Welcome to another edition of The Mueller Report!
Please bear with me and provide feedback as I figure out better ways to write, format, and deliver the newsletter. The goal is to provide grist for your intellectual mill and to share books and ideas I am thinking through myself. So without further ado, here are some thoughts on Bonhoeffer’s Life Together.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote Life Together while spending several years running an “illegal” seminary in Germany (~1935-1938). He describes what life in a Christian community ought to be in five chapters: Community, The Day with Others, The Day Alone, Ministry, Confession and Communion. I strongly commend the book. Here’s a link to a lengthy reflection I wrote if you want to hear more of my own thoughts. It is with some agony that I have kept only the most striking ideas and quotes here:
The church has a spiritual existence separate from our ideals, dreams, or fantasies.
“In Christian brotherhood everything depends upon its being clear right from the beginning, first, that Christian Brotherhood is not an ideal, but a divine reality. Second, that Christian brotherhood is a spiritual and not a psychic reality.”
“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.”
Human desire is impure and “dark.”
“Human love lives by uncontrolled and uncontrollable dark desires; spiritual love lives in the clear light of service ordered by the truth. Human love produces human subjection, dependence, constraint; spiritual love creates freedom of the brethren under the Word.”
Bonhoeffer also worries about the will to dominate others and the exercise of power.
“Thus there is such a thing as human absorption” because “human community expresses a profound, elemental, human desire for community, for immediate contact with other human souls, just as in the flesh there is the urge for physical merger with other flesh. Such desire of the human soul seeks a complete fusion of I and Thou, whether this occur in the union of love or, what is after all the same thing, in the forcing of another person into one’s sphere of power and influence.”
“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 irresistible, to rule.”
“This is why human love becomes personal hatred when it encounters genuine spiritual love, which does not desire but serves. Human love makes itself an end in itself. It creates itself as an end, an idol which it worships, to which it must subject everything. It nurses and cultivates an ideal, it loves itself, and nothing else in the world. Spiritual love, however, comes from Jesus Christ, it serves him alone; it knows that it has no immediate access to other persons. Jesus Christ stands between the lover and the others he loves.”
Community and solitude are closely connected and mutually reinforcing.
“The mark of solitude is silence, as speech is the mark of community. Silence and speech have the same inner correspondence and difference as do solitude and community. One does not exist without the other. Right speech comes out of silence, and right silence comes out of speech. Silence does not mean dumbness, as speech does not mean chatter.”
“Let him who cannot be alone beware of community.”
“Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.”
“Every act of self-control of the Christian is also a service to the fellowship.”
Ministry in community does not start with speaking God’s Word.
“We are apt these days to reply too quickly that the one real service to our neighbor is to minister to him the Word of God. It is true that there is no service that compares with this one, and even more, that every other service is performed for the sake of the service of the Word of God. Yet a Christian community does not consist solely of preachers of the Word. We can go monstrously wrong here if we overlook a number of other things. The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them.”
That’s a lot of food for thought for those of us who are part of a local church or who desire to live in Christian community.
What I am reading
As I mentioned in my previous newsletter, I am trying to read more thematically by month. My current stack of books for work includes:
The Great Reset by Richard Florida
The Flight of the Creative Class by Richard Florida
The New Urban Crisis by Richard Florida
The Triumph of the City by Ed Glaeser
For church and for personal edification, I have the following stack of books too:
Discipleship by Mark Dever
Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life by Don Whitney
Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster
Disciplines of a Godly Man by Kent Hughes
Next week’s newsletter will be my thoughts about Florida’s arguments in The Rise of the Creative Class. But I’ll be posting other summaries, reviews, and reflections on what I am reading at my website if you are interested.
Best,
Paul