With some of my Christmas money, I bought a book by one of my favorite Protestant theologians, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a mid-twentieth-century German pastor and professor and Nazi resistor executed on the orders of Heinrich Himmler. The book, Life Together (translated by John W. Doberstein, published by HarperCollins), was written as he led an underground seminary near Stetten (now Szcezecin, Poland), northeast of Berlin. This intense setting forced the seminarians to create a very tight-knit community, thus the book is an extended meditation on the concept of Christian community. Here are some points that have struck me as I have been reading:
1.
One of the first points Bonhoeffer makes is that “the Christian…belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes” (p. 17). Elsewhere, Bonhoeffer refers to this concept as being “called to the world,” by which he means that Christians should be engaged with the world, involved with solving the world’s problems. As a Mormon, sometimes I think we too often call ourselves away from the world, seeing the problems of the world as results of sin. In many cases there is something to this perspective, but it by no means excuses us from action. Bonhoeffer quotes Martin Luther who wrote disparagingly of the Christian who always “wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people but with the devout people” (qtd. in Bonhoeffer, p. 17-18). He calls such Christians “blasphemers and betrayers of Christ.” “If Christ had done what you are doing,” Luther continues, “who would ever have been spared?”
When I was teaching at a low socio-economic school, I had many students who were from severely disrupted families, who were born into sin in a major way. A number of my students were born into families of drug addicts and habitual criminals, many even had rather robust criminal records themselves. If I had called myself away from the world, and refused to work with these students, what good would I have done? Despite the difficulty and sometime hopelessness of working at that school, one thing I can feel good about is that much of the time, I was able to be of some Christian service to a number of students. If I had refused to interact with them, I might have denied them exposure to the Gospel. Isn’t this what Christ was referring to when he admonished us to “let [our] light so shine before men”? (Matt. 5:16) If we refuse to interact with the wider world, then we refuse to share the light of the Gospel.
2.
While we are to share the Gospel through interaction with the world, we should also rejoice in the presence of our Christian brothers and sisters: “It is easily forgotten that the fellowship of Christian bretheren is a gift of grace, a gift of the Kingdom of God” (p. 20).
3.
In America, we tend to think in terms of individualism, possibly even to a fault. American Mormons are no exception. Having grown up in the Church, I can say that while lessons may often acknowledge the importance of others, just as often or even more frequently we talk about the church in very individualistic terms. While we often talk about service, we often remind ourselves that we “work out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12; see also Mormon 9:27). I’ve even noticed that we often talk about service with rather individualistic, even selfish language; we talk about how service makes us feel good, for example.
Bonhoeffer, though reminds us that a “Christian comes to others only through Jesus Christ” (p. 23). How does this work? “Among men there is strife.” Like most Christians, we acknowledge this as a result of the Fall—though we resist the language of original sin, of course. There is also “discord between God and man.” Through the Atonement, though, “Christ became the Mediator and made peace with God and among men. Without Christ we should not know God…But without Christ we also would not know our brother, nor could we come to him. The way is blocked by our own ego.” The Atonement provides the only real and lasting way to overcome ego.
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