Needful words to those of us who tend towards idealism

My favorite book by Bonhoeffer as well. Contains much wisdom for our time. Thank you for drawing attention to it.

Such true words. I’m reading Dorothy Day’s diaries now–filled with her experiences of living in Catholic Worker communities that she help found–and she echoes much of what B. says. It’s very, very hard. She writes at one point of the disillusion visitors suffer when they visit one of the CW hospitality houses or farms: It’s not all sweetness and light, but arguing, mess, anger, drunkenness … which reflects real people living in community. She spent her life finding the face of Christ in the people who entered her communities, not trying to create an idealized community.

Scot,
Great post. I really needed to hear that I’m part of the problem. Very helpful and convicting while strangely encouraging.
-Jon Peacock

Jon, that last sentence is the common experience of reading Bonhoeffer.

Back 30 yrs ago when we attended an established church, we found it hard to have community, to get to know people well enough to have community. So the pastor recommended this new house church that was forming and in it we found community because that was one of the priorities in it.

your name is me

Great post; I was just reading the opening chapters of his “Christ the Center” this AM, and felt compelled to repent of selfish desires for answering the question “How?” over “Who?” The above produces similar influence: this could be long day of repenting and being relieved of uneasy burdens.

I am writing about this in my book on loneliness, in a chapter on social loneliness. Here is what I think is the the most serious tension in Christian social life: That Christian fellowship rests on a promise.
God gives us the Holy Spirit and lives in us as a promise of fellowship. Fellowship with God and with other people. When we first experience the power of God’s presence, we know with divine certainty that we shall never again be lonely for social belonging.
The power of this knowledge is what makes Christians come back to the church, again and again.
But what the Holy Spirit gives us is life in Christ, and that always only comes through death. We must die to our own desires so that Christ can give us his own life. This is true for us individually, and it is true for us as the church.
Socially, this means bringing death to our dreams of what the church should be. It means repentance from reliance on those dreams. Otherwise we become “those people”: “Those who want more than what Christ has established between us do not want Christian community.”
In a sense, Bonhoeffer had it a little too easy. His testimony is so powerful because his actual death brought life to the church. It teaches us the truth that only trough death comes life.
But, we cannot all die like Bonhoeffer. Most of us must live.
This brings us back to the promise, which is always about the life that comes after death. God’s promise of fellowship is a promise of life. So, how do you lead the church of the living? It is one thing to lead a fellowship forward into death to dreams and illusions. But it is quite another to live a NEW life together.

I read all of Bonhoeffer’s major works this year and I agree that Life Together is the best. It is the one he told his fiance Maria to read (she was suffering through Sanctorum Communio–poor woman). But he told her to wait because he wanted the joy of reading it with her when he was released from prison (which of course he never was). I also love Chapter 11 of Discipleship entitled “The Visible Church-Community” which people should read for the theology of Life Together–too often people never get there when trying to get through Discipleship.
These quotes had a huge impact on me in college and continue to chasten me. For those of us passionate about establishing vibrant Christian communities (Willow Creek chargers, emerging church innovators, church planting dreamers, evangelicals of almost any stripe actually) and who have some leadership ability, Bonhoeffer’s profound sensitivity to the weak (and how we tend to plow them over) is a welcome corrective. He was all too aware of the danger of leadership (think “F?hrer”–”leader” in German and Hitler’s title) casting an utterly warped vision of what a society should look like. When we as pastors get annoyed by that person who always criticizes the way we dress or our grammar or the song selections and we are tempted to tell them to go to another church (because we are tired of them), Bonhoeffer’s words here give us pause (as do Paul’s about the weak in 1 Cor 8 and Rom 14). Still, Bonhoeffer (like Paul) does have definite ideas of what Christian community should be and not be–it is not just tolerance and mediocrity–this passion for cruciform living is also present in Life Together. Keep up the good work, Scot.
Andy

Or this: “Christian community is like the Christian’s sanctification. It is a gift of God which we cannot claim. Only God knows the real state of our fellowship, of our sanctification. What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as the Christian should not be constantly feeling his spiritual pulse, so, too, the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be constantly taking its temperature. The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more surely and steadily will fellowship increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.
“Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.”

A sense of timelessness saturates Bonhoeffer’s writing, especially his notes from German prison. So interesting – I woke up this morning thinking about the “churches” passages of Revelation – all the screwed up churches who will get “spat out of my mouth” – wondering about how grace finds its way into this horrible mess.
Reality is: we ARE screwed up. And yet the writer of Revelation seems to be calling us to idealized forms of “dream community.” Reading Revelation in light of Bonhoeffer is challenging.

I read Life Together for the first time about a year ago or so. This is a powerful book – what impressed me most in the book was the emphasis on the need for confession in the community, a place for confession and accountability. Is there any real place for confession and accountability in our individualistic (consummerist) Evangelical church?
I think I’ll have to read Life Together again.

A GREAT book that deserves to be read every year!

#11 and 12
Amazing that Jesus chooses to reveal Himself to a church you (#12) imply is screwed up. I think it shows Jesus may not care too much for our idealizations we have of His church and chooses to engage us at the level of our “screwed-up-ness.”
This ought to threaten our petty idealisms because Jesus does exactly as He expects us to do. Love the Lord our God w/ all our hearts, souls and minds and strength and our neighbors as ourselves. The activity of love for His church is exactly what is brought to us in The Revelation and all heaven adores Him for His devotion to His people and His works.
Loving each other as He has loved us is not elective and this is no idealism. Jesus set the standard for us on His terms not ours, no exceptions for anybody at any time. We idealize because we don’t like His terms.

We are now in the midst of the struggle of finding community, of becoming disillusioned with our expectations, as well as the expectations of the greater beauracracy and institution which surrounds us and demands that these expectations become reality. The leaders of the institution just visited us and declared that we are not following the correct protocols and we are not meeting the benchmarks which, in their minds, would justify our existence.
But just yesterday a homeless couple who have been attending (but not contributing to our financial needs!) went for job interviews, dressed in clothes from our small pantry, and in doing so, found new hope for their lives. They may never contribute financially (they may move on before that happens…) My questions are these: What costs are we willing to bear to see this kind of thing happen among us? And what if it never benefits us in the “intitutional” sense? Is this irresponsible on our part? Or is this, in some small way, a realization of the Kingdom of which Jesus spoke?
It is a risky business to become a community within the Kingdom of God…it is not understood or supported by the institutional beaurocrats…
Is this what Bonheoffer was saying? Why do we so easily forget the reason for our existence on this earth?
I’d love to hear some thoughts…

I agree. I think ‘Life Together’ is one of the most amazing books I have ever read. And the part that you quoted here is something I ponder often.

RJS, #13, I think the small group model is a great place to build a confessing community. Done correctly, they build the necessary trust, intimacy (in the plutonic sense!), and accountability for believers to confess to one another regularly and in an edifying way.
Jim, #16, I am not at all untroubled by the institutional concerns placed on you. I think there are appropriate places for metrics in measuring church growth and success, but so many of the models I have seen use the wrong metrics. Butts in seats do not a church make. That said, when you ask what kind of costs are we willing to bear to see people’s lives transformed and to see hopelessness be replaced by hope and even joy, all for the spread of the Gospel… I think it’s the wrong question, or at least it has an obvious answer: Any cost is worth this. What won’t we give? Can’t we do more?
I don’t say this naively, thinking that it will be without pain and sacrifice, but if the “institution” doesn’t get that, then the “institution” is not from God. Sometimes we are to be salt and light even to the church. And that is probably the most painful of all.

Blech, forgot to put in the name: I’m #18. Don’t want to encourage anonymous posting.

Great Post Dr. Scot! Another illuminating quote from “Life Together” that is relevant to this discussion relates the indispensable component of “confession” as it relates to our spiritual growth and health in Christian community. Speaking of why true fellowship alludes many church-goers, Bonhoeffer writes:
“The final break-through to fellowship does not occur, because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and devout people, they do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship. We dare not be sinner. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy. The fact is that we ARE sinners.” (Life Together, Harper & Row, 1954, p. 110).
The James 5 passage on “confessing” to one another in order to find healing is at the core of both fellowship and discipleship. In spite of the Church’s recent and repeated affirmations of values like “authenticity”, “community” and “transparency”, as a pastor I am aware that far too many Christians are still not plugged in to even one, solitary, accountable relationship within which they can confess sin and brokenness openly without fear of rejection. I am almost certain that I could not succeed in shepherding God’s flock without that handful of relationships with other men in my life. I remember the loneliness of ministry prior to forging those relationships, and by God’s mercy I will never go back to being without them.

A church that loves the notion of being a church more than the risks, faith and responsibilities that this entails, is bound to reveal only one primary commitment ? a commitment to self-preservation. It is my contention that many churches exist for one purpose only – to maintain its own existence. Community is the task and challenge for every gathered group of individuals. Mission (a shared sense of identity and purpose) is lost when self-preservation becomes the sole reason for existence. Bobhoeffer’s corrective, life, and death (martyrdom) testify to the possibility, if not the reality, of such a community. My question – and I think Bonhoeffer stuggled with this as well – is when does the church cease being the church?

I found great comfort in Life Together during my 27 years of ministry. Bonhoeffer cuts through a tendency to romanticize the church. But does anyone romanticize the church anymore? We all know it’s a broken vessel, those who reside inside and outside of it. The point now is: How do we deal with the fact that the culture no longer sees the church as the repository of that which is Christian, much less spiritual. This is the church’s crisis right now and this is what demands a prayerful response.

Don (22), Bonhoeffer breaks through religious romanticism at -every- level, much like Kierkegaard.
Wayne (21), I think you are spot-on about the power of institutional self-preservation. And I think Jesus represents freedom from these religious motivations and patterns. But I would disagree with Bonhoeffer as “martyr.” I know that’s an unpopular opinion, but my reading of his imprisonment shows far more political motivation that spiritual altruism. I cannot seamlessly connect the two, nor, ultimately, I think, did he.
Bill (15), I can’t disagree with you. But don’t you see a paradox here? Loving others as Jesus loved us is, in practice, perhaps the most difficult and challenging bit of idealism ever thrust upon mere humanity. The reality is – we often don’t love others as Jesus loved us. Our ideals and daily reality are often far apart. And I think this is -exactly- the kind of paradox and dualism Bonhoeffer was addressing here and elsewhere in his work.

23 John
I think we are close on this. But I don’t see that anything Jesus commanded us to do is in any way idealistic or some form of divine idealism.
If we define idealism as “the cherishing or pursuit of high or noble principles, purposes, goals”, why would Jesus command? If He knows we can’t obey, He’s cruel. If He knows we won’t ever obey, He’s wasting His breath. I don’t think Jesus laid out the ideal. He laid out the real. Our choice to not love one another or have ideals about what the church should be is based on an idea which we think is better than God’s command. The apostle I think commands us to pursue love (1 Co 13 and 14) which is a divine reality and connects us with the love of the Trinity, not an ideal.

Is this your mandate Scot to write on modern ecclesiology?

In an age that is all about pursuing “community” as, yes, an IDEAL, Bonhoeffer is more important than ever. Community–true, Spirit-wrought community–only comes as a result of the gathering pursuing Jesus together, and being pursued by Him in Word & Sacrament. Incidentally, my Seminary (Concordia, St. Louis) is doing a “Seminary reads” thing this year with Life Together as our text. Bonhoeffer was, we are wont to remind Evangelicals who would claim him as their own, an emphatically Lutheran pastor…but I digress.

Yes, Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran, and we’re happy to share him with others! There is wisdom for all followers of Christ.
Meanwhile, we Lutherans also confess our complicity with Nazi Germany and the Final Solution.