"Communio" – is this an issue of religion? The connection between religion and communion might not be obvious at first sight. Some people might think of religion as contemplation, of an individual religious practice. For others, religion may be a matter of personal spirituality or of the individual's relationship to his or her God. From a Christian perspective, this is a reductionist view of religion and of religious existence. Christianity is inseparable from community. Simply put, Christianity is community. And religious practices like believing, praying, celebrating build community.

Within the community of believers, it is possible to discover a simple structure which is constitutive of it. This structure consists of a given “word” and a “response”: The word of the one corresponds to an answer of the many. In a community, an answer occurs only in the plural, which is perfectly appropriate. Many words together tell of a reality that can hardly be grasped by the individual. God and the faith in him transcend the individual. Community is necessary to let words find their meaning. Or, to put it another way, only the diversity of finite goods corresponds to the one highest good. Community thus becomes a necessity and a good itself. As a fundamental good, it makes possible the realization of other goods.

These brief reflections outline a theology of community, of communio. In Christianity, religion and community are closely connected. In the following three sections, I explain their close and constitutive relationship in more detail, using three dimensions: time, space and the relationship between inside and outside. It shall become clear that faith and community always carry ambivalences. A history of ups and downs testifies to this.

Time & community

Who forms a community, in what moment in time, and for how long? This is an important question in Christianity. Because from a Christian perspective, community transcends the ages. It is not only about the community within my own lifetime, but also about the community of the living, the dead and the people to come. The bible emphasizes this continuity through long genealogies. In our liturgies we pray for the deceased and we believe that heaven and earth come together to praise God. Christianity clearly reckons that we are not only the ones that are here today, but that we are part of a much larger context. This larger context consists of an indispensable interconnection of generations. Without those before us, we would not be; and those after us would not be without us.

Christianity does not form communities for any purpose. Christian communities are rather narrative communities, communities of telling and re-telling. The one word of revelation that has been given wants to be read, to be understood and to be re-told. It is only through shared understanding and common stories that an individual response becomes possible. Understanding does not happen overnight but develops steadily and takes time. Meanwhile community is formed. At the same time, community is constitutive for processes of understanding. They are per se collectively structured. Reading, understanding, re-telling and forming community are reciprocal movements and go hand in hand.

The thought of the French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour helps me to understand this basic constitution of Christianity. He says: Religion is the continual resumption of a word that has to be said again and again (1). This idea can be better understood by a simple analogy. It's like a love relationship: Saying "I love you" once isn't enough. You can't say: I already told you that! It has to be said again and again. Speaker and addressee of the word are thereby touched and changed. Saying the same words again in different circumstances is not only a continuous repetition but creates new reality and lets connection and relationship emerge. In a similar sense, religious practice is not one-time information or simply transmission of knowledge but consists in the "transformation" of people. This transformation does not happen in isolation, but in community. In community, the individual is addressed anew by the word of revelation that has been given. Reading, understanding, re-reading, re-telling and being changed is a practice of time and of community.

Space & Community

Looking at history, the concept of community is very ambivalent. As a German, the history of my own country serves as an obvious example. The Nazis wanted to create the Nazi state as a place of "substantial homogeneity" of an aryan national community. Substantial homogeneity means that in this place, within this community, diversity is not desired. Everyone has to be the same. Those who can't fit in have to leave. Or even worse, those who are not judged equal by the community are removed. The will to community bears the danger of ignoring the individual. There is a temptation to create uniformity where there is diversity. Individual freedom then dwindles.

Christianity has an ambivalent history with regard to the relationship between space and community, too. For a long time, the churches, at least in old Europe, claimed to occupy the space of the political exclusively. This claim was expressed above all in the political form of a confessional state. The formula cuius regio, eius religio sums it up.

However, there is also a counter-story to “community and space”. Christianity – at least in its catholic variant – also succeeded in understanding itself as a global community. As a community and a movement that overcomes all demarcations and divisions of nation, state and culture. All these variables are of course somehow important. However, they are grown, man-made and not immutable. In short, they are relative. Stability, on the other hand, is found in religious identity which is understood as a resource that shapes state and society.

Again, the thinking of Bruno Latour inspires us to go a step further and to escape the illusion of abstract universalism without falling into the ideology of the soil (2). Territoriality, the ground that defines my location, holds the possibilities and limits of my existence. "Universality", boundless mobility from here to there, is not available for free. However, economic globalization has fed the illusion that we can avoid these costs. What is important, according to Latour, is to recognize the dependencies and origins of our existence. What in our vicinity do we live off? Who are the neighbors on whom we depend? Who is our community, whether we like it or not? Only if we answer these questions honestly can we become "global" in a way that does justice to this earth – the creation.

Inside and outside

Considering the different paths of inculturation of Christianity and the tension between claim and reality, “communio” seems to be an ambiguous term. A kind of dialectic is revealed: there is a real, social community, here and now. However, this is only pars pro toto. It is open, both backwards and forwards in time. On the one hand it is a real social community, but on the other hand it breaks up other real social communities. How does one succeed in feeling a real sense of belonging to the Christian global community? To the Christian community as a real social community and at the same time as a spiritual one that transcends time and space? What forms of belonging do justice to this dialectic? How are you supposed to feel a sense of belonging without having to spiritualize everything all the time?

Particularly in the Catholic Church, one may be inclined to emphasize a mere spiritual affiliation. However, especially in the catholic tradition, the legal constitution (canon law, etc.) is not something accidental, but is of the essence. One cannot be a catholic Christian without the vinculum communionis, the necessary integration into the legally constituted community of faith. Anyone who believes subscribes to this community, submits to the hierarchy, and joins a social order. And all of this is so strongly symbolically charged that it cannot be changed easily.

This reveals a major dilemma: You need to be part of a concrete, real community with its own legal constitution. As always when community is created, boundaries are set: There is an inside and an outside. That is one side of Christianity. It wants to be grounded and rooted – in living traditions, in the lives of people, very concretely and locally. On the other side it wants to break down temporal and spatial boundaries. One could say it is avant-garde: The local community symbolizes a much larger, transnational and transtemporal community, extending to a global community as well as to the deceased and those living in the future.

Christianity sets and removes boundaries at the same time. It builds on local, concrete communities, always pointing beyond themselves. Christian communities are called to constantly expand their boundaries, to overcome their limits and to meet those who are outside. Christian faith aims at an integration that fully respects the other.

This oscillation between communal self-assurance and stepping out of oneself offers a new understanding of community. Christianity makes us rethink the way community can be shaped. It is the challenge to build communal identity without excluding others. It is the undertaking of inviting others without pushing them or forcing them to adapt. Ultimately, it is the idea of living diversity in unity. What a challenging, maybe impossible, maybe overwhelming undertaking. And yet, perhaps, it is a fitting one for a fragile humanity: for human beings that are at once individual and autonomous, fragile, and flawed. That can do little without others and yet despair of the limits set by these others.

It is precisely in such anthropological tensions that an answer to the question of belonging can be found. It is the art of being complete with oneself and yet drawing from the strength of the community – a community that is at the same time concrete and locally rooted as well as world- and generation-spanning.

And all of this in a Haiku?

Where I am, a “we” can become
Only together I understand myself.
Alone with each other.

1. Cf. Bruno Latour, Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech, Cambridge: Polity Press 2013.

2. Cf. Daniel Bogner, “Die Universalität liegt nicht hinter uns, sie steht uns bevor. Christliche Theologie im Dialog mit Latour», in: Daniel Bogner, Michael Schüssler, Christian Bauer (Hg.), Gott, Gaia und eine neue Gesellschaft. Theologie anders denken mit Bruno Latour, transcript: Bielefeld 2021, 73-112.