Highlights from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on Community
The only book I've read by Dietrich Bonhoeffer is Life Together, which comprises his reflections on how Christians do community together, or to take a cringey contemporary Christian phrase: how Christians do life together (cringes to the point of physical crumpling). He provides several insights from his experience & theology which really put a finger on many (potential or actual) problems hiding within our pursuits in "Christian community" today. I identify with many of them: both as defects in the way I approach community and also as defects in Christian communities I've tried to be a part of which really just turned me away.
One of the most helpful distinctions that Bonhoeffer draws in his book is that between spiritual community and emotional community. This is how he first explains it:
"Because Christian community is founded solely on Jesus Christ, it is a spiritual and not an emotional reality. In this respect it differs absolutely from all other communities. The Scriptures call pneumatic or 'spiritual' what is created only by the Holy Spirit, who puts Jesus Christ into our hearts as lord and saviour. The scriptures call 'emotional' what comes from the natural urges, strengths, and abilities of the human soul."
What does an "emotional" community look like? It looks like trying to forge ties with each other from our likenesses, and out of our own energy and dare I say, lust for association, rather than accepting our tie in Christ as a gifted reality. Thus church becomes a "community of pious souls" (or a community of people who all fit the same pious churchy mold), rather than "the community of those who are called by Christ".
The thing that holds an emotional community together is not so much agape love which desires simply to humbly serve others in the community, but rather "the dark love of pious-impious urges, eros, burn[ing]".
This characterisation really struck me in a number of respects.
The burning urge of common piety and human lust after likeness is what has made Christian community so stressful and frustrating to me sometimes (either at the receiving end or in the inadvertently perpetrating end). At times, it has made me feel under pressure to appear pious in one way or another (in some churches, it's hand-lifting; in others, it's an ability to quote obscure minor prophets from memory, or to remember exactly what Haggai and Obadiah are about).
But piety isn't a bad thing. It is just approached and applied unhelpfully when community is not taken as a spiritual reality but approached emotionally as the fulfillment of a human lust for association. Things may look the same in many respects, but Bonhoeffer says that "everything that is originally and solely characteristic of the community mediated through Christ reappears in the nonmediated community of souls in a distorted form" (emphasis added). In the worst forms of this forced community of piety, service to one another is not "simple and humble" as it should be, but rather it becomes service "to strangers treated in a searching, calculating fashion", by which he means, perhaps, that other people in the community are really just pawns in our human community & piety game.
One potential (extreme) outworking of this distorted pursuit of piety is a coercive kind of "love" when we try to help and encourage others. We end up, instead, trying to carve others in an image of "Christ" we have in our own heads which really is either extrabiblical or not within our mandate to do. Bonhoeffer writes: because "Christ stands between me and others", I must remember they are free in Christ, and I should be an agent releasing them into this freedom:
"I must release others from all my attempts to control, coerce, and dominate them with my love. In their freedom from me, other persons want to be loved for who they are, as those for whom Christ became a human being, died, and rose again, as those for whom Christ won the forgiveness of sins and prepared eternal life. Because Christ has long since acted decisively for other Christians, before I could begin to act, I must allow them the freedom to be Christ's. They should encounter me only as persons that they already are for Christ. [...] Emotional love constructs its own image of other persons, about what they are and what they should become. It takes the life of the other person into its own hands. Spiritual love recognises the true image of the other person as seen from the perspective of Jesus Christ."
As my own extrapolation, perhaps this is what perpetuates undue divisions and condescension in church. And perhaps this is even what perpetuates emotional pious communities by producing identical-looking people built on human images of piety and excluding people who do not follow those images. This is what makes many people feel like impostors in church: not having the right vocabulary, tastes, hobbies, careers... and it might be this very impostor impulse that makes many (me included) want to slip away at the end of a service rather than stick around (ah, that dilemma between fresh brewed coffee and the 13984798372 conversations I must have while it cools enough for me to be able to drink).
Bonhoeffer further warns that an emotional pious community is limited in the love that its members can offer one another, because the ultimate goal is to maintain the community rather than to enjoy the community given as a result of the further, more ultimate truth of our being commonly in Christ. He writes (in words that probably need to be read 10 times before their full wisdom is gleaned):
"Emotional love cannot tolerate the dissolution of a community that has become false, even for the sake of genuine community. And such emotional love cannot love an enemy, that is to say, one who seriously and stubbornly resists it. Both spring from the same source: emotional love is by its very nature desire, desire for emotional community. As long as it can possibly satisfy this desire, it will not give it up, even for the sake of truth, even for the sake of genuine love for others. But emotional love is at an end when it can no longer expect its desire to be fulfilled, namely, in the face of an enemy. There it turns into hatred, contempt, and slander."
