Life Together, Life Alone--Part 1

"Whoever cannot be alone should beware of community. Such people will only do harm to themselves and to the community. . . . But the reverse is also true. Whoever cannot stand being in community should beware of being alone. You are called into the community of faith: the call was not meant for you alone."--Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

I've just finished reading Bonhoeffer's wonderful little book, Life Together, and while the work is not directly concerned with the matters of the political economy and polity that we have been exploring in this blog, it nonetheless contains a number of wise insights that may suggest at least the prophetic witness that the church should model in its critique of the City of Man. For Bonhoeffer, Christian freedom can only be understood within the drama of Christian salvation. Freedom is our delivery from sin by the power for righteousness. We are crucified with Christ, buried with him, and raised with him. The end for our identity in Christ is shalom, a restored relationship with God that therefore restores relations with humanity and nature. We are for Bonhoeffer, "scattered like seed" in the world as a "visible community" in "gracious anticipation of the end time" (28).

Because we are being redeemed in Christ, we model through confession to one another, service to all, speaking the Word in truth, learning to truly listen, and so on, a community that is based in Christ and not in our unmediated psychological need. Bonhoeffer warns that a community not based in Christ turns to self-seeking, self-justification, and selfish emotion. In the former, we learn to lay aside our unredeemed definitions of community, while in the later, we grow quickly angry when community does not match our self-defined needs: "Those who want more than what Christ has established between us do not want Christian community. They are looking for some extraordinary experiences of community that were denied them elsewhere" (34).

Bonhoeffer explores in some detail the nature of corporate morning and evening prayer, the public reading of scripture, daily and yearly cycles of worship, the praying of the Psalter, singing together, and eating together. Each of these practices has a formative element. They make us more like Christ and his Body. They act as a different way of living than the cultures we are residing in.