Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Community

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is this huge big deal theologian who I’ve heard a bunch of people recommend. I read his book “Life Together; The Classic Exploration of Christian Community” so that I could learn more about…Christian community, or any kind of community. Trying to work out people can live together at all, really.

Personally, I’m much more about Christianity on your own. I don’t see huge benefits of Christian community, for the most part. The Christian communities that I have been a part of were either dysfunctional or primarily concerned with socializing. I appreciated them, for sure, but I don’t feel like the Christian communities that I’ve been a part of were helping me grow in my faith. Moreso, they were communities that I valued for the community, but it felt like we were mostly doing faith on our own, with vastly different levels of interest/commitment/knowledge in our faith.

In “Life Together” Bonhoeffer writes “The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer.” My response to that was “Really? Does that include any other Christians? Because some Christians are Trump-supporting, racist, Islamaphobic bigots.”

A few pages later, there is a passage that feels so right and makes so much sense. “We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.

“What does this mean? It means, first, that a Christian needs others because of Jesus Christ. It means, second, that a Christian comes to others only through Jesus Christ. It means, third, that in Jesus Christ we have been chosen from eternity, accepted in time, and united for eternity.”

“He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation…The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure.”

In the intentional communities I’ve been in, it felt like we had these lofty ideas for what our community would be, but we were ultimately more concerned with other aspects of our lives and let the community fall by the wayside. This passage speaks to that.

“The more genuine and deeper our community becomes ,the more everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly and for all eternity.

“That dismisses once and for all every clamorous desire for something more. One who wants more than what Christ has established does not want Christian brotherhood. He is looking for some extraordinary social experience which he has not found elsewhere; he is bringing muddled and impure desires into Christian brotherhood.”

Perhaps this was the founding flaw of the Christian communities I’ve been in. I think we may have been hoping for an extraordinary social experience when what we should have been aiming for a Christ-centered community.

Later, Bonhoeffer writes “when a community of a purely spiritual kind is established, it always encounters the danger that everything human will be carried into and intermixed with this fellowship.”

I feel like this factor was such a huge issue in the communities I’ve been in, that we brought everything human into it. I don’t know how to get past that, to move beyond those very human issues to transcend and create a purely spiritual community. I don’t know if any of us know how to do that.