Book Review:
by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Nathan Vonnahme
The Christian Life
Regent College
21 March, 1999
I first started reading Life Together during my last year of college, when my two roommates and I decided to read it as part of our life together. At the time, though, the book proved difficult for several reasons and I don't think any of us finished it. So, this semester, I again took advantage of the book review assignment to finish a book I'd been wanting to finish for years. Just like the first assignment, this second reading turned out to be much more fruitful than the first.
Bonhoeffer begins with a chapter describing Christian community and emphasizing its spiritual nature. Christians enjoy fellowship with each other in many different forms, but Bonhoeffer immediately makes the basis of this community clear:
Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. No Christian community is more or less than this. Whether it be a brief, single encounter or the daily fellowship of years, Christian community is only this. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ (21).
Jesus is the bedrock of Christian community, and it is founded on him alone. To clarify the nature of this community Bonhoeffer contrasts it with two other views of community–community as an ideal and community as a psychological state. First, he emphatically declares that Christian community is not an ideal but a divine reality:
Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients. We thank God for what He has done for us (28).
Therefore Christian community is not something that can be manufactured, learned or even practiced–it is simply inherent in the Christian's life just as justification is. Like justification, community is already completed, perfect; it is entered into through faith and with thanksgiving.
Secondly, Bonhoeffer contrasts the spiritual (or pneumatic) basis of Christian community with the psychological (or psychic) basis of typical human community. "Because Christian community is founded solely on Jesus Christ, it is a spiritual and not a psychic reality" (31). The spiritual love of this community transcends natural human love, agape over eros.
Human love is directed to the other person for his own sake, spiritual love loves him for Christ's sake. Therefore, human love seeks direct contact with the other person; it loves him not as a free person but as one whom it binds to itself. It wants to gain, to capture by every means; it uses force. It desires to be irresistible, to rule (34).
So, because community is founded in Christ, all its relationships are in him also. Just as Christ mediates between God and human, so he mediates between the members of his community. Through his mediation, and only through it, Christians can love others fully and purely.
It is also important to understand that the love of the Christian community does not replace the love of natural human relationships; rather it transcends it. Bonhoeffer cautions against the dangers of ostensibly "spiritual" community:
A marriage, a family, a friendship is quite conscious of the limitations of its community-building power; such relationships know very well, if they are sound, where the human element stops and the spiritual begins. They know the difference between physical-intellectual and spiritual community. On the contrary, 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. A purely spiritual relationship is not only dangerous but also an altogether abnormal thing (38).
Bonhoeffer moves from the foundations of Christian community to its practices. The second chapter, "The Day With Others," surveys some of the disciplines of the Christian community–early morning communal prayer, song and reading, shared meals, work, and noonday and evening prayer. Bonhoeffer freely offers authoritative thoughts on all these subjects, but I found two of his observations about the Psalms especially insightful:
Can we, then, pray the imprecatory psalms? In so far as we are sinners and express evil thoughts in a prayer of vengeance, we dare not do so. But in so far as Christ is in us, the Christ who took all the vengeance of God upon himself, who met God's vengeance in our stead, who thus–stricken by the wrath of God–and in no other way, could forgive his enemies, who himself suffered the wrath that his enemies might go free–we, too, as members of this Jesus Christ, can pray these psalms, through Jesus Christ, from the heart of Jesus Christ (47).
Is there not in these repetitions of the same thought, which in Psalm 119 rise to the point where it seems that it would never end, the tremendous suggestion that every word of prayer must penetrate to a depth of the heart that can be reached only by unceasing iteration? Is this not an indication that prayer is not a matter of pouring out the human heart once and for all in need or joy, but of an unbroken, constant learning, accepting, and impressing upon the mind of God's will in Jesus Christ? (49)
Bonhoeffer's discussion of communal song is similarly perceptive, stressing the spiritual importance of singing just as the spiritual importance of community has been stressed:
'Sing and make melody in your heart to the Lord' (Eph. 5:19). The new song is sung first in the heart. Otherwise it cannot be sung at all. The heart sings because it is overflowing with Christ. That is why all singing in the church is a spiritual performance. Surrender to the Word, incorporation in the community, great humility, and much discipline–these are the prerequisites of all singing together. Where the heart is not singing there is no melody, there is only the dreadful medley of human self-praise. Where the singing is not to the Lord, it is singing to the honor of the self or the music, and the new song becomes a song to idols (58-59).
One of the most unusual and memorable things about this book is Bonhoeffer's insistence on unison singing and disapproval of harmonizing. But on close reading, especially of the passage above, it is apparent that his main concern is unison of heart and spirit among the singers– "Unison singing, difficult as it is, is less of a musical than a spiritual matter" (60). Harmony and musical embellishment do often distract singers rather than contribute to spiritual unison, but I think Bonhoeffer would agree that used in the right spirit they can be a proper contribution to the "voice of the Church" (61).
Discussing the day with others, Bonhoeffer describes how daily work can be part of the reality of Christian community too, as prayer and worship continue from the communal devotion to the individual's work.
The continuing struggle with the 'it' remains. But at the same time the break-through is made; the unity of prayer and work, the unity of the day is discovered; for to find, back of the 'it' of the day's work, the 'Thou,' which is God, is what Paul calls 'praying without ceasing' (I Thess. 5:17). . . . Thus every word, every work, every labor of the Christian becomes a prayer; not in the unreal sense of a constant turning away from the task that must be done, but in a real breaking through the hard 'it' to the gracious Thou. 'Whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus' (Col. 3:17) (70-71).
Bonhoeffer's vision of the Christian community is holistic, and his discussion of the "day with others" covers wide ground. But he also gives attention, in the second chapter, to "the day alone." He warns repeatedly, "Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. Let him who is not in community beware of being alone" (78). Bonhoeffer carefully and insightfully connects the personal disciplines of solitude, silence, meditation, prayer, and intercession with the life of the community. He offers some practical advice along the way:
It is one of the particular difficulties of meditation that our thoughts are likely to wander and go their own way, toward other persons or to some events in our life. Much as this may distress and shame us again and again, we must not lose heart and become anxious, or even conclude that meditation is really not something for us. When this happens it is often a help not to snatch back our thoughts convulsively, but quite calmly to incorporate into our prayer the people and the events to which our thoughts keep straying and thus in all patience return to the starting point of the meditation (85).
Ending his discussion of the "day alone" with reflection on the community's constant need for intercessory prayer by its members for each other, Bonhoeffer begins describing some of the other ministries necessary in the Christian community. His list begins– perhaps pessimistically– with "the ministry of holding one's tongue" (91) and goes on to include the ministries of meekness, listening, helpfulness, bearing one another's burdens, proclaiming the Word, and the ministry of authority. Each ministry in the community is in opposition to human selfishness, as this comment about the ministry of listening shows:
One who cannot listen long and patiently will presently be talking beside the point and be never really speaking to others, albeit he be not conscious of it. Anyone who thinks that his times is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and for his own follies (98).
Bonhoeffer concludes with a chapter covering the place of confession and communion in the community. Again, his insights are piercing.
In confession a man breaks through to certainty. Why is it that it is often easier for us to confess our sins to God than to a brother? God is holy and sinless, He is a just judge of evil and the enemy of all disobedience. But a brother is sinful as we are. He knows from his own experience the dark night of secret sin. Why should we not find it easier to go to a brother than to the holy God? But if we do, we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution (115-116).
He contrasts Christian confession with psychotherapy:
Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of men. And so it also does not know that man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness. Only the Christian knows this. In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner (119).
And he vividly describes the scandalous power available in confession among brothers and sisters:
What brought upon Jesus the accusation of blasphemy, namely, that he forgave sinners, is what now takes place in the Christian brotherhood in the power of the presence of Jesus Christ (121).
Finally, Bonhoeffer sees in the Eucharist the summation of Christian community:
The fellowship of the Lord's Supper is the superlative fulfillment of Christian fellowship. As the members of the congregation are united in body and blood at the table of the Lord so will they be together in eternity. Here the community has reached its goal. Here joy in Christ and his community is complete. The life of Christians together under the Word has reached its perfection in the sacrament (122).
In many ways, rereading this book was a call to worship for me. It challenged me to recognize the community that God has given to me through Christ, and gave me a clear image of how Christian community goes about its daily life. I was reading The Mystery of Marriage by Mike Mason off and on during the time I read Life Together, and I found myself constantly translating Bonhoeffer's descriptions of community into marital terms and thinking about how my marriage expresses Christian community. My wife Betsy and I began spending time together every morning praying, singing and reading the Bible to each other very much according to Bonhoeffer's directions. I also found that the ideas about community, so lucidly described, were constantly finding their way into conversations with Betsy and other brothers and sisters. This living discourse with the book was really enjoyable. Another thing I enjoyed was the simplicity of the book–there are no wasted words and no attempt to be exhaustive or to justify, disclaim and qualify every statement.
The only weakness that I can see in Life Together probably rests more with me, the reader–both times I read it I found myself so wooed and challenged by Bonhoeffer's winsome descriptions of the disciplines of community (corporate prayer, reading, singing and confession as well as solitary devotion) that I found it too easy to forget the first chapter, which so strongly asserts that Christian community is not the result of human effort or affinity but of God's unity-making action. In fact, the main thing I remembered from my first reading was how disappointed I was when Bonhoeffer's disciplines never seemed to fully develop in the community I was living in. It is understandable and appropriate that Bonhoeffer puts the declaration of the spiritual foundation of community first in his book, but it might be helpful for readers to turn to it again at the end of the book to temper their enthusiasm for the disciplines of community and recognize again the God-given wonder and reality of life together.