There's something astonishing about a group of young theological students gathering and into an underground theological seminary in Nazi Germany. They represented a different kind of resistance to National Socialism as they struggled on two fronts, for the soul of their nation and for the soul of the Church in Germany. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been appointed Director of the seminary, and his approach produced a curriculum and context radically different from the more cognitive, and traditional theoretical education that dominated theological academia in the renowned Universities of Europe's premier intellectual centres.
The Editor's Introduction to the critical edition begins, "In an ironical way we are indebted to the Gestapo for this remarkable book." Because the underground seminary at Finkenwalde was closed down on Gestapo orders, Bonhoeffer was persuaded to "compose his thoughts on the nature and sustaining structures of Christian community based on the "life together" that he and his seminarians had sustained..." (Life Together. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol., p.3)
The curriculum at Finkenwalde had presupposed a communal life of monastic spiritual disciplines, as these pastors-in-training plunged into studies of what it would mean to live as a disciple of Jesus in the hostile environment of a culture intent on destroying the vital organs of the Body of Christ. The book Life Together gathers together the principles, ethos and structures that shaped life in Finkenwalde Seminary. The sole purpose of all the teaching was to guide and encourage those who took their faith seriously, and were seeking ways of embodying the life of the crucified Lord of the Church in their own discipleship.
This is a book about community and prayer, about time together and time alone and time with God, and about the dynamics that vitalise and co-ordinate the communion of saints in the Body of Christ. It is also a book about sacrifice and service, humility and honesty, love that does not calculate, and which sets no conditions for loving actions of forgiveness, ministry, healing and compassion.
Bonhoeffer's description of the pastor praying for the people is a searching account of how disciplined regular praying grow out of love, and where love for people is fading, sincerely praying for them has the reflexive effect of growing to love them again.
"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 for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me. His face that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in intercession into the countenance of a brother for whom Christ died, the face of a forgiven sinner." (65)
Elsewhere in the book Bonhoeffer writes of the ministry of listening. He is unsparing about voluble Christians, loving the sound of their own voice, ever ready duracells with their endless output of opinions, arguments and self-absorbed spirituality. If that sounds harsh, here is Bonhoeffer in even more astringent mood:
"Just as love for God begins with listening to his Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them. It is God's love for us that he not only gives us his Word but also lends us his ear. So it is his work that we do for our brother when we learn to listen to him. Christians, especially ministers, so often think they must always contribute something when they are in the company of others, that this is the one service they can render."
"Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking when they should be listening. But he who can n o longer listen to his brother will no longer be able to listen to God either; he will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God too. This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life, and in the end there is nothing left but spiritual chatter and clerical condescension arrayed in pious words." (75)
You can see why this book is essential reading in any serious course on pastoral theology, spirituality and even ethics. It is a thickly textured thin book of ninety five pages. The words flow from the heart of someone who lived what he spoke, and whose determined and determining passion was to follow Christ up the hill carrying his own cross. This is astringent stuff, it stings the heart, but it cleanses away illusions and all pretence of self-importance. No it is not a nice devotional book; it's more like a workbook for the gym, or a manual of disciplines to strengthen mind and heart and soul in living for Christ in community, or a handbook of team building for communities of light resisting darkness.
So Bonhoeffer is training pastors to lead communities of faithful witness and Christlike character in a world turned dark, and intentionally alien to all that Christ is, and all the church was called to be. There was a full curriculum of theological studies at Finkenwalde; these are gathered in two very thick volumes of lectures, essays, sermons and letters from these years. But this small volume describes a remarkable experiment in Christian community whose principles retain their original challenge to any community content to live in the comfortable settled status of business as usual.
I read Life Together fifty years ago. I don't use casual exaggeration much, but it blew me away. I've read it often, taught it over ten years, and still feel the intensity and uncompromising demands Bonhoeffer makes. Just because he can be accused of being unrealistic doesn't make the book less valuable, or true. They say the same about the Sermon on the Mount; which incidentally forms the core of Bonhoeffer's much larger work, Discipleship.
Please note, in Life Together, Bonhoeffer was recording the pprocedures and result of an experiment in community intended to demonstrate its principles to church, congregations, communities and every brother and sister who hears the call of Christ to discipleship. This book shouldn't be dismissed as 'for ministers'. It is a book about how a group of pastors-in training were helped to develop structures, disciplines, and capacity for God and others, that would sustain them in their Christian calling.
It is Bonhoeffer's gift, and legacy, intended as a contribution to the urgency and challenge of living for Christ in a world come of age. It is a spiritual workbook for the church in a secularised culture oscillating between indifference and hostility to the Gospel of Jesus, and inherently resistant to the presence of his disciples as salt and light. Bonhoeffer's short book is an attempt to "infuse new life and a new sense of Christian community into a church grown cowardly and unchristlike." (5) It was written as Hitler annexed the Sudetenland. But it was written for the whole church, then and there, and here and now.
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