“I do not know in advance what love of others means on the basis of the general idea of love that grows out of my human desires—all this may rather be hatred and an insidious kind of selfishness in the eyes of Christ. What love is, only Christ tells us in his Word.”
A young German pastor wrote
Gemeinsames Leben in 1939, just after the Nazis had ordered him to close down his unofficial seminary for training "Confessing Church" pastors--that is, men who did not agree with the official German Lutheran embrace of Hitler and his party. That group of pastors and pastors-in-training at Finkenwalde had been a special place for him and the others; a place where the study of the Word was paramount and the resulting fellowship sweet. His reflections on that time have become the "modern classic"
Life Together, first published in English in 1954. His name, of course, was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, now famous as the pastor who plotted to assassinate Hitler and died on a gallows in the last days of WWII.
Life Together is short, but packed: packed with the sort of wisdom that only comes through long study of the Word and the refining fire of suffering. In it he examines how Christians ought to dwell with one another, a biblical obligation that is too often ignored or taken for granted today. If I could get all American Christians to read one Christian book, this one might be near the top of my list.
As a sample, consider this passage in the light of COVID lockdowns, virtual services, come-as-you are megachurches, worship-by-personal-taste, and the cults of personality that develop around preachers or practices in our own communities:
“Many people seek fellowship because they are afraid to be alone. Because they cannot stand loneliness, they are driven to seek the company of other people. There are Christians, too, who cannot endure being alone, who have had some bad experience with themselves, who hope they will gain some help in association with others. They are generally disappointed. They blame the fellowship for what is really their own fault. The Christian community is not a spiritual sanatorium. The person who comes into a fellowship because he is running away from himself is misusing it for the sake of diversion, not matter how spiritual this diversion may appear. He is not really seeking community at all, but only distraction which will allow him to forget his loneliness for a brief time, the very alienation that creates the deadly isolation of man. The disintegration of communication and all genuine experience, and finally resignation and spiritual death are the result of such attempts to find a cure.”In other words, only in Christ can true community be found. And as someone who is a member of a very special and often lauded Christian community, let me add a very hearty Amen.
Find this book. Read it. Live it.
