BLOG 1/14/17. THE CHURCH IS NOT AN IDEAL, OR MERELY HUMAN COMMUNITY … BUT A DIVINE REALITY.
For my part, I am prone to believe that anyone who is continually dissatisfied with the church needs to take a long drink at the fountain of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s wonderful Life Together. You may (or may not) recall that Bonhoeffer lived in the era of Adolph Hitler in Germany. Hitler had pretty much co-opted the church, and insisted that true Christians were those German Christians who supported his regime. But there were those whose Christian faith was much more formative than their approval by the Reich Chancellor, Adolph Hitler. But because they did, in fact, become an alternative, and protesting, Christian community, they also became a threat to Hitler and so were outlawed. This resulted in an underground church, or as more properly designated: ‘the witnessing church’.
It was out of that clandestine experience, and under extreme political pressures, that the fertile mind of Bonhoeffer (as one of its most influential leaders) wrote this brilliant work on the Christian fellowship (the communion of the saints). It is not painless reading. Bonhoeffer shatters our comfort with many mistaken motivations for wanting to be a part of the community of God’s people. He had strong rebukes for those who came making demands upon the church, and insisting that meet their desires for a homogeneous fellowship of persons such as themselves. What was true was that there were evidently quite a few who, while they were dissatisfied with the compromised German church, were looking for a congenial setting in which to practice their ostensible life of faith without cost. Bottom line, they were looking for an illusion, a church made up of people who were all well put-together, and so would be a comfortable fit. He had strong rebukes to such people who came making their personal demands upon the church. The church, he reminds them, is made up of real sinners, real children of grace, persons who can be troublesome in their need, people who make demands on us.
It is a basically superficial understanding of the church, that refuses to look at it as that creation of Jesus Christ, made up of those who embrace Christ and his commands by faith, and who in turn are embraced in grace by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit … who thereby have the genome, the DNA, the life of Christ incarnated in their human lives. This means that they then become that New Humanity in which we, and those in whom Christ lives, respond to this world what with all of its troubled, seeking, difficult, gifted and non-gifted, pleasant and not-so-pleasant persons out of our oneness with Christ. And so, the Christian community is one in which we enter as ministers to one another—not making demands, but giving ourselves, our Christ-in-us selves as ministers to one another. We become ministers of reconciliation and healing and new creation to one-another, with all of the complex others who also are part of those colonies of New Creation.
Which brings us to an often-neglected dimension which leads to our misunderstanding of the church. It is all of those one another passages given to God’s people in the New Testament: love one another, confess you sins to one another, bear the burdens of one another, be reconciled to one another, pray for one another, rebuke and reprove and exhort one another (and reciprocally, be rebuked, etc. by one another), teach and exhort one another, etc. Now note: such one-another ministry requires that there exists a relationship of knowledge and intimacy among those in the community, which means also that the community, or colony must be quite small, and in which there is a mutual consent to live out these ‘one another’ injunctions. This is only possible as the Holy Spirit is the divine reality that is our motivation—that motivation of the divine life of Christ indwelling us. Otherwise we become part of the problem. Read Life Together.
