bonhoeffer
some cool stuff i read
Life Together
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
trans John W. Doberstein
harper &brothers, publishers, New York
1954
“God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethern. He// acts as if he is the creator of the Chrisitan community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his bretheren, then an accuser of God, and finally the desparing accuser of himself”(27-28)
“Only he who gives thanks for little things recieves big things.”(29)
“If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only kee p complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ. / This applies in a special way to the complaints often heard from pastors and zealous members about their congregations. A pastor should not complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men. When a // person becomes alienated form a Christian community in which he has been placed and begins to raise complaints about it, he had better examine himself first to see whether the trouble is not due to his wish dream that shoudl be shattered by God; and if this be the case, let him thank God for leading him into this predicament. But if not, let him nevertheless guard against ever becoming and accuser of the congregation before God. Let him rather accuse himself for his unbelief. Let him pray God for an understanding of his own failure and his particular sin, and pray that he may nto wrong his brethren. let him, in the consciousness of his own guilt, make intercession for his bretheren. Let him do what he is committed to do, and thank God.”(29-30)
“THus there is such a thing as human absorption. IT appears in all the forms of conversion wherever the superior power of one person is consciously or unconsciously misued to influence profoundly and draw into his spell another individual or a whole community. Here one soul operates directly upon another soul. The weak have been ocvercome by the strong, the resistance of the weak has broken down under the influence of another person. He has been overpowerd, but not won over by the thing itself. THis becomes evident as soon as the demand is made that he throw himself into the cause itself, independtly of the person to whom he is bound, or possibly in opposition to this person. Here is where the humanly converted person breaks down and thus makes it evident that his conversion was effected, not by the Holy Spirit, but by a man, and therefore has no stability”(33)
“Human love is directed to the other person for his own sake, spiritual love loves him for Christ’s sake. Therefore, human love seeks direct contact with the other person; it loves him not as a free person but as one whom it binds to itself. IT wants to gain, to capture by every means; it uses force. It desires to be irrisistible, to rule”(34)
“Unison singing, difficult as it is, is less of a musical than a spiritual matter. Only where everybody in the group is disposed to an attitude of worship and discipline can unison singing, even though it may lack much musically, give us the joy which is peculiar to it alone.”( 60)
“But there should be singing, not only at devotions, but at regular times of the day or week. The more we sing, the more joy will we derive from it, but , above all, the omore devotion and discipline and joy we put into our singing, the richer will be the blessing that will come to the whole life of the fellowhip from singing together”(61)
“The first condition, which makes it possible for an individiual to pray for the group, is the intercession of all the others for him and for his prayer. How could one person pray the prayer of the fellowship without being stedied and upheld in prayer by the fellowship aiself. At this very point, every word of criticism must be transformed into fervent intercession and brotherly help. “(63)
“Often in the Christian community there will be a desire for special prayer fellowships beyond the daily prayers of common devotions. Here there probably can be no set rule, except one, that such meetings hsould be held only where there is a common desire for them and where it is certain taht thaere will be common participation in definite hours of prayer. Any individual undertakings of this kind may well plant the seed of destruction in the community. It is precisely in this area that there must be a demonstration of the strong bearing the burdens of the weak, and of the weak not judging the strong.” (65)
“Prayer should not be hindered by work, but neither should work be hindered by prayer”(69)
“Work plunges men into the world of things. The CHristian steps out of the world of brotherly encounter into the world of impersional thigns, the ‘it’; and this new encounter frees him for objectivity; for the ‘it’-world is only an instrument in the hand of God for the purification of Christians form all self-centeredness and self-seeking. The work of the world can be done only where a person forgets himself, where he loses himself in a cause, in reality, the task, the ‘it.’”(71)
“let none expect from silence anything but a direct encounter with the Word of God”(81)
“In our meditation we ponder the chosen text on the strength of the promise that it has something utterly personal to say to us for this day and for our CHristian life, that it is not only God’s Word for the CHurch, but also God’s Word for us individually. We expose ourselves to the specific word until it addresses us personally. And when we do this, we are doing no more than the simplest, untutored CHristian does every day; we read God’s Word as God’s WOrd for us./ We do not ask what this text has to say to other people. For the preacher this means that he will not ask how he is going to preach or teach on this text, but hwat it is saying quite directly to him. IT is true that to do this we must first have understoood the content of the verse, but here we are not expounding it or preparing a sermon or conducting bBible study of any kind; we are rather waiting for God’s Word to us. IT is not a vacuous waiting, but a waiting on the basis of a clear promis”(82)
”We aremembers of a body, not only when we choose to be, but in our whole existence. Every member serves the whole body, either to its health or to its destruction. This is no mere theory; it is a spiritual reality”(89)
“Often we combat our evil thoughts most effectively if we absolutely refuse to allow them to be expressed in words. IT is certain that the spirit of self-justificaiton can be overcome only by the Spirit of grace; nevertheless, isolated thougths// of judgement can be curbed adn smothered by never allowing them the right to be uttered, except as a confession of sin, which we shall discuss later”(91-92)
“God does not will that I shoudl fasion the other person according to the image that seems good to me, that is, in my own image; rather in his very freedom from me God made this person in His image. I can never know beforehand how God’s image should appear in others. That image always manifests a completely new and unique form that comes soley from God’s free and sovereign creation. To me the sight may seem strange, even ungodly. But God creates every man in the likeness of His Son, the Crucified. After all, even that image certainly looked strange and ungodly to me before I grapsed it.”(94)
“In a Christian community everythign depends upon whether eahc individual is an indispensable link in a chain. ONly when even the smallest link is securely interlocked is the chain unbreakable. A community which allows unemployed members to exist within it will perish because of them. IT will be bwell, etherefore, if every member receives a definite task to perform for the community, that he may know in hourse of doubt that he , too, is not useless and unusable. Every CHristian community must realize that not only do the weak need the storng, but also that the strong cannot exist without the weak. THe elimination of the weak is the death of fellowship(94)
“He will know that it is good for his own will to be broken in the encounter with his neighbor. He will be ready to consider his neighbor’s will more important and urgent than his own. What does it matter if our own plans are frustrated? Is it not better to serve our neighbor than to have our own way?’(95)
“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God. God will constantly crossing our paths and canceling our plans by sending us people with claims and petitions. We may pass them by, preoccupied with our more important tasks, as the priest passed by the man who had fallen among thieves, perhaps--reading the Bible”(99)
“Therefore, the Bible can also characterize the whole life of the CHristian as bearing the Cross. IT is the fellowship of the Cross to experience the burden of the other. If one does not experience it, the fellowship he belongs to is not CHristian. IF any member refuses to bear that burden, he denies the law of CHrist./ It is, first of all, the freedom of the other person, of which we spoke earlier, that is a burden to the Christian. The other’s freedom collides with his own autonomy, yet he must recognize it. He could get rid of this burden by refusing the other person his freedom, by constraining him and thus diong violence to his personality, by stamping his own image upon him. But if he lets God create His image in him, he by this token gives him his freedom and himself bears the burden of this freedom of another creature of God. The freedom of the other person includes all that we mean by a person’s nature, individuality, endowment. IT also includes his weakness and oddities, which are such a trial to our patience, everything that produces frictions, conflicts, and collisions among us. TO bear the burden of the other person means involvement with the created reality of the other, to accept and affirm it, and, in bearing with it, to break through to the point where we take joy in it. / This will prove especially difficult where varying strength and weakness in faith are bound together in a fellowship. The weak must not judge the strong, the strong must not despise the weak. The weak must guard against pride, the strong against indifference. None must seek his own rights. IF the strong person falls the weak one must guard his heart against malicious joy at his downfall. IF the weakone falls, the strong one must help him rise again in all kindness. The one needs as much patience as the other. (101-102)
“This renuciation of our own ability is precisely the prerequisite and the sanction for the reading help that only the Word of God can give to the brother. Our brother’s ways are not in our hands; we cannot hold together what is breaking; we cannot keep in life what is determined to die. But God binds elements together in the breaking, creates communityh in the se3paration, grants grace through judjement. HE has put His Word in our mouth. He wants it to be spoken through us. IF we hinder His Word, the blood of the sinning brother will be upon us. IF we carry out His Word, GOd will save our brother through us”(108)
“THe more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation. Sin wants to remain uknown. IT shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the whole being of a person”(112)
“The expressed, acknmoleded sin has lost all its power. IT has been revealed and judged as sin. It can no longer tear the fellowhip asunder. Now the fellowship bears the sin of the brother. He is no longer alone with his evil for he has cast off his sin in confession and handied it over to God. IT has been taken away from him. Now he stands in the fellowship of sinners who live by the grace of God in the Cross of Jesus CHrist. Now he can be a sinner and still enjoy the grace of GOd. He can confess his sins and in this very act find fellowship for the first time. The sin concealed separated him form teh fellowship, made all his parent fellowship a sham; the sin confessed has helped him to find true fellowship with the brethren in Jesus Christ.”(113
“Confe3ssion in the presence of a brother is the profoundest kind of humiliation. IT hurts, it cuts a man down, it is a dreadful blow to pride . .. Because this humiliation is so hard we continuallys cheme to evade conessn gto a brother. Our eyes are so blinded that they no longer see the promise and glory in such abasement”(114)
“IN confession the Christian begins to beforsake his sins. Their dominion is broken. From know on the CHristian wins victory after victory./ What happened to us in baptism is bestowed upon as anew in confession. We are delivered out of darkness into the kingdom of Jesus CHrist”(115)
“Why shoudl we not fiend it easier to go to a brother htan to the holy God? But if we do, we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been// deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves adn also granting ourselves absolution. And is not the reason perhaps for our countless relapses and the feebleness of our CHristian obedience to be found precisely in the fact that we are living on self-forgivness and not a real forgiveness? Self-forgiveness can never lead to a breach of forgiveness? Self-forgiveness can never lead to a breach with sin; this can be accomplished on ly by the judgin and pardoning Word of God itself” (116)
“The day before the Lord’s Supper is administered will find the bretheren of a CHristian fellowship together and each will beg the forgiveness of the others for the wrongs committed. Nobody who avoids this approach to his brother can go rightly prepared to the table of the Lord. All anger, strife, envy, evil gossip, adn unbrotherly conduct must have been settled and finished if the brethren wish to recieve the grace of GOd together in the sacrament. But to beg a brother’s pardon is still not confession, and only the latter is subject to the express command of Jesus”(121)
Life Together
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
trans John W. Doberstein
harper &brothers, publishers, New York
1954
“God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethern. He// acts as if he is the creator of the Chrisitan community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his bretheren, then an accuser of God, and finally the desparing accuser of himself”(27-28)
“Only he who gives thanks for little things recieves big things.”(29)
“If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only kee p complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ. / This applies in a special way to the complaints often heard from pastors and zealous members about their congregations. A pastor should not complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men. When a // person becomes alienated form a Christian community in which he has been placed and begins to raise complaints about it, he had better examine himself first to see whether the trouble is not due to his wish dream that shoudl be shattered by God; and if this be the case, let him thank God for leading him into this predicament. But if not, let him nevertheless guard against ever becoming and accuser of the congregation before God. Let him rather accuse himself for his unbelief. Let him pray God for an understanding of his own failure and his particular sin, and pray that he may nto wrong his brethren. let him, in the consciousness of his own guilt, make intercession for his bretheren. Let him do what he is committed to do, and thank God.”(29-30)
“THus there is such a thing as human absorption. IT appears in all the forms of conversion wherever the superior power of one person is consciously or unconsciously misued to influence profoundly and draw into his spell another individual or a whole community. Here one soul operates directly upon another soul. The weak have been ocvercome by the strong, the resistance of the weak has broken down under the influence of another person. He has been overpowerd, but not won over by the thing itself. THis becomes evident as soon as the demand is made that he throw himself into the cause itself, independtly of the person to whom he is bound, or possibly in opposition to this person. Here is where the humanly converted person breaks down and thus makes it evident that his conversion was effected, not by the Holy Spirit, but by a man, and therefore has no stability”(33)
“Human love is directed to the other person for his own sake, spiritual love loves him for Christ’s sake. Therefore, human love seeks direct contact with the other person; it loves him not as a free person but as one whom it binds to itself. IT wants to gain, to capture by every means; it uses force. It desires to be irrisistible, to rule”(34)
“Unison singing, difficult as it is, is less of a musical than a spiritual matter. Only where everybody in the group is disposed to an attitude of worship and discipline can unison singing, even though it may lack much musically, give us the joy which is peculiar to it alone.”( 60)
“But there should be singing, not only at devotions, but at regular times of the day or week. The more we sing, the more joy will we derive from it, but , above all, the omore devotion and discipline and joy we put into our singing, the richer will be the blessing that will come to the whole life of the fellowhip from singing together”(61)
“The first condition, which makes it possible for an individiual to pray for the group, is the intercession of all the others for him and for his prayer. How could one person pray the prayer of the fellowship without being stedied and upheld in prayer by the fellowship aiself. At this very point, every word of criticism must be transformed into fervent intercession and brotherly help. “(63)
“Often in the Christian community there will be a desire for special prayer fellowships beyond the daily prayers of common devotions. Here there probably can be no set rule, except one, that such meetings hsould be held only where there is a common desire for them and where it is certain taht thaere will be common participation in definite hours of prayer. Any individual undertakings of this kind may well plant the seed of destruction in the community. It is precisely in this area that there must be a demonstration of the strong bearing the burdens of the weak, and of the weak not judging the strong.” (65)
“Prayer should not be hindered by work, but neither should work be hindered by prayer”(69)
“Work plunges men into the world of things. The CHristian steps out of the world of brotherly encounter into the world of impersional thigns, the ‘it’; and this new encounter frees him for objectivity; for the ‘it’-world is only an instrument in the hand of God for the purification of Christians form all self-centeredness and self-seeking. The work of the world can be done only where a person forgets himself, where he loses himself in a cause, in reality, the task, the ‘it.’”(71)
“let none expect from silence anything but a direct encounter with the Word of God”(81)
“In our meditation we ponder the chosen text on the strength of the promise that it has something utterly personal to say to us for this day and for our CHristian life, that it is not only God’s Word for the CHurch, but also God’s Word for us individually. We expose ourselves to the specific word until it addresses us personally. And when we do this, we are doing no more than the simplest, untutored CHristian does every day; we read God’s Word as God’s WOrd for us./ We do not ask what this text has to say to other people. For the preacher this means that he will not ask how he is going to preach or teach on this text, but hwat it is saying quite directly to him. IT is true that to do this we must first have understoood the content of the verse, but here we are not expounding it or preparing a sermon or conducting bBible study of any kind; we are rather waiting for God’s Word to us. IT is not a vacuous waiting, but a waiting on the basis of a clear promis”(82)
”We aremembers of a body, not only when we choose to be, but in our whole existence. Every member serves the whole body, either to its health or to its destruction. This is no mere theory; it is a spiritual reality”(89)
“Often we combat our evil thoughts most effectively if we absolutely refuse to allow them to be expressed in words. IT is certain that the spirit of self-justificaiton can be overcome only by the Spirit of grace; nevertheless, isolated thougths// of judgement can be curbed adn smothered by never allowing them the right to be uttered, except as a confession of sin, which we shall discuss later”(91-92)
“God does not will that I shoudl fasion the other person according to the image that seems good to me, that is, in my own image; rather in his very freedom from me God made this person in His image. I can never know beforehand how God’s image should appear in others. That image always manifests a completely new and unique form that comes soley from God’s free and sovereign creation. To me the sight may seem strange, even ungodly. But God creates every man in the likeness of His Son, the Crucified. After all, even that image certainly looked strange and ungodly to me before I grapsed it.”(94)
“In a Christian community everythign depends upon whether eahc individual is an indispensable link in a chain. ONly when even the smallest link is securely interlocked is the chain unbreakable. A community which allows unemployed members to exist within it will perish because of them. IT will be bwell, etherefore, if every member receives a definite task to perform for the community, that he may know in hourse of doubt that he , too, is not useless and unusable. Every CHristian community must realize that not only do the weak need the storng, but also that the strong cannot exist without the weak. THe elimination of the weak is the death of fellowship(94)
“He will know that it is good for his own will to be broken in the encounter with his neighbor. He will be ready to consider his neighbor’s will more important and urgent than his own. What does it matter if our own plans are frustrated? Is it not better to serve our neighbor than to have our own way?’(95)
“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God. God will constantly crossing our paths and canceling our plans by sending us people with claims and petitions. We may pass them by, preoccupied with our more important tasks, as the priest passed by the man who had fallen among thieves, perhaps--reading the Bible”(99)
“Therefore, the Bible can also characterize the whole life of the CHristian as bearing the Cross. IT is the fellowship of the Cross to experience the burden of the other. If one does not experience it, the fellowship he belongs to is not CHristian. IF any member refuses to bear that burden, he denies the law of CHrist./ It is, first of all, the freedom of the other person, of which we spoke earlier, that is a burden to the Christian. The other’s freedom collides with his own autonomy, yet he must recognize it. He could get rid of this burden by refusing the other person his freedom, by constraining him and thus diong violence to his personality, by stamping his own image upon him. But if he lets God create His image in him, he by this token gives him his freedom and himself bears the burden of this freedom of another creature of God. The freedom of the other person includes all that we mean by a person’s nature, individuality, endowment. IT also includes his weakness and oddities, which are such a trial to our patience, everything that produces frictions, conflicts, and collisions among us. TO bear the burden of the other person means involvement with the created reality of the other, to accept and affirm it, and, in bearing with it, to break through to the point where we take joy in it. / This will prove especially difficult where varying strength and weakness in faith are bound together in a fellowship. The weak must not judge the strong, the strong must not despise the weak. The weak must guard against pride, the strong against indifference. None must seek his own rights. IF the strong person falls the weak one must guard his heart against malicious joy at his downfall. IF the weakone falls, the strong one must help him rise again in all kindness. The one needs as much patience as the other. (101-102)
“This renuciation of our own ability is precisely the prerequisite and the sanction for the reading help that only the Word of God can give to the brother. Our brother’s ways are not in our hands; we cannot hold together what is breaking; we cannot keep in life what is determined to die. But God binds elements together in the breaking, creates communityh in the se3paration, grants grace through judjement. HE has put His Word in our mouth. He wants it to be spoken through us. IF we hinder His Word, the blood of the sinning brother will be upon us. IF we carry out His Word, GOd will save our brother through us”(108)
“THe more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation. Sin wants to remain uknown. IT shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the whole being of a person”(112)
“The expressed, acknmoleded sin has lost all its power. IT has been revealed and judged as sin. It can no longer tear the fellowhip asunder. Now the fellowship bears the sin of the brother. He is no longer alone with his evil for he has cast off his sin in confession and handied it over to God. IT has been taken away from him. Now he stands in the fellowship of sinners who live by the grace of God in the Cross of Jesus CHrist. Now he can be a sinner and still enjoy the grace of GOd. He can confess his sins and in this very act find fellowship for the first time. The sin concealed separated him form teh fellowship, made all his parent fellowship a sham; the sin confessed has helped him to find true fellowship with the brethren in Jesus Christ.”(113
“Confe3ssion in the presence of a brother is the profoundest kind of humiliation. IT hurts, it cuts a man down, it is a dreadful blow to pride . .. Because this humiliation is so hard we continuallys cheme to evade conessn gto a brother. Our eyes are so blinded that they no longer see the promise and glory in such abasement”(114)
“IN confession the Christian begins to beforsake his sins. Their dominion is broken. From know on the CHristian wins victory after victory./ What happened to us in baptism is bestowed upon as anew in confession. We are delivered out of darkness into the kingdom of Jesus CHrist”(115)
“Why shoudl we not fiend it easier to go to a brother htan to the holy God? But if we do, we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been// deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves adn also granting ourselves absolution. And is not the reason perhaps for our countless relapses and the feebleness of our CHristian obedience to be found precisely in the fact that we are living on self-forgivness and not a real forgiveness? Self-forgiveness can never lead to a breach of forgiveness? Self-forgiveness can never lead to a breach with sin; this can be accomplished on ly by the judgin and pardoning Word of God itself” (116)
“The day before the Lord’s Supper is administered will find the bretheren of a CHristian fellowship together and each will beg the forgiveness of the others for the wrongs committed. Nobody who avoids this approach to his brother can go rightly prepared to the table of the Lord. All anger, strife, envy, evil gossip, adn unbrotherly conduct must have been settled and finished if the brethren wish to recieve the grace of GOd together in the sacrament. But to beg a brother’s pardon is still not confession, and only the latter is subject to the express command of Jesus”(121)