On Saturday I finished reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. The short book was insightful, impactful, and convicting. I want to share some snippets from the book that I found rang with clear and beautiful truth.

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Overview

Life Together is Bonhoeffer’s condensed treatise on Christian community—what Christian community is and is not, how to function in Christian community, and how to order your life in Christian community and solitude. He finishes with remarks on ministry, confession, and communion as they relate to general Christian living.

Chapter 1: Community

The basis of all spiritual reality is the clear, manifest Word of God in Jesus Christ (p 31).

Here Bonhoeffer makes a distinction between true spirituality and false spirituality. The true spiritual reality finds its root in the Word of God in Jesus Christ. What is known and understood about spiritual things is known and understood through God’s Word, the Bible, and the Bible is made clearest in the life of Jesus Christ. Any kind of “spirituality” that is built on some psychology or mysticism in opposition to or incompatible with the Word of God is unreal—false. Christians believe in the solid, bodily manifestation of spiritual reality in the historical person of Jesus Christ and His Word, the Bible.

In the community of the Spirit there burns the bright love of brotherly service, agape; in human community of spirit there glows the dark love of good and evil desire, eros. In the former there is ordered, brotherly service, in the latter disordered desire for pleasure; in the former humble subjugation to the brethren, in the latter humble yet haughty subjugation of a brother to one’s own desire (31-32).

The two kinds of community, Spiritual and human, are fundamentally different. Spiritual community is marked by service and giving over of oneself to a brother or sister in Christ; human community is marked by grabbing power over others to fulfill our own desires. We see this everywhere, and we ourselves participate in it. Each move we make in community carries an element of attempting to manipulate and subjugate people to ourselves, to meet our own desires for happiness, for romance, for comfort, for food, etc. Spiritual community is a giving community at its core. Human community is a getting community.

[In Spiritual community] all power, honor, and dominion are surrendered to the Holy Spirit; [in human community] spheres of power and influence of a personal nature are sought and cultivated. It is true, in so far as these are devout men, that they do this with the intention of serving the highest and the best, but in actuality the result is to dethrone the Holy Spirit, to relegate Him to remote unreality (32).

This is the effect of us jockeying for social benefit or honor in the eyes of others in our respective Christian communities—putting the Holy Spirit out of the picture entirely. As long as there is any focus on me and my advancement, I elbow out the real King and act as if He’s not even there.

Human love is directed to the other person for his own sake, spiritual love loves him for Christ’s sake… Human love has little regard for truth. It makes the truth relative, since nothing, not even the truth, must come between it and the beloved person (34).

This is a hard word. Are we in relationships where we value the person more than we value Christ? Are we in relationships where we value the person more than we value truth, which is ultimately to the wellbeing of all parties? In denying truth within a relationship, we fall like Adam and Eve—we choose what is right and wrong, and in so doing make ourselves out to be God, or place that relationship on an altar. Let us love one another in truth. Sometimes following Jesus is hard, even with respect to our relationships [Luke 14:25-33].

Human love makes itself an end in itself. It creates of itself an end, an idol which it worships, to which it must subject everything. It nurses and cultivates an ideal, it loves itself, and nothing else in the world. Spiritual love, however, comes from Jesus Christ, it serves him alone; it knows that it has no immediate access to other persons (35).

Here is the humility in Spiritual love. You are not mine. You can never be mine and mine alone. I give you to Jesus, and love you through Jesus, and our relationship is thereby sanctified. This stance in relationship explodes any possibility of exploitation, domineering, or abuse. That other person is Jesus’, not mine.

Because Christ has long since acted decisively for my brother, before I could begin to act, I must leave him his freedom to be Christ’s (36).

I love this. So often we (I) try to fit people into our own boxes and molds instead of giving them the freedom to be who God intended them to be, free from our acts of dominion over them.

In other words, life together under the Word will remain sound and healthy only where it does not form itself into a movement, an order, a society, a collegium pietatis, but rather where it understands itself as being a part of the one, holy catholic, Christian Church, where it shares actively and passively in the sufferings and struggles and promise of the whole Church.

Chapter 2: The Day with Others

The work of the world can be done only where a person forgets himself, where he loses himself in a cause, in reality, the task, the “it” (70).

As Christians, we are called to work, and to work well. Work indeed is a blessing, just as rest is a blessing, when both are ordered properly and received as blessings. Receiving work as a blessing from God means, in part, losing yourself in the task, being absorbed and completely enamored in whatever thing, big or small, the Lord has put before you today to do. It’s a joyful thing to be absorbed in work, and we all know by experience that our best work comes when we are properly absorbed.

Wasted time, which we are ashamed of, temptations that beset us, weakness and listlessness in our work, disorder and indiscipline in our thinking and relations with other people very frequently have their cause in neglect of the morning prayer (71).

After talking at length about the morning prayer—what it should look like, why it is important—Bonhoeffer suggests that the Spiritual battles we fight during the day may be won early on, in the morning prayer time. We often wish and pray in the evening that God will give us the strength for the following day to treat a co-worker with grace or work diligently, but do we begin each day with that prayer? I know that I myself have the tendency to start each day with vain, stupid, and ugly thoughts running every which way in my head as I go through the morning routine. And I expect order to come from these morning thoughts?

Chapter 3: The Day Alone

Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. Let him who is not in community beware of being alone (78).

Both solitude and fellowship, when sought independently, lead to brokenness. Solitude alone, Bonhoeffer says, leads to “vanity, self-infatuation, and despair,” whereas seeking only fellowship and spurning solitude leads to “the void of words and feelings.”

I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me (86).

What remedy is there for a broken relationship, for healing our own ill-will towards our brothers and sisters? Prayer. In prayer we see our enemies as Christ sees them, and in our hearts are reconciled to them in Love. This does not happen all at once, for great bitterness of heart is a long time getting out. We must patiently, faithfully, and hopefully pray for our enemies in earnest, seeking their good, and over time they will cease to be our enemies.

Every act of self-control of the Christian is also a service to the fellowship (89).

As Bonhoeffer discusses sin, he makes the needful remark that our sins do not effect us alone. We do not sin in a vacuum. Instead, each hidden perversion and brokenness in our own lives bleeds out into the lives of the brothers and sisters in our Churches and table fellowships. Our sins hurt the faith of the weak, cause the strong to stumble, and may tear relationships apart. Therefore, with an understanding of the severity of the consequences of sin not just for ourselves but for the whole community of saints, we recognize that our self-discipline is not merely a service to ourselves in our personal walks with Christ, but rather a service to the whole body of Christ. For when one member is in pain, all feel it; when one suffers, all participate.

Chapter 4: Ministry

Where the discipline of the tongue is practiced right from the beginning, each individual will make a matchless discovery… His view expands and, to his amazement, for the first time he sees, shining above his brethren, the richness of God’s creative glory. God did not make this person as I would have made him. He did not give him to me as a brother for me to dominate and control, but in order that I might find above him the Creator. Now the other person, in the freedom with which he was created, becomes the occasion of joy, whereas before he was only a nuisance and an affliction (93).

This is perhaps my favorite section in Life Together. Here Bonhoeffer flips our gossip and slander on its head and explains to the reader that controlling our tongues (and, I say, our minds) with regards to our brothers and sisters allows us to see them for who they are: glorious creations, each wonderfully different, that display the creative work of the Father. Now the voice that irked me or nose that for no reason made me squirm is viewed rightly as a part of God’s creation and good. For God did not make the world like you or I would have made the world, and it is so good that that’s true. We think we know what’s best for the world, but God values a deep and broad diversity of body, experience, ability, voice, and culture. Only He has the expansive grace to create such a marvelously marbled world as this one, and we need His eyes to see it with grace, not condemnation.

It is, first of all, the freedom of the other person, of which we spoke earlier, that is a burden to the Christian. The other/s freedom collides with his own autonomy, yet he must recognize it (101).

Bonhoeffer says this in the context of bearing with one another. I think what he’s saying is incredibly important, and I find it extremely difficult to put other people’s freedoms before my own autonomy. For in bearing with one another, we are allowing God’s creative work in that person’s “nature, individuality, endowment… weaknesses and oddities… everything that produces frictions, conflicts, and collisions among us” to be made manifest and honored. Bearing with one another in freedom does not mean allowing sin to root and flourish, but putting to death the sins of subjugation and domination in our own minds over our brothers and sisters. Any work against sin must be done from the stance of a servant, not a lord, for there is only one Lord and Ruler of all, and he made us just as weak and odd and beautiful as our brothers and sisters.

Chapter 5: Confession and Communion

In confession the light of the Gospel breaks into the darkness and seclusion of the heart. The sin must be brought into the light (112).

Confession is absolutely key to dealing with sin. LET YOUR SIN BE KNOWN to a brother or sister. As long as it’s kept secret, whatever it is, it keeps you in bondage. Jesus came to set you free! Be free! For “the expressed, acknowledged sin has lost all its power” (113).

đź‘‹ My Concluding Remarks

I realized as I was working on this post that I spent a lot less time reflecting on what Bonhoeffer wrote as simply conveying what he wrote. Forgive me for this. I hope his words moved and challenged you as they did me. I also hope that this taste of Life Together will make you want to pick it up and read it for yourself. There is so much that I didn’t include in this one small post but is extremely significant and worthwhile to meditate on.

Also, if you haven’t been acquainted with Bonhoeffer before, please look him up and read about his story. He was a remarkable man who followed hard after Jesus Christ in his life and death. I highly recommend another one of his classics, The Cost of Discipleship.

Thanks for reading! May the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you always.