On Life Together

As a (temporary) going away gift, here's a reflection I wrote on Bonhoeffer's book, Life Together:

The Christian community, the Church, is created by God in Christ, ordered by the Word of Christ in the gospel, and preserved by the Spirit of Christ against all that would seek its disruption. This is the fundamental point of Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. Christ is the floor and the ceiling (to borrow Gordon Wenham’s metaphor) of Christian communion; he establishes it, and his life is the pattern to which it all conforms. In this way, Bonhoeffer’s understanding of community – indeed, of the Christian life as a whole – is deeply Protestant and properly evangelical (in its grounding in the evangel). 

In essence, Life Together answers the question of what happens when sinful human beings are really confronted with and really changed by the Word of God in the gospel. The book could be accurately titled with language Bonhoeffer uses in the first paragraph: life together under the Word. The first chapter deals with what happens when people who in the Word of the gospel are justified by grace live together in community, and how this is to be understood. Each subsequent chapter deals with an aspect of this fact which invariably spirals outward from it: persons who live in community will necessarily order their days differently (both days together and days alone); they will constantly be ministering to and for each other; and while they still live in the present evil age, they will need to confess to each other and forgive one another.

For Bonhoeffer, every moment of the Christian life ought to be considered in light of the gospel of grace. Whether we are alone or in the presence of others, we are sinners justified by grace. When we minister to one another, we minister as sinners justified by grace. As sinners aware of the call of Jesus to confess our sins and forgive one another, we do so with confidence because we are justified by grace. These things (confession excepted) will find their consummation on the last day, but when we gather for the Lord’s Supper, we taste in part the supreme expression of Christian community: “As the members of the congregation are united in body and blood at the table of the Lord so will they be together in eternity.”

I found Bonhoeffer’s chapter “The Day With Others” to be oddly particular in the ways he thought a day in community should be ordered. Each element was expounded upon helpfully, but at times it felt like he was giving the same weight to his own personal opinions about how Scripture should be read in community or what kinds of songs must be sung as he does in other parts of the book which I’m inclined to consider weightier (e.g. that one listening to confession should also regularly be practicing it). On the other hand, there was much said in that chapter that bears emphasis. In particular I appreciated his argument that public prayers need not be entirely spontaneous (for the spiritual “mood” of the person praying will vary day by day), but also not entirely formal (for the community will begin to see prayer as monotonous). Continuing his emphasis elsewhere in the book on reality (of community, of confession, etc.), Bonhoeffer makes the important point that abuse of spontaneous prayer can inhibit real prayer just as abuse of formal prayers can. That the community be governed by “moods which have nothing to do with spiritual life”is a function of overly formal prayers as much as overly “chaotic outbursts”.

This being (as Charles Taylor titles it) the Age of Authenticity, it comes as no surprise that I find Bonhoeffer’s aforementioned emphasis on reality over against pretense both deeply stimulating and profoundly paradigm-shifting. Churches in America do seem to be guilty of preferring an appearance of perfection and the ideaof community to the muddiness and complexity of being truly honest before God and one another. This resistance is often so pernicious that even the appearance of “not-having-it-all-together-ness” is a way to avoid actually admitting one’s own failure, fragility, or fallenness. I admit that this is all very tempting; gaining all the serotonin without expending any relational or spiritual capital sounds like a great deal at first. But the challenge (and encouragement) of Bonhoeffer is that God deals with the real person, not the façade we present. His Word has formed a community which has the freedom to be exactly as saintly and sinful as it truly is and does so because its people recognize that in Christ they are reconciled to the God “who justifies the ungodly”.

EJT, SDG