Discipleship (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works)

by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

it proclaims to us the one Jesus Christ. It is him alone whom I ought to hear. He is one and the same everywhere.

listen to the word that is preached, and receive the sacrament. In both of these listen to Christ himself. Then you will hear his call!

After all, we do not “belong to Paul, or to Apollos, or to Cephas, or to Christ”; instead, our faith rests on the unity of the scriptural testimony to Christ. If we hold that the Christ Paul proclaims is still present to us in the same way, whereas the Synoptic Gospels testify to a presence of Christ which we no longer know, we break up the unity of scripture.

something Jesus Christ offers to us.

Having been rescued from the rule of this world, they now have become Christ’s own.

In baptism this break now also takes effect in my own life. I am deprived of my immediate relationship to the given realities of the world, since Christ the mediator and Lord has stepped in between me and the world.

The

break with the world is absolute.

The old self cannot kill itself. It cannot will its own death. We die in Christ alone; we die through Christ and with Christ. Christ is our death. It is for the sake of community with Christ, and only in that community, that we die.

This death is thus not the final, angry rejection of the creature by its creator but rather the gracious acceptance of the creature by the creator.

Baptism thus means to be received into the community of the cross of Jesus Christ (Rom. 6:3ff.; Col. 2:12). The believer is placed under the cross of Christ.

The gift received in baptism is the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is Christ himself dwelling in the hearts of the believers

Jesus demanded a visible act of obedience. To follow Jesus was a public act. In just the

Christians who are actively involved in the church-community take a step out of the world, their work, and family; they visibly stand in the community with Jesus Christ. They take this step on their own as individuals. But they regain what they have given up—brothers, sisters, houses, fields. Those who are baptized live in the visible church-community of Jesus Christ. What that means and entails must be examined in the following two chapters on the “body of Christ” and the “visible church-community.”

They live out of the once-and-for-allness of Christ’s death.

baptismal grace,

It also betrays a reprehensible thoughtlessness in dealing with the children’s spiritual welfare, for baptism can never be repeated.

And so he gave them his cross. That was the gift of baptism to the first disciples.

It tells us that those who are baptized are still meant to live, even after the Lord’s death and resurrection, in the bodily presence of and community with Jesus. For those

the body of Jesus Christ is our new life.

The Son of God accepts all of humanity in bodily form, the same humanity which in hate of God and pride of the flesh had rejected the incorporeal, invisible word of God. In the body of Jesus Christ humanity is now truly and bodily accepted; it is accepted as it is, out of God’s mercy.

The entire gospel message can be understood properly only in light of this crucial distinction. The body of Jesus Christ, in which we together with all of humanity are accepted by God, has now become the foundation of our salvation.

“He was wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities.” He bore our sin, and was therefore able to forgive sin; for in his body our sinful flesh had been “accepted.” This is why Jesus accepted sinners (Luke 15:2): he bore them in his own body. In Jesus the “acceptable (δεκτόν) year of the Lord” had dawned (Luke 4:19).

True, Christ’s earthly body dies, but only to rise again from death as an incorruptible, transfigured body. It is the same body—the tomb was, indeed, empty!—and yet it is a new body. Jesus thus brings humanity not only into death with him, but also into the resurrection. Thus even in his glorified body he still bears the humanity which he had taken on during his days on earth.

The way we do gain a share in the community of the body of Christ is through the two sacraments of his body, that is, baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

we are now “with Christ” and “in Christ,” and that “Christ is in us.”

What for the rest of humanity becomes a cause of death is for Christians a gift of grace.

“being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator”

No one can become a new human being except by being within the church, that is, through the body of Christ. Whoever seeks to become a new human being individually cannot succeed.

and yet it is Christ alone who fills all in all.

This is why Paul, in developing further the concept of the body, calls Christ the head of the body

This suffering first takes the form of dying the death upon the cross in baptism; it then is Christians’ “daily dying” (1 Cor. 15:31) by virtue of their baptism. It is, in addition, a suffering that bears an indescribable promise.

Even though Jesus Christ has already accomplished all the vicarious suffering necessary for our redemption, his sufferings in this world are not finished yet. In his grace, he has left something unfinished (ὑστερήματα) in his suffering, which his church-community is to complete in this last period before his second coming.

For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you”

Blessed are those to whom God grants the privilege of suffering for the body of Christ.

For it was built by human hands, and thus doomed to destruction. The prophecy, still unfulfilled, remained valid. To this day, the Jewish people still wait for the temple built by the son of David whose kingdom shall endure forever.

it was not the temple of God’s promise.

But he was speaking of the temple of his body.

The temple of the Old Testament is merely a shadow of the body of Christ

But he will rise again, and the new, eternal temple will consist of his risen and transfigured body. This is the house built by God’s own self for God’s own Son; and yet it is also the house built by the Son for the Father. In this house God truly dwells, as does the new humanity, the church-community of Christ.

“for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (Rev. 21:22).

God. Christ’s body is the spiritual temple (οἶκος πνευματικὸς) built from living stones (1 Peter 2:5ff.).

The temple of God is the holy church-community in Jesus Christ. The body of Christ is the living temple of God and of the new humanity.

brothers and sisters,

fields and houses.

Here were bodies that acted, worked, and suffered in com...

First, in the preaching of the word. “They continued in the apostles’ teaching” (Acts 2:42). Every word in this sentence is significant.

The word was with God and the Word was God

The Holy Spirit enables me to trust that Jesus Christ has come to tell me that he has accepted me and will do so again today.

Neither the gift of baptism nor the gift of the Lord’s Supper is fully understood if we interpret them only in terms of the forgiveness of sin. The gift of the body conferred in the sacraments presents us with the Lord in bodily form dwelling in his church-community. Forgiveness of sin is indeed a part of this gift of the body of Christ as church-community.

the sacraments have been given solely to the church-community. The Christian community is thus essentially the community gathered to celebrate baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and only then is it the community gathered to hear the word proclaimed.