Life Together (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works)

by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

a Christian needs others for the sake of Jesus Christ.

Christian comes to others only through Jesus Christ.

from eternity we have been chosen in Jesus Christ, accepted in time, an...

the danger of confusing Christian community with some wishful image of pious community,

First, Christian community is not an ideal, but a divine reality; second, Christian community is a spiritual [pneumatisch] and not an emotional [psychisch] reality.

Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.

When pastors lose faith in a Christian community in which they have been placed and begin to make accusations against it, they had better examine themselves first to see whether the underlying problem is not their own idealized image, which should be shattered by God.

The basis of spiritual community is truth; the basis of

Emotional love loves the other for the sake of itself; spiritual love loves the other for the sake of Christ.

this means that I must release others from all my attempts to control, coerce, and dominate them with my love.

Emotional love constructs its own image of other persons, about what they are and what they should become. It takes the life of the other person into its own hands. Spiritual love recognizes the true image of the other person as seen from the perspective of Jesus Christ. It is the image Jesus Christ has formed and wants to form in all people.

This spiritual love will thus speak to Christ about the other Christian more than to the other Christian about Christ.

The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from everyday Christian life in community [Lebensgemeinschaft] may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; for in the poor sister or brother, Christ is

It is not the experience of Christian community, but firm and certain faith within Christian community that holds us together.

We are bound together by faith, not by experience.

For Jesus Christ alone is our unity. “He is our peace.” We have access to one another, joy in one another, community with one another through Christ alone.

Christian prayer takes its stand on the solid ground of the revealed Word and has nothing to do with vague, self-seeking desires.

We pray on the basis of the prayer of the truly human Jesus Christ. This is what the Scripture means when it says that the Holy Spirit prays in us and for us, that Christ prays for us, that we can pray to God in the right way only in the name of Jesus Christ.

Ötinger, in his exegesis of the Psalms, brought out a profound truth when he arranged the whole Psalter according to the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. What he meant was that the long and extensive book of

Psalms was concerned with nothing more or less than the brief petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.

The Holy Scriptures do not consist of individual sayings, but are a whole and can be used most effectively as such.

What is important is not that God is a spectator and participant in our life today, but that we are attentive listeners and participants in God’s action in the sacred story,

How often do we hear innumerable arguments “from life” and “from experience” to justify the most crucial decisions? Yet the evidence of Scripture is excluded even though it would perhaps point in exactly the opposite direction.

Wherever 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.

As difficult as it is, unison singing is much less a musical than a spiritual matter.

As good and useful as our scruples may be about keeping our prayer pure and biblical, they must nevertheless not stifle the free prayer itself that is so necessary, for it has been endowed with great promise by Jesus Christ.

As long as we eat our bread together, we will have enough even with the smallest amount.

Hunger begins only when people desire to keep their own bread for themselves.

The inseparable unity of both will only become clear when work and prayer each receives its own undivided due. Without the burden and labor of the day, prayer is not prayer; and without prayer, work is not work. Only the Christian knows that. Thus it is precisely in the clear distinction between them that their oneness becomes apparent.

When we grow tired, God works. “The Guardian of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.”

It is an old custom of the monasteries that by set practice in the daily evening worship the abbot asks his brothers to forgive him for all the

sins of omission and wrongdoings committed against them. After the brothers assure him of their forgiveness, they likewise

ask the abbot to forgive them for their sins of omission and wrongdoings and ...

every division that the day has caused must be healed in the evening. It

“Yours is the day, yours also the night” (Ps. 74:16).

Many persons seek community because they are afraid of loneliness

The Christian community is not a spiritual sanatorium.

But the reverse is also true. Whoever cannot stand being in community should beware of being alone.

Those who want community without solitude [Alleinsein] plunge into the void of words and feelings, and those who seek solitude without community perish in the bottomless pit of vanity, self-infatuation, and despair.

There is a wonderful power in being silent—the power of clarification, purification, and focus on what is essential.

silence before the Word leads to proper hearing and thus also to proper speaking of God’s Word at the right time.

There are three things for which the Christian needs a regular time alone during the day: meditation on the Scripture, prayer, and intercession.

“Seek God, not happiness”—that is the fundamental rule of all meditation. If you seek God alone, you will gain happiness—that is the promise of all meditation.

Has the community served to make individuals free, strong, and mature, or has it made them insecure and dependent?

Moreover, we will see at this point whether Christians’ time of meditation has led them into an unreal world from which they awaken with a fright when they step out into the workaday world, or whether it has led them into the real world of God from which they enter into the day’s activities strengthened and purified.

Has it transported them for a few short moments into a spiritual ecstasy that vanishes when everyday life returns, or has it planted the Word of God so soberly and so deeply in their heart that it holds and strengthens them all day long, leading them to active love, to obedience, to good works?

Every act of self-discipline by a Christian is also a service to the community.

It is the struggle of natural human beings for self-justification. They find it only by comparing themselves with others, by condemning and judging others.

God did not make others as I would have made them. God did not give them to me so that I could dominate and control them, but so that I might find the Creator by means of them.

God does not want me to mold others into the image that seems good to me, that is, into my own image. Instead, in their freedom from me God made other people in God’s own image.