Theological Journal – February 14 What Dietrich Bonhoeffer Would Say to the North American Church (7)

7.       “It’s the Church, Stupid!”  This is DB’s seventh word to the church in the US. Here we tend to treat the church as an optional extra to Christian living. A good thing if it helps; otherwise, dispensable. DB, on the other hand, came to see that “everything depended on the renewal of the church and the pastoral station” (personal letter, 1936, cited in Nation and Hauerwas, 2018). The “church for others” as he called it in Letters and Papers. We like to “go to the garden” alone to commune with God. As we have seen, we think people are pretty much like billiard balls. Complete and self-sufficient in themselves, they roll around the billiard table bumping into other balls and the rails. But such contacts are external and though they change the ball's direction they do not change what it is. Our relationship with God, on this view is personal, by which we mean private. Inaccessible to others unless we chose to disclose something of it to them.

DB, will have none of this! For him humanity was created in God’s image, and God being triune, that is in a threefold relationship within himself, means we are created for relationship with one another. Think of this as a molecule model in contrast to the billiard ball model. Various atoms in differing numbers connected by atomic forces form molecules. H₂O is only water in this configuration. The hydrogens can’t do without each other or the oxygen or vice versa and still remain water. 

Further, I only become me when confronted with you, a thou. When we stand before each other we become aware of the connections and commitments we have to each other as divine image-bearers. This means we are ethically committed to each other’s well-being.

Even further, we are also created for relation to Christ. And Christ is a part of each of our molecular relationships and, thus, the church is Christ-existing-as-community (the thesis of DB’s first dissertation Sanctorum Communio). This idea, present in his earliest work, is the foundation for his later notion of Jesus-as-being-for-others that we saw above. Christ then, stands at the center of each relationship, at the boundary between I and Thou. He is the center of all reality as well, so in him his people stand at the center of world and human experience in the form of Christ-being-there-for-others.

So, the church is not thinkable apart from Christ nor Christ apart from the church. Connection to Christ and his people and participation with them in his ongoing work of reconciliation is definitional of who we are. 

And that work is fundamentally solidarity with a hurting and broken world. A world that at his cross and in his resurrection Christ has claimed, redeemed, reconciled and rules over. A world in which DB’s corollary for us might well be “Everybody Hurts” (REM). Bonhoeffer experienced that kind of world under Hitler and in that world he learned vital lessons. 

First, “We must learn to regard human beings less in terms of what they do and neglect to do and more in terms of what they suffer” (DBWE 8:1515-1516)

                   

Second, “It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering” (DBWE 8:1651-1652).             

Third, “The human being is called upon to share in God’s suffering at the hands of a godless world . . . It is not a religious act that makes someone a Christian, but rather sharing in God’s suffering in the worldly life” (DBWE 8:13476-13581).                                 

Sharing God’s suffering in the world, being the eyes and voice of the powerless, poor, and suffering, and bearing God’s presence in power(lessness) – that’s why DB felt that everything rested on the renewal of the church. No other group or body can or will do that for world. And it must be done. I’m going to let you, dear readers, reflect on and wrestle with DB’s learnings here. I find one can either say nothing or feel the need to say everything about them. And I don’t have the time or space here to do the latter.

But prior to, more fundamental than, and in my view more interesting and radical than that, is recognizing how we become and are to be the “church for others.” Or, in other words, what does Life Together mean and how does it happen? 

Joel Lawrence suggests the answer to these latter questions is “death together” (in Keith L. Johnson; Timothy Larsen, Bonhoeffer, Christ and Culture, ch.6). The transformation from selfishness to selflessness without which life together, becoming the church for others cannot happen. God’s redeeming work in Jesus Christ brings freedom to the human creature, a freedom turned into slavery by sin resulting in a “heart turned in on itself” (Luther) which renders true human community impossible. In Christ however we are freed from this self-aggrandizing clutching and for a life lived for others. As this newly freed community that lives for others we grow into that stature and vocation primarily in DB’s view by confession, without which he claims the church cannot and will not truly exist.

Confession is for DB an expression of costly grace because it entails suffering and death, participating in Christ’s death, in fact. "By confession we gain freedom from pride of flesh.... Complete self-surrender surrender to the grace, help, and judgment of God occurs in confession. Everything is surrendered to God; we retain nothing of ourselves. Thus we become free of ourselves" (Bonhoeffer, Spiritual Care, 62).

By confession, further, we become open to community. "If anyone remains,” DB writes, “alone in his evil, he is completely alone despite camaraderie and friendship. If he has confessed, however, he will nevermore be alone" (63) He goes on, "Where people lament that there is no life in the church we might ask how that is connected to disregard for confession" (63). 

In Life Together Bonhoeffer enumerates “the four breakthroughs of confession”:

-to community

-to the cross (which renders the first breakthrough the painful reality it is)

-to new life

-to assurance

This “death together” of confession brings the only possibility of the “life together” that generates the “church for others” DB envisioned. Lawrence summarizes:

“Confession is the death of solitude, which is why confession is at the heart of death together. It is the act in which the community of Christ dies and rises. It is through confession that the form of Christ takes form in the church, freeing the members of the church from the isolation of sin and instead being conformed to the image of Christ, the human being for others” (Bonhoeffer, Christ and Culture (Kindle Locations 1232-1234).