Relationships & Peacemaking

Wishful Image OR Christian Community?

January 16, 2008 /

I am continuing to slowly work through Bonhoeffer’s “Life Together” and this morning’s reading brought another level of “hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm” to my heart and mind.

(Oh–and by the way–I just can’t even IMAGINE being able to think so clearly and articulate so persuasively with such intelligent, forceful, and perfectly appropriate words. Truly, this man–who didn’t live to see 40 before the Nazis executed him!–was uniquely gifted by God.)

Here is just an excerpt (I was SO tempted to keep typing and give you paragraph after paragraph … but really, I just encourage you to buy the book):
 

“On innumerable occasions a whole Christian community has been shattered because it has lived on the basis of a wishful image. Certainly serious Christians who are put in a community for the first time will often bring with them a very definite image of what Christian communal life should be, and they will be anxious to realize it. But God’s grace quickly frustrates all such dreams. A great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves, is bound to overwhelm us as surely as God desires to lead us to an understanding of genuine Christian community. By sheer grace God will not permit us to live in a dream world for even a few weeks and to abandon ourselves to those blissful experiences and exalted moods that sweep over us like a wave of rapture. For God is not a God of emotionalism, but the God of truth. Only that community which enters into the experience of this great disillusionment with all its unpleasant and evil appearances begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it.

The sooner this moment of disillusionment comes over the individual and the community, the better for both … Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.”