Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together is a modern classic manual to understanding and practicing Christian community. The book, though short, provides thoughtful and crisp perspectives on what people foundationally believe about community, some of the misguided premise which people start with and what a core of Christian community should be based on. From there, he guides people through a myriad of important issues dealing with community. Each sub-topic is addressed in terms of its value to the individual and its value to the community. Always, we see Bonhoeffer subverting the desires of the individual by exposing them to the underlying truth of the selfishness of their practices.
Bonhoeffer begins his treatise by exploring the need and nature of fellowship.
The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer.[1]
This definition is quickly assigned a real world understanding in the representative place that a believer has as the reflective image (Imago Dei) of God:
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.[2]
This kind of understanding of community as a mutual mirroring of God’s presence to all around us throughout the fellowship is not simply an inward blessing club, rather, it is a entrance into the reality of Bonhoeffer’s understanding of what Jesus has given us in the kingdom of God.
Bonhoeffer assigns his weightiest words on the deconstruction of the mythic utopia that some think Christian community to be, when he says:
Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial. God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge one another and even God accordingly. They stand adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of the community. They act as if they have to create the Christian community, as if their visionary ideal binds the people together. Whatever does not go their way, they call a failure. When their idealized image is shattered, they see the community breaking into pieces. So they first become accusers of other Christians in the community, then accusers of God, and finally the desperate accusers of themselves. Because God already has laid the only foundation of our community, because God has united us in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that life together with other Christians, not as those who make demands, but as those who thankfully receive.[3]
Once this misunderstanding of Christian community is thoroughly shattered under his lithe polemic of artificial Christian community, the remainder of Life Together builds a construct that expresses, for Bonhoeffer, the reality of true fellowship. Such architectural work is clearly informed by the very real situation and community in which Bonhoeffer found himself during World War II, within the confines of Nazi Germany. In such a stark environment, this great Christian leader is trying to practically give people tools for caring, in faith, for Jesus (as represented in each other) and for experiencing the co-unity of God with his community. This kind of effort manifests itself very practically in Life Together.
The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from everyday Christian life in community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; for in the poor sister or brother, Christ is knocking at the door. We must, therefore, be very careful on this point.[4]
But Bonhoeffer is careful not to assign every care for the community on the conscience of the individual. In fact, he finds wayward desires in the system itself (often controlled by leader with poor agendas) and sets them to rights by verbalizing the offense in the book. For example, here he charges those in leadership of communities to seriously evaluate the fruit of the local communities they pastor.
Has the community served to make individuals free, strong, and mature, or has it made them insecure and dependent? Has it taken them by the hand for a while so that they would learn again to walk by themselves, or has it made them anxious and unsure? This is one of the toughest and most serious questions that can be put to any form of everyday Christian life in community.[5]
There are literally dozens of quotable sentences and phrases in Life Together, not because it is snippets of wisdom compiled, but because of the authors compact writing style that brings the up quickly and answers the dilemma within the same sentence often. One particular point rises powerfully to the surface in Bonhoeffer’s acknowledgement and treatment for loneliness among Christians. He clearly believes that loneliness is a powerful foothold for the work of the enemy.
The more lonely people become, the more destructive the power of sin over them.[6]
For Bonhoeffer, the antidote is clearly confession, a unifying force requiring the presence of one another. Unlike modern western culture whose individualism has told them to confess to God in private, Bonhoeffer sees that as a misplaced and powerless position. Instead, he says:
A confession of sin in the presence of all the members of the congregation is not required to restore one to community with the entire congregation. In the one other Christian to whom I confess my sins and by whom my sins are declared forgiven, I meet the whole congregation. Community with the whole congregation is given to me in the community which I experience with this one other believer. For here it is not a matter of acting according to one’s own orders and authority, but according to the command of Jesus Christ, which is intended for the whole congregation, on whose behalf the individual is called merely to carry it out. So long as Christians are in such a community of confession of sins to one another, they are no longer alone anywhere.[7]
And profoundly,
Confession is conversion.[8]
You cannot spend time in the book Life Together without being changed by its powerful message, which has obviously been informed by the realities of living under the persecution of the thoroughly anti-Christian Third Reich.
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Review by Kim Gentes
[1]Bonhoeffer, Dietrich; Albrecht Schonherr; Geffrey B. Kelly; Daniel W. Bloesch. “Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works v.5: Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible”. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996),Kindle Edition, Location 561
[2]Ibid., Location 570
[3]Ibid., Location 671
[4]Ibid., Location 805
[5]Ibid., Location 1453
[6]Ibid., Location 1745
[7]Ibid., Location 1758
[8]Ibid., Location 1779
Bonhoeffer,