BONHOEFFER’S LIFE TOGETHERReview by Jan den Ouden
In the midst of a threat of war, and a torn and divided national church,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer finds himself contemplating the question how the believer
can remain standing strong and together with his fellow believers be the church
that God has intended them to be: the body of Christ in unity. Bonhoeffer had a
fascination with the formation of this Christian community. His understanding
of the nature of community is described in his Sanctorum Communio, and in his Act
and Being which grounded his interpretation of the church as a primary form
of God’s self-revelation; how does God become present in Christ in and among
those who profess faith in the gospel? His premise is that Christians “... belong not in the seclusion of a cloistered
life but in the midst of enemies,”[1] and
that while we await the coming of the Lord who will gather the scattered
believers we are “allowed to live here in visible community with other
Christians.”[2]
Building on these premises he shapes his rationale for the formation of a daily
community life with other Christians: “The prisoner, the sick person, the
Christian living in the diaspora recognizes in the nearness of a fellow
Christian a physical sign of the gracious presence of the triune God,”[3]
meaning that “if there is so much happiness and joy even in a single encounter
of one Christian to another, what inexhaustible riches must invariably open up
for those who by God’s will are privileged to live in daily community life with
other Christians.”[4] Bonhoeffer
wrote these words while the military draft was escalating into an impending war
and the church had already shown its weakness, compromising itself in the face
of Nazi threats. It is against the backdrop of this reality that he writes that
this community of Christian is “a gift of grace from the Kingdom of God, a gift
that can be taken away from us any day.”[5]
Bonhoeffer links the corporate liturgy to the discipline of personal
devotions. Concerning the latter he differentiates between loneliness and
alones, or solitude: “Whoever cannot be alone should beware of community,” and
proposes that the opposite is equally true: “whoever cannot stand being in
community should beware of being alone.”[6]
He attempts to 1) define what Christian community is and 2) describe how to
establish such a community. He presents it, not as an ideal but as a divine
reality, and as a spiritual rather than a psychic reality.[7]
Theologically one might understand and agree to this realty but the question
how this theological reality displays itself in day-to-day life is a different
matter. His proposition that in the broken world in which we live Christians
are more interested in satisfying the ego through emotional proximity to the
other requires some exploration.
“… a life together under the Word will stay healthy only when it does
not form itself into a movement, an order, a society, a collegium pietatis, but instead understands itself as being part of
the one, holy, universal, Christian church, sharing through its deeds and
suffering in the hardship and the struggles and promise of the whole church.”[8]
Bonhoeffer acknowledges the tension between a person’s emotional need to
be in community with the other and the deeper need to be in true spiritual
community. This first need he dismisses as a desire of the soul, which he equals
to the flesh and the world. The second need is promoted as the only true option
to come to a Christian community and he then continues to deliberate the
preconditions that need to be in place in order create that true spiritual
community. In doing this he creates a dichotomy between soul and spirit. These
are presented as diametrical opposites, serving two different needs. If we were
to establish a true Christian community, the soul with its desires should be
disregarded. Three elements of awareness or, prerequisites, need to be in place
for this community to work[9]:
- Justification, deliverance and salvation
are not in us but in Jesus Christ alone.
- We come to others through Jesus Christ
alone. The way to others is blocked by one’s own ego. Christ opens the
doorway to God and others.
- Wherever he is, he bears our flesh, he
bears us. Likewise, what God did to us in Christ, we owe to them.
Community consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us. We
welcome one another, just as Christ has welcomed us (Rom. 15:7).
This is where he takes the concept to a level of abstraction that makes
it hard to translate to day-to-day life. One could agree theologically but it
seems that something is missing in Bonhoeffer’s view of man. There is no
mention of the ramification of Christ’s work for man as a whole. Bonhoeffer
makes a distinction between soul and spirit, dividing man into emotional and
spiritual parts. This is a particular approach that deviates from the notion of
man being one, created in Gods image.
With other words, Bonhoeffer takes the image of God only so far as the spirit
is concerned. It seems that Bonhoeffer doesn’t apply the work of Christ to the
human level; where man is truly man with true emotional, physical and spiritual
needs that need to, and can be met. To exclude the emotional and physical need
from the notion of true Christian community is, in my view, an error. The
denial or dismissal of the human, emotional part of what it means to be human,
turns the notion of a true Christian community into an impossible mission to accomplish.
Yet, Bonhoeffer attempts to establish such a community. The second part of his
book is about ”The day together,” and “the day alone” where he emphasizes the realization
of a spiritual community. Even though his train of thought is easy to follow,
the application is hard, if not impossible to realize. Having said that, those
living with him at that time will testify that Bonhoeffer practiced what he
truly believed in, thus having found a way to turn the relatively abstract
concepts into a real life practice. Hans-Werner Jensen, one of Bonhoeffer’s
seminarists writes that “serving his brothers became the center of Bonhoeffer’s
life,”[10] as
he believed that service was the epiphany of Life Together. Jensen also recalls
how Bonhoeffer paid his hospital bill and declined reimbursement on a train
ticket for Jensen with the words: “money is dirt.”[11]
Moreover Jensen writes about how much more Bonhoeffer cared for the souls of
the seminarists and was driven with a holy anger: “With his Mercedes he raced
to Berlin to be with brethren and friends in trouble, and driving back through
the night he only arrived in the early hours of the morning…”[12]
Bonhoeffer believed and modeled a life shaped by the liturgical life.
Liturgical prayers, long bible readings and singing emphasized the
affairs of heaven, leaving no time for participants to meet as man to man. It’s
part of man relating to a similar part of the other. Yet, that this spiritual
emphasis was affecting behavior and mutual care was once again modeled by
Bonhoeffer himself: “When our (Jensen and his wife) then only son had a fatal
accident at the age of one-an-a-half, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote us a letter
which all through the wad I carried with me as a priceless treasure.”[13] The
personal greetings that he sent to all former seminarists “steadied our
brotherhood, strengthened our faith and prepared us for service after the war.”[14]
One chapter is devoted to expected behaviors in the Christian community.
In the struggle of natural human beings for self-justification, in Christian
community … “somewhere in it there will certainly be an ‘argument among the
disciples as to which of them would be the greatest’”.[15]
Bonhoeffer insists that it must be a rule that each individual is prohibited
from talking about another Christian in secret, not even under the pretense of
help and goodwill. The paramount governance of a Christian community should be
justification by grace, which is displayed in serving others. The practical
means to implement this is through the discipline of the tongue which will
result in the recognition of “the richness of God’s creative glory shining over
their brothers and sisters.”[16]
Instead
of judging others one is now free to serve one another. The service Christians
owe to others involve listening, active helpfulness and bearing with others.
This does require a level of understanding of grace that doesn’t come easy but
is the result of “considering oneself the worst of sinners.”[17]
Finally, Bonhoeffer dedicates the last chapter to “confession and the
Lord’s supper.” In confession a
breakthrough to community, the cross, new life, and assurance takes
place.[18]
This confession is the crux that decides whether a community is successful or
not. A deep understanding of the work of Christ on the cross is required where
every pretense came to an end in Christ’s presence; “in the presence of another
Christian I no longer need to pretend. …am I permitted to be the sinner that I
am, for there alone in all the world the truth and mercy of Jesus Christ rule.”[19]
How realistic would the establishment of such a community, build on the
practice of confession, be? The deep knowledge and understanding of the
scriptures, the state of the human being and oneself it requires, carries with
it the danger that it is not much more than a theological exercise or abstract
concept. Bonhoeffer underlines the importance of this when he writes that “whoever
lives beneath the cross of Jesus, and has discerned in the cross of Jesus the
utter ungodliness of all people and of their own hearts, will find there is no
sin that can ever be unfamiliar.”[20] The
leader gets not necessarily what he wants but what he models.
Bonhoeffer implies that confession can be the trigger for establishing
community. If community is the new reality that God has called into being
through his redemptive work of Christ on the cross, one could argue that
confession is the litmus test to demonstrate whether a Christian takes his
beliefs serious. As Luther writes in The Large Catechism: “If you are a
Christian, you should be glad to run more than a hundred miles for confession,
...Therefore when I urge you to go to confession, I am urging you to be a
Christian.[21]
The Bible suggests confession as a means to healing. The main reference
to confession is found in James 5:17. Eugene Peterson captures the spirit of
this verse when he translates: “Confess your sins to each other and pray for
each other so that you can live together whole and healed,” thus connecting
confession and community.
The
research section will bring to surface the place and practice that confession
has in the modern small groups.
Life Together attempts to help the
Christian understand what unity is, and how it can be displayed. The
understanding of it requires a level of scriptural- and self-understanding that
is a long and tedious journey in itself. The most effective way to learn it is
to see it modeled. For Bonhoeffer it was more than theory, he lived it and
became a model for others to follow.
[1] Wayne Whitson
Floyd, Jr. ed., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life
Together and Prayerbook of the Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005),
27.
[2] Ibid., 28
[3] Ibid., 29.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., 30.
[6] Ibid., 66.
[7] Ibid., 23.
[8] Ibid., 33.
[9] Ibid., 19-23.
[10] Wolf-Dieter
Zimmerman and Ronald Gregor Smith, eds., I
knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer (London: Collins, 1966) 152.
[11] Ibid., 153.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid., 154.
[14] Ibid., 154-5.
[15] Floyd, 78.
[16] Ibid., 79.
[17] Ibid., 82.
[18] Ibid., 95-97.
[19] Ibid., 94.
[20] Ibid., 114.
[21] A brief
admonition to confession (par. 32) in The
Book of Concord: The Confessions of
the Lutheran Church. Online: accessed February 18, 2013 http://bookofconcord.org/exhortationConfession.php#para32
