Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Challenging Christian Classic

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote Life Together in 1938. 

It was a time of tremendous spiritual upheaval in his native Germany. 

By that time the Nazi party was firmly entrenched, extending its influence into most of the Christian church. And Bonhoeffer had already been asked to help the "Confessing Church," (Christians who refused to become affiliated with Nazism). 

He was leading a Confessing Church community when he wrote Life Together.

This context is important to remember because a good portion of his insights could be glossed over as being irrelevant outside of abstract theological discussion.

But, in fact, Bonhoeffer was committed to the Confessing Church and was eventually arrested and executed by the Gestapo for his beliefs and work. He was no 'pie in the sky by and by' theologian, but very much involved in life around him, having been part of a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944.

With razor-sharp focus, Bonhoeffer states, fairly early on in Life Together, that Christian life "is not an ideal, but a divine reality."

"One who wants more than what Christ established does not want Christian fellowship. They are looking for some social experience which they have not found elsewhere... Just at this point Christian community is threatened most often at the very start by the greatest danger of all, the danger of being poisoned at its root, the danger of confusing Christian community with some wishful idea of religious fellowship."

"Christian life together depends on whether it succeeds at the right time in bringing out the ability to distinguish between a human ideal and God's reality, between spiritual and human community."

"Spiritual love does not desire but rather serves, it loves an enemy as a brother [or sister]. It originates neither in the brother [or sister] nor in the enemy but in Christ and his Word. Human love can never understand spiritual love, for spiritual love is from above; it is something completely strange, new and incomprehensible to all earthly love."

Bonhoeffer makes the point that "human love constructs its own image of the other person...[S]piritual love recognizes the true image of the other person which they have received from Jesus Christ."

He warns against excluding those on the margins from the Christian community, saying "the exclusion of the weak and insignificant from a Christian community may actually mean exclusion of Christ." The Community of the Ark and the Catholic Worker movement are examples of living out this principle.

Throughout Life Together, Bonhoeffer points out the importance of reading and understanding the Bible. For him, it's one of the cornerstones upon which Christian community is founded and flourishes.

He writes, "We are the reverent listeners and participants in God's action in the sacred story, the history of the Christ on earth. And only in so far as we are there, is God with us today also... It is not in our life that God's help and presence must still be proved, but rather God's presence and help have been demonstrated for us in the life of Jesus Christ."

Similarly so, Bonhoeffer argues that, "It is not our heart that determines our course, but God's Word."

He talks about the importance of a balance between being alone (in solitude and silence) and being part of a community. "We recognize, then, that only as we are within the fellowship can we be alone, and only the person who is alone can live in fellowship. Only in the fellowship do we learn to be rightly alone and only in aloneness do we learn to live rightly in the fellowship... Each by itself has profound pitfalls and perils. One who wants fellowship without solitude plunges into the world of words and feelings, and one who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation and despair."

He notes the importance of intercession in Christian community. "A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses. I can no longer condemn or hate a brother [or sister] for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble they cause me. Their face, that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in intercession into that countenance of a brother [or sister] for whom Christ died, the face of a forgiven sinner."

Along with intercession, Bonhoeffer spends significant time discussing the importance of confession. In fact, he says that "In confession the break-through to community takes place."

He sees sin as isolating and destructive to community life. Confession to one another, even if it be difficult, is the antidote. Bonhoeffer gives the example of the public humiliation of Jesus on the Cross as actually being the very thing that sets us free to follow his example.

Life Together is not an especially difficult book to understand, but its lessons can be very difficult to accept and apply.

Life Together is not a call to neglect social justice in pursuit of doctrinal purity.Bonhoeffer's own life and death attest to this. These tensions continue to make his book powerful and timely. 

Richard Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline, wrote of Bonhoeffer's book, "Most books can be skimmed quickly; some deserve careful reading, a precious few should be devoured and digested. Life Together... belongs to the third category."