The Fall

This chapter explores how Bonhoeffer develops and deepens his theological engagement with social theory in his hamartiology or doctrine of sin. Bonhoeffer is clear that the fall into sin has radically disrupted and overturned primal social relations and formations (of the kind outlined in his chapter on creation). With the fall, the kinds of persons and relations evident in the primal state are replaced with sinful individuals who wilfully pursue their own isolation and solitude. Moreover, this chapter shows how Bonhoeffer, in critical dialogue with Augustine, draws in and reworks the social-philosophical concept of the ‘collective person’ to provide an account of how sin might be understood as simultaneously universal and personal. For Bonhoeffer, sin is universal in a way that makes individual acts of sin inevitable, but without thereby undermining the culpability of individuals for their sinful acts.