their basis in meaning and purpose, are in the midst of temporality.

This gives rise to a new problem. Is the reference to time or duration for these basic sociological concepts something new?29 Is there a new principle of order here ? Basically, the question here is the relation of eternity to the temporal community. This is most important for the idea of the church, though it also goes to the heart of the social structure we are now considering. We

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have distinguished between a will for meaning and purposive will, a structure of meaning and a structure of purpose, between community and society. The meaning of society is clear. But why should we speak, in connection with community, of 'a will for meaning' and 'a structure of meaning'? Because in this kind of bond the will is not self-establishing, but recognises something established, it is not related to a purpose but to value, because what demands acknowledgment is a structure of values which cannot be grasped rationally or teleologically.30 Or, to put it from another angle, because community by its nature does not point purposively beyond itself. Unlike many sociologists, we do not consider that it is possible to elaborate the telos of a community, a family or a nation, however delicate our insights. A community may have a rational telos, but it is not contained within it, the community itself is not this telos. It is its very nature that this should be so. Rather, community is permeated with value, as history is, and as value itself lies beyond intramundane limitations. As history by its nature finds its telos at the boundary of history (regarded as the end of time, and beyond time) , that is, in God, so community is founded in God, and willed by him. History has no rationally perceptible purpose, it comes from God and goes to God, it has meaning and value as such, however broken its origin and its destiny may be. So, too, genuine com- munity, in marriage, the family, the nation, is from God to God, and its telos lies on the boundaries of history. This means that the concept of duration, whose boundary lies on the boundary of time, is given with the concept of community. The 'duration' of a community is identical with the duration of history. We are thinking of community as an idea, not as an empirical fact. Concretely, one may think of the communities of blood, such as family and race, or of historical communities, such as the people and the nation, or of communities of destiny, such as marriage and friendship — in their nature as communities they are all from God to God. Nor is there any essential difference between the communities which are found and those which are made, so far as they are communities in the sense defined above.

In contrast, a society as a structure of purpose is purely within

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history. For the realisation of its purpose it is constituted in history. Its purpose can be the purely personal desire of each individual (earning money, or connections), and with the satisfaction of the individuals the duration of the society is, ideally, at an end. If a society's purpose goes beyond the indi- vidual, say over a whole generation, then the duration corre- sponds to this purpose. If the purpose of the society is the dream of many people to establish the kingdom of God on earth, then its purpose lies at the end of history, which is thought of as the end of time. The category of 'development' appears, which is not found in a community. But the idea of society never goes beyond the idea of the purpose which constitutes it. A purposive association which tries to reach beyond what is temporally possible for it, ceases to be an association. Here the end of history is the end and not a boundary. Thus the idea of a concrete society as purely teleological is necessarily intra-historical, and tempor- ally conditioned.

This description cannot be refuted by an appeal to the empirical difference in duration. For we are speaking of the idea of society, not of its empirical duration. If wills have joined to- gether for the sake of their joining, if a community has been affirmed, irrespective of rational purposive tendencies, then the intentionality in these acts reaches to the limits of time, i.e. to the limits of history, to God : it is 'from God to God' . Here is the entire 'holiness' of human life in community, the relation with God which is found in friendship as in marriage and the life of a people, and thus also the indissolubility of all these structures of life.

Finally, in the sociological concept of the mass we saw that the dynamic and mechanical stimulus on a great number of men was constitutive. 'Stimulus' can only be conceived of in the category of what is temporally conditioned, the temporal 'moment'. If a community is at the boundary of time and a society is bounded by time, then the mass is to be described as being within time.

An association of authority cannot be described here. For it is to be categorised according to whether it is seen as a structure of society or a structure of community.

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So far we have analysed the structures of acts of will and the possible types of social life. We can now consider the concept which is of the utmost significance for social philosophy and sociology, one whose use is very confused and yet can be service- able for an analysis of the concept of the church, the concept, namely, of objective spirit.

But before we do this we must give a brief historical excursus on the patristic view, and the view of St. Thomas Aquinas, on the natural forms of human socialisation.

The problem of social formations arose early in the history of theology, as both a philosophical and ethical problem. It was natural that it should arise in the communal life of the state rather than of the church. Is the state a consequence of the Fall, that is, is it sin; or is it willed by God?31 The answer can be seen as flowing from the two concepts of the world32 which run through early Christian literature, the one seeing the world as good, as created, the other seeing it as evil, made bad by the evil will. We therefore find the concepts of primary and secondary,33 of absolute and relative,34 or of ideal and concrete35 natural right. The state in itself is willed by God, and good, and it is the con- sequence of sin that the power of punishment and of compulsion is necessary. In their primal state men would also have founded a state. It is noteworthy, however, that the state in patristic literature has essentially social character. Its task is to care for order and welfare. Ideals of state in Hegel's sense are quite absent.36 The existing state is therefore good and sinful at the same time. This twofold character is found in all social structures, which would also have arisen in the primal state, but now bear flaws. Man is by nature a social being. Sociale quiddam est humana natural1 This is the general patristic view. The necessary pre- supposition, for all empirical social structures, of the difference and inequality between persons is acknowledged by the Fathers, and moreover as belonging to man's primal state, and not as a consequence of sin. Basic to this view is the acceptance of the organic conception of society. If this was possible as a solution of the problem of the church, as following St. Paul it was thought necessary to believe, then it was also applicable to man s original

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existence. Marriage and family are the most primitive social structures, undoubtedly willed by God, which were depraved in the state of sin by concupiscence and the punishment of patriarch- alism, and then hallowed once more by Christ. Originally, neither the continuation of the race nor the idea of subordination, as the constitutive powers for the family, was connected with sin. Both are good and necessary. In particular, 'equality' is not abolished by subordination. The heavenly hierarchies provide an example of this. Troeltsch's idea of primal equality in the sense of absolute likeness of being does not hold for patristic literature.38 From the idea of organic equality there came into force the philosophical and ethical justification of private property, derived from Lactantius, Cicero, and Aristotle.39 There were few who maintained that poverty and wealth are the consequence of sin (Ambrose) . Since gainful activity was regarded as natural, and therefore good, buying and selling, and profits and risk, were approved, there arose an explicit acknowledgment of social action in the sense of purposive rationality. The danger of self- seeking was again and again mentioned by the Fathers.40 But the necessity of commercial activity was not disputed. Thus there was made explicit a basic estimation of all honourable work as having a proper place in the organic social structure.41

These basic ideas were taken over and systematised by St. Thomas.42 Here too his theological system of reason and revelation may be plainly seen. With the help of Aristotle and the idea of organism the life of the state and of society in its Christian form was established and recognised as having natural right. The purpose of the state is essentially the same as in pat- ristic thought. The spiritual superstructure is given with the concept of the church, to which everything is referred.43 The balance between individualism and socialism is provided by the conception of organism. How far this can be systematically maintained cannot be examined here. It is enough for our purpose to see that both social and communal activity were recognised as belonging to primary ideal natural right, and that social life as a whole was regarded as willed by God. If, as Thomas maintains, mankind is presented as a unity (unus homo),

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then social life is necessary.44 It is the evil will which depraves everything and introduces self-seeking into the organic common life.

3. Objective spirit

Without being aware of it, people speak of objective spirit in a double sense:45 (1) in the sense in which the spiritual is objec- tivised in contrast to unformed spirit, and (2) in the sense in which the spiritual is social in contrast to subjective. The basis for both is the recognition that where wills unite, a 'structure', that is, a third thing, previously unknown, arises, independent of its being willed or not willed by the persons joining with one another. This general recognition of the nature of objective spirit was a discovery of qualitative thinking, which arose in Romanticism and Idealism. It is only here that concrete totality arises ; it is not a question of numbers, but depends on the way people think of it, and experience it as a phenomenon. Two wills encountering one another form a 'structure'. A third man joining them does not see just the two men joined together, but rather a third thing, the structure itself, opposes his will with a resistance which is not identical with the will of the two indi- viduals, but can be greater than the resistance of the individuals, or — if such an idea were possible — of the sum of all individuals. It is this 'structure' which is objective spirit. Not only does it confront the third man, who is seeking admittance to a society of friendship, as something independent and autonomous, but it also intrudes as a third thing between the two who are bound to- gether in however primitive a structure. The persons thus experi- ence their community as something real outside themselves, disengaging itself from them, and rising above them.

In community the individual is faced by his own objectivised self. His own life has flowed into the community, and stands before him daily as experienced content and form, as a regulative principle for his conduct.

Thus the law of human community is an intermingling of being

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that is continually moved and of objectivised being. Time fixes every past moment in objectivity, so that the present moment and the past are in conflict. In this conflict the victory is with onward-marching time, which makes objective spirit into the historical and social turning-point between past and future. In objective spirit there is the element of historical movement forward and the expansive element. The first is the reality of its historicity, the second the reality of its sociality. Objective spirit is thus the bond between the sense of history and the sense of community, between the intention of a community in time and its intention in space. Objective spirit is the will effectively operat- ing upon the members of the community. It has individual form. It leads an individual life over and above the individuals of the community, yet it is real only through them. The more the individuals are alive, the more powerful is the objective spirit. It interacts with each individual, and with them all together. To withdraw from it is to withdraw from the community. It has a will for historical advance as well as for the social realisation of its will.

What is objectivised, however, is completely irremovable, whether by one individual or by all together. If the individual cuts himself off completely from the community, then he no longer experiences the objective spirit; but he cannot do more. It must be generally admitted that this is not all that can be set aside, if what is objectivised has been materialised. But what cannot be shown is that there is a difference in principle between the objectivisation in a work of art, so far as it is not experienced as mere matter, and unmaterialised objectivisation.

Objective spirit is found in social as well as communal forma- tions. The more members a community has, the less specialised their awareness of standards will be, the less the inner power, and the greater the outward power. It is easier to immerse one- self in the spirit of a class of school children than in that of a friendship. The difficulty of entering into the spirit of a social formation is independent of the number of its members. Its objective spirit bears none of the marks of personal aliveness. That which in a society is a means to an end (advertisement) is

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in a community a symbol, corresponding to the difference between them : the society has an end or goal, whereas the com- munity is self-representational. Objective spirit in a society is not affirmed as a value in itself, but only as means to an end : it is an objective structure of purpose. The productivity of objec- tive spirit is here directed to a system of means. If the society is dissolved, this system of means is left behind as materialised spirit, but has lost its inner meaning, since the aim is no longer there. An 'instrument' whose purpose is no longer understood, or no longer of interest, is dead, because the objective spirit which sustained it, and which was simply the means to an end, dis- appears when the end is lost sight of. A work of art, on the other hand, which bears fulfilment and understanding within itself, in its intention, rests in itself, because the objective spirit which sustained it was an end in itself, and has a life over and above the will of its members.

From all this it follows that society and community have a different view of time. In a community the intention reaches to the bounds of time, in a society it is bounded by time. This eschatological character, which a community shares with history, contains its deepest meaning, as being given 'from God to God'. This is the basis of the 'holiness' of human life in com- munity, whether it is a physical community of blood and race, or a historical community like the nation, or a community of destiny like marriage or friendship. It is in virtue of this holiness that all such human structures are in principle indissoluble. The idea of society, on the other hand, does not go beyond the idea of the goal which constitutes it; it is temporal, and intra-historical. For a society the end of history is really an end, and not just a boundary. (The temporal intention of the mass, as we have already seen, is directed towards the moment.) That is why only a community, and not a society, can become a 'church'. Of this more later.

The most profound difference between the two social forms lies in the fact that we can attribute personal character to the objective spirit of the community, but not to that of the society.46 It is regarded as an achievement in sociology to have discarded

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such a metaphysical hypostatisation.47 It is the fear of Hegel which prompts this view. His idea of the 'spirit of a people' makes the individualist feel uneasy. But we cannot accept the criticism of his idea. This is based upon the empirical idea that there would be no objective spirit without persons, that its existence depends upon persons coming together and parting, the spirit being constituted by the first movement, and destroyed by the second. The interdependence of the individual spirit lives in the objective spirit, but 'it is the triumph of the subjective spirit that the objective structures which it can produce out of itself, with their own value and duration, never win completely free of it, but must always tend back to it in order to be quite real.'48 It should not be necessary to repeat that the genetic dependence of objective spirit tells us nothing about its ideal autonomy. For subjective spirit, too, as we have shown, is dependent for becoming personal on other spirits, but is never- theless in principle autonomous. Objective spirit lives its own life, but not in such a way that the life of the individual is ab- sorbed into it, as Hegel suggests, when he says, 'It is mind that has reality, and individuals are its accidents.'49

Rather we must say 'in principle everyone can say good-bye, and go his own way.'50 Nevertheless there is a centre of action which is proper to the experience of community (love, sympathy, rejoicing, etc.) and a particular way of acting in community, alongside other individuals, in the sense of social equilibrium and the image of the monad.

Thus we do not have here the conception of a being of the spirit, called the spirit of a people, rising up with power from metaphysical depths. But in the dialectical movement, in which persons arise, there also arise individual collective persons, and only when this is seen does the richness of the monadic image of social life become clear. Collective persons are self-conscious and self-active.

But it is also clear why no personal character can be ascribed to a society. Objective spirit is regarded only as a means to an end, whereas a person can never be only a means to an end.

Can we speak of the collective person having a body? We

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must not confuse this with a theory of organism. This would once again bring us close to the theory of the spirit of a people. Body is not the equivalent of the spirit's executive function, a definition which is certainly false. 'Body' is not an objectively establishable entity, but one which is experienced subjectively. It must not be confused with physical body, the 'flesh' of the Apostles' Creed.51 Objectively, a dead and a living physical body have the same aspect, but only the latter is 'body'. 'Body' is given in relation to the I ; it is the physical body experienced by the I as its possession, with which it has an inner connection, and which it has to some extent at its disposal. In this sense the centre of action of the community experiences all its members, which have affirmed it. The community takes this affirmation seriously, and in this sense has its 'body' at its disposal. In distinction from the idea of an organism there is here the idea of a community of will. The concept of body is important for the concept of the church, as we shall see later.

Those who have followed the course of the argument will certainly now raise the objection that idealism has after all carried the day. For the community of will which has been so em- phasised, which is built upon the structural separateness and diversity of individuals, has now become the unity, with its own centre of action. What are we to reply? In fact, with the collective person a new unity does arise, which is something else than the absolute and relative unity found in the identity of what is intended. But this new unity does not annul the specific reciprocal movement of community. The individual persons remain entirely separate from one another. Metaphysically the collective person is autonomous in face of the individual persons, even though genetically dependent on them. In the structure of persons its position is no different from that of any individual person. In the strict sense unity and community are not mutually exclusive, nor are they identical; but they require one another.

In relation to the doctrine of the primal state, we may now say that theologically all the relationships in community which we have discussed can be represented in the integral state, that is, within the community of love, both social and religious, which

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was originally given, and that therefore the spiritual form (this community of love) and the natural form (the empirical com- munity) are so created that they rest in one another. From this it is easy to draw conclusions about the character of the empirical community.

We have now to show how, with the coming of sin, the spiritual form takes a new shape, and how these altered ethical relation- ships are related to the unchanged natural forms. The idea of the collective person can then be fully elaborated.

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CHAPTER IV

Sin and the broken community

The world of sin is the world of 'Adam', the old mankind; but the world of Adam is the world for which Christ atoned and which he turned into a new mankind, into his church. This did not happen, however, in such a way that Adam was completely overcome, but in such a way that the mankind of Adam still lives on in the mankind of Christ. Thus a discussion of the prob- lem of sin is indispensable to an understanding of the sanctorum communio.

Our essential task in this chapter is to reveal the new basic social relationships, between the I and the Thou and equally between the I and mankind, which are postulated by the con- cept of sin. The argument will bear extensive reference to the concept of the Christian person presented in Chapter Two. The question of the connection of these relationships with natural forms can be treated very much more briefly.

Whereas the previous spiritual form had grown up upon the basis of love, the Fall changed this to selfishness. This gave rise to the break in immediate communion with God, as it did to that in immediate communion with man. This alteration in direction brought about a change in man's whole spiritual attitude. Morality and religion in their true sense are lost to his nature; they are still visible only as forms in legal order and natural religion.

Whereas the primal relationship of man to man is a giving one, in the state of sin it is purely demanding. Every man exists in a state of complete voluntary isolation; each man lives his own life, instead of all living the same God-life. Each man now has his own conscience. Conscience did not exist in the primal state ; it was only after the Fall that Adam knew what good and evil

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were. Conscience can just as well be the ultimate prop for self- justification as the point at which Christ strikes home at man through the law. Hearing the divine law in solitude and recog- nising his own sinfulness man comes to life again as an ethical person, though in ethical isolation. With sin ethical atomism enters into history. This is essentially applicable to the spiritual form. All the natural forms of community remain, but are corrupt in their innermost core.

But man's perception of utter solitude in his responsibility before God, of the utter particularity of his guilt, encounters another perception, which, even though it seems to run directly counter to the first, does not cancel it out, but rather deepens it still further. The second perception is based upon an insight into the qualitative nature of sin, that the misery caused by sin is infinitely great; this means that it must have not only an individual but also a supra-individual significance. Sin must be imagined as a supra-individual deed, though of course as an individual deed too ; it must be at the same time the deed of the race and of the individual. Thus the perception that in sin one is to the highest degree alone leads to the other perception that one's sin is to the widest extent shared, so that of inner necessity we are once again directed from the one to the others, without whom the existence and nature of the one could not be under- stood.

Two problems force themselves upon us here. How should the universality of sin be understood from the point of view of logic and theology? It is not enough simply to suppose it as a fact. Secondly, how should we conceive of the empirical spreading of sin throughout mankind ? The idea of the social significance of sin has been developed dogmatically in the doctrine of original sin.

A. ORIGINAL SIN

The doctrine of original sin assumes that sin is spread through- out mankind, and inquires concerning the manner of its spread-

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ing. It then gives an account of the way mankind belongs to- gether, is bound together, in the status corruptionis . But joined with the account of the spread of sin there are ideas which aim at proving its universality, and it is for this reason that the doctrine of original sin presents some of the most difficult logical problems of all dogmatics.

Theology has suggested various answers to the problem. We give a brief outline of the biblical material.

Throughout the Bible there is reference to the universality of sin (Gen. 8.2, Ps. 58.5, Ps. 14, Job 14.14, Rom. 3.24), but none to original sin (not even Ps. 51.7 or Ex. 20.5, cf. Ezek. 18.2, 20 and Jer. 31.29). Nor does Paul make use of a doctrine of physical original sin. The translation of Rom. 5.12 e<p'J)—in quo is wrong: this should be rendered 'by which'. The line of thought here is therefore 'through one man sin comes into the world,' i.e. into the human race. When Adam sinned, he sinned as an individual and as the race. From eternity God lays upon his sin, as an individual sin and as a sin of the race — i.e. upon mankind from Adam to Christ — the condemnation of death. For with the one sin there is given the 'objectively effective principle' (Seeberg) for all men's further sins. No man will act differently from Adam. That is, as a result of this 'objectively effective principle' the universality of sin is established in principle. Paul does not dis- cuss the empirical form of this, which is the very question of the doctrine of original sin. From Paul we receive no more than the general thought that God imputes to all men the one sin of Adam, and that this is derived from the universality of the con- demnation of death. The first question, then, concerns the con- nection in principle between the one man, Adam, and the whole race; and the second question concerns the empirical nature of the spread of sin — to which latter question Paul gives no answer, a fact which has its reasons.

A brief historical survey will show how these two basic socio- logical and ethical problems have been dealt with in the history of theology. This will give us a starting-point for a systematic presentation.1

We begin with Augustine. The essence of original sin is the

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guilt of all mankind, introduced by Adam and continued by physical propagation ; it is shown in the corruption of the natural state of all men, in concupiscence, which is deserving of punish- ment. Concupiscence is regarded as the punishment consequent upon the primal sin. Sin must somehow be man's own act, for a moral view presupposes that there is an identity, however brought about, between the guilty and the punished. Thus, in line with Rom. 5.12, it is maintained that all men were 'in Adam'. Being 'in Adam' is a necessary but an inadequate basis for punishment. The guilt which occurs 'in Adam' must be 'reckoned': this is the meaning of the 'imputation'; and the punishment which is the consequence, namely, concupiscence, is simultaneously given. But original sin and original evil go together so closely that Augustine can describe original evil as the reason for the reckoning of guilt : that is, he calls concupi- scence itself a sin, and not just the punishment and the place where further sins can arise. Original sin and original evil continue by physical propagation. A question arises here con- cerning Augustine's view of mankind's basic social relations. The social and philosophical concepts which give significant help here seems to me to be (1) original evil, (2) man's 'being in Adam', and (3) imputatio.

When Augustine considers the whole of mankind, his first feeling is that he belongs to a race which has been struck by a terrible and overwhelming fate, and is distorted and corrupted in every element of its life, in its very nature. A fearful punish- ment has been imposed upon it. As conceivers and as conceived the members of the race are indissolubly connected to one another, and at the very nearest point of this connection the most terrible fate is also to be found. For it is sexual concupiscence which Augustine regards in this way. Its very naturalness assures the universality of the fate. With terrific intensity of feeling Augustine recognises the power of the natura vitiata, of original evil. In that unbridled age he shudders before the immense power which concupiscentia has in the world. This power, which not even the will can command, which again and again brings even the saints low, and leaves not a single man

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untouched, must have some special religious and metaphysical significance. Mankind lives in its endless thrall. Thoughts of this kind are the devastating utterance of a man who ascribes to the powers of nature a significance which is at once metaphysical and borne by destiny. These thoughts lead logically to the con- ception of the massa perditionis, the mass which endures a tragic destiny, seen as a natural happening.2

But in this pessimistic, almost Manichaean view there are also to be found the means for overcoming it. In the bodily consciousness of every man, which is given with sexuality, he is aware both that he possesses something quite personal, and that he is a natural being beyond his life as a person. Augustine, thinking the first along with the second, is able not only to relate natural corruption to personal guilt, regarding the corruption as the punishment for the guilt, but he actually makes con- cupiscence the reason for the ascription of guilt: for con- cupiscence itself is guilt.3 Concupiscence is still a power, but not like an earthquake or a thunderstorm. It is connected with man's bodily nature and thus with the person ; and yet again, it is quite independent of the person. This twofold nature of Augustine's thought is clearly expressed in the image borrowed from Rom. 5.12, that we were all 'in Adam', that is, in a purely biological and natural sense, but at the same time this expresses the guilti- ness of each man. The contradiction here is to our way of thinking extreme. Augustine's strongest words for the purely personal and spiritual reference are 'we were all that Adam' {pecc. mer. et rem. 1, 10, 11). That is, our will is like Adam's, and thus we ourselves have done what Adam did. The thought of personal guilt is strongly emphasised, but at the same time the idea of original sin seems to have disappeared. Although Augustine constantly strove to understand personal guilt as truly personal, he was always led astray, by the thought of infant baptism, to false biological views of the human race. Yet we must acknowledge that besides the concept of the mass we have another, which we can describe as the concept of the kingdom of ethical persons. The cleft between the two ideas is most clear in his doctrine of the imputation of Adam's sin. Here Augustine

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suggests a middle position between the two views already described. It is joined to the first view, so far as mankind is regarded as a biological unity, and to the second view, so far as it tries to express the idea of personal guilt. Its problem is how to derive personal guilt from the biological unity of mankind in Adam. It cannot solve this problem, for it is a view which contains inner contradictions. Adam is regarded in a twofold way, as primal father and as representative of mankind : first as the conceiver, and second as the one in whom the will of all mankind reposed : as caput seminale and morale, to use terminology from a later age. Adam's willed deed is imputed to man as his own. So biological and ethical views of mankind struggle vainly with one another. But for Augustine the dominant interest is in the universality of sin rather than individual guilt : the biological view prevails over the ethical.4

It was Luther who put all the weight on man's ethical guilt, and overcame the biological view of the race which had been derived from the notion of physical reproduction. In the 'willing of the F he found the essence of original sin, that is, in a personal ethical act. He thus maintains simultaneously that sin is both inexcusable and universal. In orthodox teaching this view has not been preserved.

It was Schleiermacher who saw once more the significance of original sin as a social and philosophical problem. He brought to the problem a new biological view. He thought it was easy to regard sin as inherited, but in that case the concept of sin was misleading (The Christian Faith n, para. 69). Original sin is on the one hand the sinfulness which is present in man, but beyond his actual life (para. 70), and on the other hand it is the guilt of each man towards the other, and thus to be described as the total deed and the total guilt of the human race (para. 71). Sinfulness, in the form of sensuality, is innate in every man, and he actualises it by free self-confirmation 'in real sins'. The first man possessed this innate sinfulness as something original (para. 72.5). Real sin increases the 'disposition', that is, of sinfulness, and so becomes the 'effective original sin', which impels others, as well as itself, to real sin (paras. 71.1, 72.6). The individual should see himself

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as the subject of original sin only in actual sin. But since actual sin necessarily happens, it is clear that every man would have acted as Adam did, so that Adam's sin can rightly be called the sin of every man. No one can regard sin as something individual, but rather it arises as something communal from the self- consciousness which is extended to the consciousness of the race. Everyone knows his sinfulness as dependent on the guilt of others, but he also knows that his own real sin is the basis for the sin- fulness of others. Therefore not only has every man made himself guilty, but everyone also lives in a total life of guilt, which both relieves him and weighs upon him. So on the one hand everyone is 'the representative of the whole race' (para. 71.2), and on the other hand the concept of original sin is cor- rectly applied only when it is related to 'the entirety of the race', in which it 'cannot likewise be the guilt of the individual' (para. 71.2). This means that the individual is relatively relieved of the burden by the totality. It is the race which is the subject of original sin, as at first it was the individual in his actual sin who was regarded as the subject. Schleiermacher undoubtedly saw correctly that the concept of sin is fulfilled in a social and col- lective understanding. But in place of an ethical and social category he has introduced a biological category, with a partial metaphysical foundation. Sin is sensuality, a hindrance to the consciousness of God, that is, something negative, and not an ethical category. The emphasis lies on a theory of heredity interpreted as a physical fact. Thus Schleiermacher concentrates on establishing the inheritance of sin — the part of the problem which is unbiblical; he loses touch with the biblical content.

Partly in opposition to Schleiermacher, partly in dependence on him, Ritschl developed his doctrine of the kingdom of sin. On his view the subject of original sin is mankind as the sum of all individuals.5 The biological view, but also sin as original, dis- appear from this teaching. Moreover, we may, as I think, find a substitute not in Ritschl's idea of a sum of individuals, but only in the idea of a collective person (see below) .

In the twentieth century the tendency is to set aside the problem of how sin is inherited. The most recent justification of

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a doctrine of original sin is to be found in the Roman Catholic philosopher Scheler, with whom we shall have to deal briefly.

We take up the threads of our systematic presentation, and must attempt to understand in ethical terms some basic socio- logical concepts, such as the race, ascribing or imputing, and collective person, before we attempt to understand the meaning of the church.

The guilt of the individual and the universality of sin should be conceived of together. The individual's guilty act and the guilt of the race must be joined in our thinking. So far as we mean by 'race' the concept of the biological species, we weaken the ethical seriousness of the concept of guilt. We must therefore find a concept of the species which is suitable to Christian ethics. We have to understand the human species in terms of the concept of sin. Hitherto it has only seemed possible to understand what the human species is, in terms of nature. Children, idiots, and nor- mally developed people had all, it seemed, to be included equally. But this necessarily led to a view of sin, of sacraments, and of the church, that was ethically indifferent. From this it follows that the Christian concept of guilt is incompatible with a biological concept of the species. So the concept of guilt must not be understood in terms of the concept of the species, but vice- versa. In this way we reach an ethical collective concept of the race, which is able to meet the requirements of the idea of the race's sin. The individual is then established as the self-conscious and self-active person, which is the presupposition for ethical relevance. And the race is understood as consisting of such persons.

The idea of the sin of the race and the individual must be dis- cussed from the standpoint of the Christian concept of the race, of mankind. How is it possible to conceive of the individual's act of guilt and of the guilt of the race together, without making the one the basis for the other, that is, excusing the one by the other ? Augustine evidently thought that it was the sinful general act which formed the basis for every individual act, and basically Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas do not advance beyond this position. Ritschl's thought takes the directly opposite course,

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proceeding from the sum of individual sins to the concept of the kingdom of sin, and thus not finding a sufficient basis for the universality of sin. Everything clearly depends upon finding the general act in the individual's sinful act, without making the one the basis for the other. An ethical category must be related to the individual as an individual person. This, however, is not to exclude the social element, but to postulate it together with the individual person. Man is the race precisely in being an indi- vidual. This is the definition which is adequate to man's spirit in relation to the basic social category. If the individual spirit rebels against God in the sinful act and thereby rises to the utmost height of spiritual singularity — since this is its very own deed against God, occasioned by nothing outside it— the deed the man concerned is doing is at once the deed of the human race (no longer in the biological sense) in his person. In acting thus he lapses not only from his personal destiny but also from his destiny as a member of the race, so that with every sin it is the whole of mankind which falls, and in principle none of us is distinct from Adam — which also means, however, that each of us is the 'first' sinner. This relation between the individual and the race also corresponds to the monadic image presented in the section on social philosophy, the image in which every single monad 'represents' the whole world. If we recognise this state of things then the awareness of the deepest personal guilt is linked with that of the universality of our deed. We cannot take refuge behind carrying the guilty burden of an empirical and temporal first sin, for this would mean falling back upon the biological concept of the race. But we are to connect our individually general deed with the universal guilt. And it is clear that this leads not to an unburdening but to renewed burdening. Every act is at once an individual act, and one in which mankind's general sin is brought to life again. In this way we have established the universality of sin as necessarily given along with and in individual sin.

From this recognition of the bond between the individual and the race there emerges what has been called the experience of common sinfulness. T am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips,' Isaiah cries, as, in the

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utmost loneliness, he confronts the holiness of God. In speaking thus he is not divesting himself of his personal guilt, but rather positing it together with the awareness that in him the sin of the whole people comes to life, and that his sin stands in the closest connection with it. The experience of ethical solidarity and the recognition that one is the peccator pessimus belong together. But the experience does not in any way constitute sociality; but sociality is present before and apart from it. It is necessary to bear this carefully in mind (see below on 'Experiencing the Church', 1 94ff.) . The experience of ethical solidarity is built upon the uncompromising singularity of the person, so that even in the awareness of the closest belonging together the ontic and ethical separateness of individual persons on account of sin can never cease, nor fade from the consciousness. There is no over- leaping the limits of the I. Here we once again meet the I -Thou relation presented above (realised in the guilty sense), the 'aboli- tion' of which is possible only in the concept of the church. We now add, however, to complete the picture, that it is not only the Thou which is essential to the I, but the race too. The 'experience' of the peccatorum communio in its relation to the basic ontic re- lationships paves the way for the experience of the church, as we shall later present it.

Further, the I which has become a person experiences the bond only with other individual I's which have become persons, and it is only to these I's that the concept of community can be applied. All others belong only in possibility to community. (Note how the basic outlines of the concept of the church are already emerging.) With these considerations all empirical objectification of the universality of sin is rejected, and we have consciously turned aside from the Augustinian doctrine of original sin.

The defence of the idea of original sin recently suggested by Max Scheler is based on the proper recognition that our ethical concepts do not keep pace with our social insights, but are one- sidedly individualistic. Guilt, he says, is necessarily connected with autonomous personal action, but not with concrete indi- viduality. It is perfectly possible for a person to act guiltily

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without being individually guilty. The basis for this view is the Platonic conception of good and evil as substantial entities, with the consequent weakened concept of autonomy. For Christian thinking good and evil are qualities of the will, and this destroys Scheler's argument. I think we have shown that nevertheless we are not driven to think in sheerly individualistic terms.

But since we are bound to accept some kind of historical spread of sin, we must now face the question of the nature of this empirical spread. First, we must say that basically nothing can be known about this. Sin is on every occasion an unfathomable and inexcusable contradiction of God, arising out of the free will. The psychological motivation of sin can be analysed right up to the deed, but the deed itself is something entirely new, done in freedom, and psychologically inexplicable. All explan- ations whether in the psychic or the mental realm are historicis- ings, excuses, weakenings of the fact of sin. If we remember this, then we avoid fundamental error, and can at the same time recog- nise the relative justification of our question. At least we must try to analyse the motivation of sin up to the actual doing of it. We look for these motives not in sexuality, as is done in tradi- tional teaching, but in spirituality bound up in sociality. The original community of love, as the repose of wills in mutual action, is destroyed when one will exchanges the movement of love for an egocentric movement. And it is of the nature of the situation that the one who sees everyone around him abandoning the unbroken community and adopting an egocentric direction should himself take the same direction, for he sees that his own movement towards community is empty, and without response. This begins in the smallest circle and extends ever farther, so that one can say that the reason for general egoism is to be found in sociality.6

Is this development identical with the shift from community to society? Clearly not. For in practice both community and society continue, though no longer in their purity, but in 'relativity'. There is now no community without sin, but on the other hand a 'society' is not just a 'sinning community'. A 'contract' as such is not evil (see above). It is only evil when it

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consciously exploits or destroys the other. Nor is the will to self- preservation as such evil. Therefore sin in the community is not the newly-added individual will to self-preservation — which in fact makes community possible — but the sin is the will to affirm in principle oneself and not the other as a value, and to acknowledge the other only in relation to oneself. But it will be objected that this is precisely the nature of a society. Not so. A society is not built upon self-seeking, but on the instinct to self- preservation ; and thus it is no more built upon the evil will than a community is. By a relative life of community we mean that the community is a necessary form of human activity in general, and that it is not completely bound to the ethical content of the will. Even when the will takes an evil direction there is still community, though it is hollow. In contrast to a society the value of the common life, without defined purposes, is acknowledged, though the individuals in this community are fundamentally separated and isolated from one another. But the evil will at work in a society turns it into an institution for the systematic exploitation of its members. It would be misguided to try to understand the real nature of communities and societies in terms of this state of affairs. For we see here the degeneration of their real nature through sin. A solution of this problem can only be found in the Christian concept of community.

B. ETHICAL COLLECTIVE PERSONS

If the subject of sin is at once the individual and the race, what is the form of sociological unity suitable for the mankind of Adam ? This reintroduces the question of the ethical personality of collective persons which we previously left open and which determines whether there is any meaning in the idea of a col- lective person. Is it possible to regard the collective person as an ethical person, that is, place it in the concrete situation of being addressed by a Thou? If so, then we shall have proved that it is a centre of action.

The meaning and reality of such a call can be comprehended

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only by one who, as a part of an empirical community, has experienced it. It is the Israelite concept of the people of God, which arose solely through being thus challenged by God, by the prophets, by the course of political history and by alien peoples. The call is to the collective person, and not to the individual. It is the people that is to do penance as the people of God. It was the people, and not the individuals, who had sinned. So it was also the people who must be comforted (Isa. 40.1). When peoples are called, God's will is seen shaping history, just as when the individual is called, he experiences his history. There is a will of God for the people, just as there is for the individual. When a people conscientiously submits to God's will and goes to war, to fulfil its history, its mission in the world, thus entering completely into the ambiguity of human sinful action, it knows that it is summoned by God, that history is to be made ; here war is no longer murder. God does not only have eyes for the nation ; he has a purpose for every smallest community, for every friend- ship, every marriage, every family. And in this same sense he has a purpose for the church too. It is not only individual Germans and individual Christians who are guilty; Germany and the church are guilty too. Here the contrition and justification of individuals is of no avail ; Germany and the church themselves must repent and be justified. The community which is from God to God, which bears within it an eschatological meaning — this community stands in God's sight, and does not dissolve into the fate of the many. It has been willed and created, and has fallen into guilt; it must seek repentance, it must believe in and ex- perience grace at the limits of time. It is clear that this can happen only 'in' the individual. Only thus can the hearing of the call be concretely comprehended, and yet it is not the individuals, but the collective person (Gesamtheit) who, in the individuals, hears, repents and believes. The centre of action lies in the collective person. Thus the collective guilt of a community is something else than guilt as a social phenomenon in the community. The 'people' is to repent, but it is not a question of the number who repent, and in practice it will never be the whole people, the whole church, but God can so regard it 'as if' the whole people

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has repented. Tor the sake of ten I will not destroy it' (Gen. 18.32). He can see the whole people in a few individuals, just as he saw and reconciled the whole of mankind in one man. Here the problem of vicarious action arises, which we deal with later. When the collective person is addressed ('He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches' — Rev. 2 and 3), the conscience of each individual person is addressed. Each person, however, has only one conscience, which is valid for him both as a member of the collective person, and as an individual. For there are not two strata in man, one social and one private; a man is structurally a unity, and it is only the directional in- tentions which can be in conflict in him. He must know himself and make decisions as an inner unity, must not therefore blindly subject himself to the concrete claims of the collective person, but struggle through to an integrated decision of the will. Only upon such integrated persons is the ethical community built. Our conception of collective guilt is thus not that of a fault de- riving from certain contents or parts of the soul ; but the con- crete form of collective guilt is the total guilt of the integrated person.

These insights now have to be applied to the concept of man- kind. Mankind is the universal community comprising all communities. The participation in its life as a community is authenticated by the affirmation of life lived in fellowship with others. For this always exists within the collective human person. It too, like every person, is capable of receiving the ethical call, as it can be heard for the whole of mankind in the story of Jesus Christ. The collective human person has a heart. The indi- vidual authenticates his participation in this in its ethical aspect, that is, by every act of repentance and recognition of guilt. The collective person's heart beats at the point where the indi- vidual recognises himself both as an individual and as the race, and bows to God's demand. Here is the seat of its moral unity; it has in reality one conscience, in so far as every man is Adam. It is a structural peculiarity of the mankind of Adam that it breaks up into many isolated individuals, even though it is united as mankind, which has sinned as a whole; it is 'Adam',

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a collective person, which can be superseded only by the col- lective person, 'Christ existing as the church'. The sign of be- longing to the old mankind, to the first Adam, lies in sin, and the individual's awareness of guilt reveals to him his connection with all those who have sinned ; in recognising that he belongs to the mankind of Adam, the individual places himself within the peccatorum communio. 'The mankind of sin' is one, even though it consists throughout of individuals ; it is a collective person and yet subject to endless fragmentation; it is Adam, as every indi- vidual is both himself and Adam. This duality is its nature, annulled only by the unity of the new mankind in Christ.

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CHAPTER V

Sanctorum Communio

A. BASIC PRINCIPLES

I . Conclusion of the discussion in the concept of the church : retrospect

and prospect

So far our whole theological inquiry has not only had the dis- cussion of the sanctorum communio as its aim; but it has been pos- sible at all, and significant, only in the light of the sanctorum communio.1 Only through the sanctorum communio can we justify the introduction of philosophical discussions into the framework of theology. It is not that in the idea of the sanctorum communio all that has been said about the peccatorum communio has no substance ; it is rather precisely in the sanctorum communio that the significance of the peccatorum communio first becomes immediate. It is true that the man who has been justified, who belongs to the church of God, has 'died to sin'; 'no one who abides in Christ sins'; 'the old has passed away, behold, the new has come'; 'for as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive' — but the life of those who are justified, namely, the new life, is 'hid in God', and 'I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.' Nullum umquam extitisse pii hominis opus, quod si severo dei judicio examinaretur, non esset damnabile.2 The reality of sin has remained in the church of God too; so Adam, the peccatorum communio, is really superseded by Christ only eschatologically, namely en-' eA-tSi (in spe3) ; so long as sin persists, the whole of sinful mankind persists in every man. Thus everything we have so far discussed is gathered together in the idea of the church, in which it culminates and is overcome.

Until now we have been pursuing two, or rather three, different

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lines of thought, which we now have to bring together in our minds; or better, whose union, which is already present in the reality of the church, we now have to explore. On the one hand there was the line of thought about men being basically related to one another by ontic personal relationships. On the other hand there was the discovery of the human spirit's pre-volitional sociality, and the consequent investigation of the forms of empirical real community relationships, which always require volitional social acts to authenticate themselves as personal social relationships. The basic ontic-ethical relationships in the state of sin not only form the basis for all personal social relation- ships, but are requisite, even, for their empirical formation. When they are changed, or re-created, in the concept of the church, the concrete form of the community must also change ; indeed it is this which makes the development of a special empirical form of community possible and necessary. We recognise certain basic forms as in accordance with creation, and consequently the question now arises, to what extent the form of the church enters into them, and whether in it we shall be able to find the synthesis of them all. This, however, can be dealt with only later.

Since even when the basic ethical relationships are changed sin remains, which means that the old ontic relationships are not radically annulled, every empirical formation will necessarily be subject to the ambiguity inherent in all human actions. What is unprecedentedly new, however, is that the new basic relationships have their own form; that the meaning of these relationships is that they produce such a form. In this we can perceive a special will of God which it is not open to us to belie by condemning everything that has taken on a form as the handi- work of man. It is in the necessary bond between the basic relationships and the empirical form of community as a special form that the nature of the church, formally speaking, resides.

There are basically two ways of misunderstanding the church, one historicising and the other religious. In the first, the church is confused with the religious community; in the second, with the kingdom of God. In the first, the character of reality which is

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possessed by the new fundamental relationships based on God is overlooked in favour of the 'religious motives' which in fact lead to empirical community (the urge to do missionary work, the need to impart one's faith, etc.). This outlook, however, receives its plain judgment in the words of John : 'You did not choose me, but I chose you' (John 15.16). The second misunderstanding springs from not taking seriously the fact that man is bound by history; that is, historicity is either deified as an object, as in Roman Catholicism, or it is simply evaluated as accidental, subject to the law of sin and death. This, however, is not to accept but to circumvent God's will, which is to reveal in the church as he did in Christ everything which he reveals by con- cealing it in the guise of historical events. To put it differently : the 'seriousness' which is so much talked about is carried so far that it loses its real character and becomes formalistic. The first misunderstanding is almost unavoidable in the study of the church from the historical or sociological point of view ; but it is equally at home in the religio-romantic circles of the Youth Movement. The second is met with in theology. Both are dangerous, for both can be nourished by solemn and earnest religious feeling. In neither, however, is there any grasp of the reality of the church, which is at once a historical community and established by God. Thus the lines of thought we have pur- sued so far are justified and blended in the concept of the church. Upon the new basic ontic relationships there rests a communal being which, viewed from outside, cannot be characterised other than as a 'religious community'. Now it is certainly possible for us to confine ourselves to the empirical phenomenon 'church' qua 'religious community' or religious society, to analyse it as a 'corporation subject to the law applying to public bodies' and describe it in terms of sociological morphology. In this case all theological discussion of the subject would be superfluous. Or on the other hand — this is the second possibility — we can take the church's claim to be God's church seriously, when it regards the fact of Christ, or the 'Word', as constitutive. This means, further, that we must look at the new basic social relationships which are here presupposed, and which in the deepest sense make

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possible a social formation like the church. In this case one of our premises will of course no longer be susceptible of further justific- ation, namely, that we take the claim of the church seriously, that is, not as historically comprehensible, but as having its basis in the reality of God and his revelation. We do not want to bring standards forjudging the church from outside; the church can be fully understood only from within itself, from within its own claim; only thus can we suitably acquire critical standards for judging it.

Here, however, we apparently fall into logical inconsistencies from the very outset. We said we were taking the church's claim to be the church of God seriously, but in the first place, this, of course, is not to say that we may accept this claim un- tested. The question is only as to what criteria we should take to test the assertion. In principle the way is indeed open for the discovery of outside criteria, that is, for deducing the correctness of the proposition from outside. This way does not in principle take us farther than the category of possibility. Proceeding from this, however, one necessarily arrives at the concept of religious community. The concept of the church is possible only in the sphere of reality based on God ; that is, it is not deducible. The reality of the church is a reality of revelation, part of whose nature it is to be either believed or denied. So if we want to find an adequate criterion for justifying the church's claim that it is the church of God, this is possible only if we place ourselves within it, if we submit in faith to its claim. Belief, of course, is not a possible method of arriving at scientific knowledge, but as the belief which accepts the claim made in revelation, it is the given premise for positive theological knowledge. It would be completely wrong, too, to 'establish' from the belief in Christ the belief in the church as a conceptual necessity. What is conceptually necessary is not for that reason real. Rather there is no relation to Christ in which the relation to the church is not necessarily presupposed. Thus logically the church presupposes its basis within itself; it can be judged only through itself, like all revelations. It pre- supposes what is to be found. Before one can begin to talk about the church there must be knowledge and acknowledgment of its

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reality. This is precisely what proves that it is a reality which has been revealed not to those outside, but to the man who be- lieves its claim. Only the man who is already in the church can admit that these theological methods are justified; but in them he will have abandoned the objective outside position. It is this very thing which provides the logical stumbling-block for the entire question of the church. People ask whether the religious community — which is then also called the church — necessarily has its basis in the Christian religion, or whether the attitude of the religion itself is individualistic ; they go to much trouble to derive the power to form communities from a concept of the 'Holy', to show by means of Christian ethics that men are ethically dependent upon one another, to arrive at a socio- logical category from the nature of revealed religion. But they never seek the point of departure in the recognition of the church of God as a reality which has been revealed, and so it is certain from the outset that the concept of the church is something they will never arrive at. Further, it is impossible to prove by means of a universal concept of religion the necessity of the concept of religious community. Two outstanding examples, taken from the most recent Protestant and Roman Catholic works on religious philosophy, may help to illustrate this.

Max Scheler,4 in his Wertethik, develops a system for placing values in order of rank. The value accorded highest place is the religious one of the 'Holy'. Now there are certain a priori laws within this order of values, one of which can be expressed in the proposition: 'The higher the values, the less they are divisible.' If several persons wish to partake of a pleasure of the senses, then the value of the sense-object, of a loaf of bread, for instance, is divided among the number of persons. Half a loaf has half the value of a whole loaf. But with works of art, for instance, the situation is quite different. Works of art are in principle in- divisible. The most pronounced contrast, however, is offered by the value of the Holy, which 'is in principle proper to every being', but which by its very nature does not even allow of any material bearer. As the sense value divides the partakers, so the function of the spiritual value is to unite, in a superlative sense.

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The deduction is very illuminating, but the thought behind it is thoroughly formalistic. It is certainly true of a sense pleasure that the pleasure can only entirely profit one man; but what does Scheler mean by 'to unite' ? Clearly the possibility of simul- taneously assembling several persons round one object. For he cannot be thinking either of bringing several persons together empirically, or of community in the strict sense, since both ideas would clearly be wrong here. (Cf. the phenomenon of the mass and egocentric mysticism.) The thought that by its nature the Spiritual or the Holy presents such a possibility sooner than do the things of the senses is correct, but devoid of content. For one could just as well say that the value of the Unholy or Diabolical as a spiritual value was of incomparable unifying power. Like- wise Scheler would be unable to demonstrate any difference in principle between the unifying effect of the Holy and that, for instance, of the Beautiful or Good. The correctness of the deduc- tion lies in the perception that the immaterial value has an essential unity setting it above all material things, but that unity only potentially guarantees a certain wider partaking of that value. It is the applied logical proposition: 'The smaller the content, the greater the compass of a concept.' The flaw in Scheler's argument lies in the fact that in the idea of the Holy he proceeds from a metaphysical concept of value which in its absoluteness remains for ever inaccessible to us, instead of argu- ing, as he might have done, from the historically positive revela- tion of the Holy in Christ, the 'material bearer of the value', and arriving from the factors determining the content of revelation (which are not only a 'symbol') at the reality of community as established by the Holy. It is only upon the ground of concrete revelation that we can overcome the empty concept and poten- tiality and arrive at the real community relationships, which are present in virtue of the 'historical' reality of the Holy.5

This, it seems, is exactly what Heinrich Scholz6 was trying to do. Proceeding from the idea of revelation he seeks to break through indirectly to the concept of community. First, he says, religion is one of the ponderables of the human spirit, and secondly it is not a priori, but revelation, these being mutually

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exclusive concepts. From this it follows that education in re- ligion is necessary. Education in revealed religion is possible, however, only upon the ground of a tradition, which is in turn unthinkable without a community. We first dispute the idea that the categories of a priori and revelation are completely opposed in the sense in which Scholz uses the concept of revelation, namely as synonymous with the consciousness of revelation. Further, we must ask what educating someone in revelation is supposed to mean. Clearly only the subject-matter of religious knowledge can be imparted. But this does not seem to be specific education in or for religion, and the bearer of such an education, the community preserving the tradition, is not as such qualified as a specifically religious community, let alone as a church. It is just as true of science that it bears within it such 'sociological cate- gories' ; basically Scholz does not tell us anything more than that religion can be handed on to others (and even this he cannot show to be something necessary in principle — one has only to think of mysticism), and to this extent exercises certain social effects. This, however, does not tell us anything new, nor even anything essentially relating to religion. It is something historic- ally self-evident.

Our problem was to decide to what extent the reality of God's revelation in Jesus Christ also postulated the reality of the revelation of the church. We see a decisive difference between the community as the guardian of the Christian tradition and the Christian church. Scholz should at least have asked why re- ligion is handed down, whether such a phenomenon means more with religion than with science, whether community was inherent in the intention of his general concept of religion, or whether it lay in the accidental inclination of men. Scheler thought too formally ; Scholz seeks to think more concretely, but falls into the opposite error of historicising and becoming too empirical. He himself admits that he does not derive the concept of community directly from the nature of religion, and is in doubt as to whether such a derivation is at all possible. There is in fact only one religion from which the concept of community is essentially inseparable, and that is the Christian religion. Thus

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in my view the two interpretations just described do not demon- strate the nature and necessity of religious community, let alone the necessity of the church. This does not mean that we repudiate the problem of the connection between religion and community as such, which belongs to the philosophy of religion. But in order to master it we must make more distinctions.

The general concept of religion has no social intentions. The idea of the Holy in its general sense as a religious category is not fulfilled in relation to society, but in the soul's solitariness with God. The mystic too has a religion. If it is nevertheless a fact that religion is for the most part social in character, this is pri- marily accounted for by various psychological factors of a more or less accidental nature (e.g. the need to communicate — Schleiermacher, the receptive-active nature of man — Seeberg). These factors indicate that religious community is possible, but not that it is necessary. This leads us back from the general idea of religion to its concrete form, which for us means the concept of the church. Here, however, a universal necessity for the com- munal form of the church cannot be proved. In what follows we shall briefly discuss this. We must note, however, that this problem can be treated not in terms of the church, but of the philosophy of religion, which means that only the basic ideas can be discussed

First, we must consider the general connection between religion and community, the concept of religious community, and secondly a typology of religious communities. Our first thesis is that, from the standpoint of its genesis, the concept of religion as a whole is taken from social life : if man were not a social being he would not have any religion.

All man's spiritual life has at least a mediate basis in society, and this holds true also for religion. The I-Thou relation of God and man, or God and community, which is as old as religion itself, is psychologically conceivable only in terms of social experience.7 There is no religious content which does not have its counterpart in the purely social process : from total dependence to free action, from rebellion to conquest, from repentance to reconciliation, from mistrust to the most complete trust, from

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insolence to reverence (pietas) , from the greatest possible distance from God to the utmost absorption in him— demanding and obeying, giving and receiving, everything has its place. Every- thing spiritual presupposes community, which means that even the original community cannot be derived from the spirit. But this original and archetypal connection of religion and com- munity does not imply any social and communal intention in religion. Certainly the communal intention is directed to God, and without this there would be no religion. Religion must be defined here as the touching of the human will by the divine, and the overcoming of the former by the latter with resultant free action.8 Religious community would then be a community which makes itself the object of divine action, and is itself active in communal terms. From this it is clear that in religion an intention directed to religious community is not established in principle, and this must be so : for the value of the Holy is not fulfilled, like that of righteousness or love or equality, and so on, in social terms, but also in solitary communion with God. The mystics too had their religion. So our second finding is that in the general concept of religion social community is not given, though made possible — community, that is, in the twofold sense, both in its empirical form and in its collective basis. These two concepts of community must be strictly distinguished in what follows.

But it is a fact that religion is a social matter. It may be un- certain whether in its first beginnings religion is a slow dawning of 'another' in the most primitive stirrings (horror, fear, longing, sexual desire) in the individual's soul, or whether the biological social form of the family, the gens, is experienced as the subject of religion. But it is certain that where we find worship of divine or demonic beings, even in the crudest style, it is carried on by a community, which so to speak 'keeps' this private god, and from which it expects protection for its communal life.

And it is also certain that in the cultic life there arise very early, alongside the acts of the individual (the paterfamilias, the sorcerer, the priest) communal practices, in dance and song and prayer9 (the latter being either a chaotic mass prayer or a series of responses from the congregation). To this sphere there also

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must be added the sacred meals,10 the sexual orgies of the fertility cults, and sacred prostitution, and indeed the orgy, 'the social form of ecstasy', can be regarded as the primal form of religious community.11 Thus with these considerations the earliest beginnings of religion are closely bound up with social life. On the one hand the subject of religion may be seen as basically in the community, with the individual as a member of it, and on the other hand the community as a whole is religiously active.

But if, as we have shown, there is no essential connection between religion and community, nevertheless most concrete religious forms must have some affinity with the concept of community in the two senses.

What is the nature of this affinity ?

We recognise four different modes of relation between religion and community. First, a radical rejection of outward and inward community, as is characteristic of mysticism. Second, there are free religious communities, which are held together by purely rational and purposive elements, by some common re- ligious practice which is the means for attaining a specific goal. Such communities are individualistic cultic societies, and have the character of an association (see below) . Distinct from these, there are, third, religious groupings based on physical com- munities. In this category the family, the tribe, etc., are so firmly regarded as the subject of religion that the individual takes part in the religions of the cult only as a part of the whole ; and here we have a definite inner collectivism. To this group there also belong the historically conditioned religious com- munities. The people of Israel, who are also the 'children' of Israel, combine both types. It is true that in such communities the collectivist basis can be destroyed, and become individualist. Such an instance would belong to the second type. Fourthly, there are free communities which are held together by divine services, without which each individual would wither away religiously, and which see the essential significance of religion as fulfilled in the communal element.

From this analysis we may discern some motives which lead

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to the formation of empirical communities. Utilitarian con- siderations, including the pattern of needs (need for com- munication and so on), the power of a thought or of an experience which has a concrete communal intention, all lead to religious groupings ; physical and historical connections are regulated and sanctioned by religion. From this we see that the motives for empirical grouping are various and accidental. It is impossible to show an objective or a psychological necessity for the con- nection between religion and community. Whether we take Schleiermacher's idea of the individual's need to communicate, or Seeberg's idea of the receptive-active nature of human spirituality, we must conclude that first there is no sign of a psychological necessity of community, and secondly a com- munity which rested only on its members' need to communicate is a purely individualistic association. A collectivist basis and a corresponding motivation for empirical grouping is to be found only in actual religions, but the general concept of religion knows nothing of specifically social intentions. It is only when we look at actual religions that we may see some relation with community. Now it is not the task of the sociology of religion to study the arising of religious communities, just as no genetic problem is essentially sociological. The task of the sociology of religion is rather to investigate the general structure of religious communities. This is not our task here. We can only indicate briefly that such an investigation would deal with the two basic types of community, the free charismatic community character- ised by the 'sorcerer', and the normative uncharismatic type characterised by the priest, both being overcome by the third type, the prophetic, with its specifically religious form of com- munity.12

In recognising that we can understand what a community is only from a study of the concrete religious form, we are thrown back upon the problem of the church. It is possible to discern certain communal intentions from a study of the actual contents of Christian faith, as these are found in empirical groupings. But in this way we cannot reach the concept of the church. (Schleier- macher even thought that he could reach the concept of the

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church from the general concept of religion) . This can only be done when the Christian revelation is believed, that is, taken seriously. The Christian concept of the church is reached only by way of the concept of revelation. But once the claim of the church has been accepted, it is as superfluous as it is impossible to prove its general necessity. The situation is the same as with the Christological attempts to prove the necessity of redemption, after its reality has been comprehended. Only by first believingly making the meaning of redemption one's own can one clearly see what makes this reality necessary. Only from reality can we deduce necessity in dogmatics. This is basic to the concept of revelation.

When works on dogmatics end by presenting the concept of the church as necessarily following from the Protestant faith, this simply indicates the inner connection between the reality of the church and the whole reality of revelation. Only if the con- cept of God is seen to be incomprehensible unless it is joined to the concept of the church, can the latter be 'derived' from the former, for technical reasons of presentation. It would be a good thing, in order to establish clearly the inner logic of the structure of dogmatics, to begin the subject, for once, not with the doctrine of God but with the doctrine of the church.

In order that we may stand on firm ground in the positive pre- sentation which follows, we now give a short outline of the New Testament teaching on the church, in particular as a social phenomenon.

2. A brief outline of the New Testament view of the church

We can only give a general outline. The New Testament has two different concepts of the church, that of Jerusalem and that of Paul.13 The former, the Jewish-Christian, is the basis for the Roman Catholic view, the latter, the Gentile Christian, is the basis for the Lutheran view. On the first view, there was in the church 'from the beginning a proper hierarchy, a divinely established order, a divine church law, a church as an institution,

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into which the individuals were taken up. A clearly defined group, the "apostles", that is, James and the Twelve, possessed a lasting divine pre-eminence, unattainable by any others, and were therefore marked out for the leadership.'14 Paul over- came this view of the church on the basis of his understanding of the gospel. We give a brief account of his views. eK/<:A>/o-ia15 is the Septuagint translation for 'edhd, and in Paul also for qdhdl, which elsewhere is translated by cruvaywy^. The concept iKKXtjcria originally signified gathering, the congregation of the people, and is not essentially different from crvvctywyrj. Later, crvvaywyj) signified the individual Jewish congregation, while eK/cA^/cna signified the religious community as such. The Jews retained eKK\rj<rla to describe themselves. The Christian adoption of this term was to this extent a happy usage, that it was already to be found in Greek, though exclusively in the sense of a political assembly. The Christian congregation, ecclesia, is not limited by national or political boundaries, it is universal; though still a 'people', it forms, along with heathen and Jews, the 'third race.'16 To help the Greeks to understand this, Paul speaks of the eKKkrjo-la. tov Oeov,11 though mostly in order to describe the whole Christian people (I Cor. 10.32 — 15.9; Gal. 1 . 1 3) . But Paul also uses ecclesia for the local congregation (I Cor. 1.2, II Cor. 1.1, I Thess. 2.14, Gal. 1.2, and in the plural I Cor. 1 6. 1, etc.). His reasons are not only linguistic, they are also theological. The local church is the concrete form of the whole church of God (I Cor. 1.2). But it is also itself the church of God. It is 'the form in which the whole church appears in one place.' The whole church is real only in the local church. By ecclesia, therefore, Paul always thinks of what God has established on earth, even when he speaks of the local church. The church exists18 by the work of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit, which have to be distinguished. The church has been chosen by Christ from eternity (Eph. 1.46°., II Thess. 2.13, John 15.16 in the Diates- saron). The new mankind lives in him, it has been created by his death (Eph. 2.15). It is the second, the new Adam (I Cor. 15.45). Thus mankind is really redeemed in him, for he gave him- self for the church (Eph. 5.25), and the building-up of the church

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means exclusively the actualising of what has been accomplished in Christ. In the church Christ is the foundation (I Cor. 3.1 1, Rom. 15.20), the corner-stone (Eph. 2.2off. I Pet. 2.4), he is the beginner of a new mankind (I Cor. 15.27), the first-born among many brothers (Rom. 8.19, I Cor. 15.20, Col. 1.15, 18, Heb. 1.6, Rev. 1.5). On the other hand, the church is the Body of Christ, and men are members of this Body (I Cor. i2.2ff, Rom. I2.4ff. Eph. 1.23, 4.i5f, Col. 1. 1 8) or of Christ himself (I Cor. 6.15, Rom. 6.13, 19). There are thus two different ways in which Christ is shown as being related to the church, but they are dog- matically logical. There follow descriptions of Christ as the Head of the Body, as the Head of the church (Eph. 1.22, 4.15, 5.23, Col. 1. 1 8, 2.19). Finally, the idea of Christ as the Head leads to the thought of marriage, where the man is the head of the woman, and the relation of Christ to the church is described as analogous to the Old Testament image of Jahveh and Israel as married to one another (Eph. 5.23ff.). Christ's relation to the church is twofold : he is the creator of its whole life, which rests on him, the master-builder of the church, and he is also really present at all times in his church, for the church is his body, he rules over it as the head does over the body. The body, again, is ruled throughout by the Holy Spirit (I Cor. 12.13, Eph. 2.18, 4.4), and here again we have to distinguish between the Spirit of Christ and the Holy Spirit, which are not identical in their power.19 What Christ is for the whole church, the Holy Spirit is for the individual. The Holy Spirit impels the individual to Christ, he brings Christ to them (Rom. 8.14, Eph. 2.22), he gives them community (II Cor. 13.3, Phil. 2.1),20 that is, his power extends to man's social life, and makes use of man's social bonds and social will, whereas the Spirit of Christ is directed towards the historical nature of human life together.

If we now look at the church not in terms of how it is built up, but as a unified reality, then the image of the body of Christ must dominate. What does this really mean? In the church Christ is at work as with an instrument. He is present in it ; as the Holy Spirit is with the individual, so Christ makes himself present in the congregation of the saints.21 If we take the thought of the

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body seriously, then it means that this 'image' identifies Christ and the church, as Paul himself clearly does (I Cor. 12.12, 6.5); for where my body is, there too am I.22 Thus when the church is split, Paul can ask 'Is Christ divided?' (I Cor. 1.13). From this conviction that Christ himself is the church there arises the idea of an organic life in the church, in accordance with the will of Christ, from this image of a living organism. It is clear that both ideas conflict with the reality of sinfulness, and that there is need of systematic work at this point. Thus Christ is really present only in the church. The church is in him and he is in the church (I Cor. 1.30, 3.16, II Cor. 6.16, 13.5, Col. 3.9, 2.17), and 'to be in Christ' is the same as 'to be in the church'.23

This touches on another idea. Schmidt quite rightly places alongside the image of the body of Christ the idea of the total personality of the church. The church has become a person in so far as it is in Christ (Gal. 3.28). In Col. 3. n it is even said that Christ is 'all things' in the church, that is, once more Christ and the church are identified (similarly Eph. 1.23).24 All the references to 'putting on the new man' (Col. 3.10, Eph. 4.24) belong to this range of ideas. So also 'putting on the Lord Jesus Christ' (Rom. 13.14, Gal. 3.27), and the words about 'the new creature' (II Cor. 5.7, Gal. 6.15), and Eph. 2.15, 4.13. Yet one thing is still not clear — -just why the plain identification of Christ and the ecclesia is so seldom made (I Cor. 1.13, 12.12, 6.15, Col. 3.1 1, Rom. 13.14), and why quite often the total personality of the church and Christ are seen as being in some kind of re- lation and yet not as identical. Schmidt's interpretatic 1 by means of Paul's mysticism is not satisfactory.25 The total person of the church can only be conceived of in Christ, that is, in his person. But Paul does not wish to make this complete identifica- tion because Christ for him is also with God. He has gone to heaven (Eph. 4.8ff., I Thess. 4.16, I Cor. 15.23). We await his coming (Phil. 3.20). Paul did not raise this dogmatic problem. Nor do Schmidt, Kattenbusch etc. discuss it.

The problem becomes more complicated when we add, as we must, the idea oipneuma. For clearly the Holy Spirit is personally at work in the creation of the church. He gives community (see

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above) and is also the principle of unity (I Cor. I2.4ff., especially w. 1 1- 1 3, Eph. 4.4, though this is not very clear in Paul: for the body as such is also a unity) . The church is the body of Christ, but only under the gathering and uniting influence of the Holy Spirit. So once more the identification of Christ and the church is made difficult, and yet it has to be made, and it is made.

The social significance of Christ is decisive. He is only present in the church, that is, where the Christian community is united by preaching and the Lord's Supper for brotherly love. The real presence of Christ is also decisive. The relation of this presence to the problem of the Word and of preaching is only indicated by Paul. The sole content of the church is in any case the revelation of God in Christ. He is present to the church in his Word, by which the community is constituted ever anew. The church is the presence of Christ, as Christ is the presence of God.

The dogmatic difficulties that arise here must be discussed later. There can be no thought of a second incarnation of Christ (say in an individual man, see below), but rather we must think of a revelatory form in which 'Christ exists as the church.' Only then can we grasp that Paul can speak in the indicative: 'You are the body of Christ' (I Cor. 3.16, 6.19, 12.2, II Cor. 6.16, Eph. 5.30). What is meant is the actual local church, in whose midst there lives a fornicator (I Cor. 5.6), and this is the body of Christ. Christ is present to this visible community. It is the basic error in pietism and in religious socialism to look on the primitive community as 'pure'. There has in fact never been a kingdom of God on earth, of which one could have said 'lo, here it is' (Luke 17.21). The church is and was and remains an ecclesia militans in history, not triumphans. The theological signific- ance of Paul's indicative does not consist in its description of empirical facts — even considered well-meaningly as somewhat idealised — but in the hard contradiction of the actuality and reality of human holiness.26 Every misunderstanding of the early Christian idea has led from early times to a sectarian ideal of holiness in the establishing of the kingdom of God on earth.

In the body of Christ there prevails a communal life in accord- ance with the laws of organic life (I Cor. 1.12). The body is

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attached to the head, and the whole is held together by joints; but the bond of the community is love (Eph. 4.16 and Col. 2.19). The Pauline idea of organism is neither the Roman Catholic nor the biological, nor is it the organological view of a philosophy of the state. In all these views the actual whole is superior in value to the individual, the individual becomes a part of a whole body and loses his own being. Paul is speaking of the church of God, which as such is the revelatory reality of God, and the individual is really only a part of this, but a part as a whole, as one who is chosen by God in the community. But the church can in principle make no absolute claim over the individual; this would involve the Roman Catholic view of the church. So by this organic view Paul means on the one hand all belonging to the body of Christ, who is the unity of all members, and on the other hand he means the belonging to the community of God, in which alone the individual can live. But from this there follows the demand, or rather there follows as a matter of course, that one co- operates in the whole. It is not the empirical church as such which is the organism — the empirical sociological view of organism is untenable sociologically, if it tries to be more than a partial image, and superfluous27 if it does not try to be more — but the community of God. The organism of the community is the function of the Spirit of Christ, that is, it is the body of Christ in the sense we have already described, of the body as a collective person. We may now understand how Paul can say that we are the body which is ruled by the head. 'Body' is always a functional concept (see below), and on the other hand where Christ rules human wills he is himself present. He is the 'body', he is 'Christ existing as the church'.

From all this it follows that the sociological structure of the church in the New Testament view involves a multitude of persons, a community and a unity, all belonging together, analogous to the structure of communities of will.

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B. POSITIVE PRESENTATION LEADING TO THE BASIC PROBLEMS AND THEIR DEVELOPMENT

The church is God's new purpose for men. His will is always directed towards actual historical man, and therefore has its beginning in history. At some point in history it must become visible and comprehensible. But since the primal community, in which God speaks and the Word becomes deed and history through men, is rent asunder, now God himself must speak and act, and because his Word is always deed this means that he simultaneously accomplishes a new creation of men. Thus his will is at the same time fulfilled, that is, revealed. So just as the church has its beginning in Christ, so it is fulfilled in him. He is the corner-stone and foundation of the building, and the fullness of the church is his body. He is the first-born among many brethren, and yet all are one in him — Eph. i.$. : 'According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love; having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself . . . (verse 1 1 ) in whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will' (cf. II Tim. 1.9, John 15.16 — Diatessaron). Note the use of ev throughout;28 'not merely by him but in him are we reconciled; hence also rightly to discern his Person and his history is the right discernment of our reconciliation.' If we, the members of the Christian church, are to believe that God in Christ has reconciled us, the Christian church, with himself, then in the Mediator of our reconciliation there must be combined not merely the love of God that reconciles, but at the same time the humanity that is to be reconciled, the humanity of the new Adam.29

If the church consummated in Christ is to build itself up in time, the will of God must constantly be realised anew, no longer acting as a general principle for all men, but in the personal appropriation of individual men; and this appropriation is

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possible only upon the ground of God's action in Christ, and pre- supposes both the being of mankind in the church (which is consummated in Christ) and the bringing of the individual into the church, that is, into the humanity of Christ, by the act of appropriation. The refractoriness of the ideas of revelation and time, consummation and becoming, cannot be overcome logically. Revelation enters into time, not only apparently but in reality, and in doing so bursts the time-form asunder. If, however, we sought for this reason to understand revelation only as a beginning (potentiality) and not as at the same time con- summation (reality), we should be depriving God's revelation of its decisive quality: the fact that his Word has become history.

In order to carry out the temporal building of the church as his community, God reveals himself as the Holy Spirit. The will of God which brings individual human beings together in the church, maintains it, and is effectual only within it, is the Holy Spirit; and only by being personally appropriated by the Holy Spirit, by standing in the actual church, do we experience our election in the Church, which is based on Christ.

Thus our study falls naturally into the following parts : first, we have to inquire into the consummated church established in Christ through God's action, the church of God; or, as we expressed it earlier, into the life-principle of the new basic relationships of social existence. We have therefore to discuss the analogy with the basic relationships established in Adam, and their abolition. The new relationships are completely estab- lished in Christ, not ideally but in reality. Mankind is new in Christ, that is, new when seen in the light of eternity, but it also becomes new in time. Thus the second part will be the study of the action of the Holy Spirit as the will of God for the historical actualisation of the church of Jesus Christ. Only we must take strict note that the opposition here is not between actualisation by the Holy Spirit and the potentiality in Christ, but between the actualisation by the Holy Spirit and the reality in the revelation in Christ. That is the basis for the whole understand- ing of the problem of the church. The 'possibility' that the church

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will not be made actual by the Holy Spirit simply no longer exists. But it is the church which is completely established in Christ as a reality which is necessarily made actual. It is a great temptation to apply here the category of potentiality in Christ. But this category destroys the character of redemption as real; the reconciliation and justification of the world is, with regard to revelation, really based on Christ — for the faith which, admittedly, is possible only within the actualised church. The church is not first made real by assuming empirical form, when the Holy Spirit does his work; but the reality of the church of the Holy Spirit is one which is founded on revelation, and it is a matter merely of believing in that revealed reality in its empirical form. As Christ and the new mankind now necessarily belong together, so the Holy Spirit too is to be seen as effectual only within this mankind. This makes evident the misunderstanding which consists in regarding the objective action of the Spirit as independent of the church. The Holy Spirit is solely in the church and the church is solely in the Spirit. Ubi enim ecclesia ibi et Spiritus; et ubi Spiritus Dei, illic ecclesia et omnis gratia.30 And yet Troeltsch thought it necessary to maintain that in the Protestant conception of the church it was not a question of the congre- gation, but solely of the Word, that is, of the objective action of the Holy Spirit; that where the Word is, there the church is, even in the complete absence of hearers. This is a complete mis- understanding of the Protestant tenet of the significance of the Word, of which we have yet to speak.

It will then, thirdly, be necessary to determine the relation between the Holy Spirit ruling over the church and the human spirit of the community which the action of the Holy Spirit brings about. This raises the problem of the empirical church. In this connection the difference between the Idealist and the Christian concept of objective spirit will become plain.

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I. The church established in and through Christ — its realisation

The reality of sin, we found, places the individual in the utmost loneliness, in a state of radical separation from God and man. It places him in the isolated position of one who confesses that he committed the 'first' sin, that in him the whole of mankind fell. But at the same time it brings him both objectively and subject- ively into the closest bond with the rest of mankind, precisely through the guilt involved, which, while it cannot, it is true, take on empirical form as a bond of guilt, is nevertheless experienced in every concrete bond. Now since in the individual act of guilt it is precisely the humanity of man which is affirmed, mankind itself must be regarded as a community. As such it is at the same time a collective person, which, however, has the same nature as each of its members. In Christ this tension between being isolated and being bound to others is really abolished. The thread be- tween God and man which the first Adam severed is joined anew by God, by his revealing his love in Christ. He no longer demands and summons, approaching mankind purely as Thou; but gives himself as an I, opening his heart. The church is grounded in the revelation of the heart of God. But as, when the primal communion with God was rent asunder, human commu- nity was rent too, so likewise when God restores the communion of mankind with himself, the community of men with each other is also re-established, in accordance with our proposition about the essential connection between man's communion with God and with his fellow-man.

In Christ mankind is really drawn into communion with God, just as in Adam mankind fell. And yet in the one Adam there are many Adams; but there is only one Christ. For Adam is 'man', but Christ is the Lord of his new mankind. Thus each man becomes guilty through his own strength and guilt, because he himself is Adam ; but each man is reconciled without his own strength and merit, because he himself is not Christ. Whereas the old mankind consists of countless isolated units of Adams which

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are conceived as a unified entity only through each individual, the new mankind is completely drawn together into the one single historical point, into Jesus Christ, and only in him is it comprehended