Gemeinschaft und Differenz

How is ecclesiology reliant on the notion of community? And how is it possible to reconcile this notion of community with the experience of social difference and exclusion? Addressing these questions, the article turns to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's book Sanctorum Communio. Here, it is not Bonhoeffer's sociology which proves to be informative for an ecclesiology based on community, but his social philosophy: the way in which he interprets the concept of vicariousness from the perspective of the philosophy of dialogue.