The Church for Others

Developed in the final months of his imprisonment at Tegel, "the church for others" (Kirche für andere) was Bonhoeffer's proposal for what the postwar church must become if it was to survive morally, whatever its institutional fate. The church, he argued, "is only the church when it exists for others." Not the members; the others. The poor, the displaced, the outsiders, those the dominant social order had written off. A church that organized itself around its own preservation — its buildings, budgets, clergy welfare, theological orthodoxy, cultural position — had already ceased to be the church, regardless of how full the pews remained. The simulation applies the structural move to the AI builder and the technology firm: the firm exists not for its own sake but for those its work affects, and when institutional survival becomes the operative goal, the firm has ceased to be what it was supposed to be, whatever its market position.