When you think about Christian community do you think about something that the Christian church must primarily foster or create? Is Christian community a culture that each individual must contribute to in order to achieve a certain kind of genuine and interconnected love and service? If that is the case, then certainly the Christian or the church can fail at this task and thus this concept of Christian community will break down and not be achieved. Who would be to blame if such a situation were to arise? The Christians or the church which failed to bring it about of course. That would be a serious problem.
So what might lead to such a breakdown of Christian community? Bonhoeffer would answer that it is the very idea that Christian community is an ideal for which we must strive for in the first place, as opposed to the theological stance that Christian community is a divine reality and a spiritual reality.
Read this quote from Bonhoeffer and pay very careful attention. He writes,
“We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity. That dismisses once and for all every clamorous desire for something more. One who wants more than what Christ has established does not want Christian community*. He is looking for some extraordinary social experience which he has not found elsewhere; he is bringing muddled and impure desires into Christian community. Just at this point Christian community is threatened most often at the very start by the greatest danger of all, the danger of being poisoned at its root, the danger of confusing Christian community with some wishful idea of religious fellowship, of confounding the natural desire of the devout heart for community with the spiritual reality of Christian community. In Christian community everything depends upon its being clear right from the beginning, first, that Christian community is not an ideal, but a divine reality. Second, that Christian community is a spiritual and not a psychic reality.”
To sum up what Bonhoeffer is saying here, he is telling us, or more accurately warning us, that Christian community is first and foremost a divine reality which is purchased for us by the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ and our subsequent union with him by the Holy Spirit. From this reality Christian community find its actuation. Christian community therefore does not find its inception from the Christian first and foremost trying to make it themselves. It is the difference between ‘being’ and ‘creating’. Bonhoeffer is telling us that we do not create Christian community ourselves. Instead, and very importantly, we live out Christian community because we already are a community, a “brotherhood” or family in Christ. So it is that Christian community is the expression of our union with Christ.
Bonhoeffer makes this very clear at the beginning of the quote where he says,
“We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity.”
Bonhoeffer’s words are so important to us in our day and age (any day and age really) because at the moment community is such a longed-for experience, both by those inside the church and outside the church. The problem for the Christian, or the temptation rather, is to build our community on anything other than Christ. This temptation in the present is the ideal to build community for nothing more than the sake of community – like community is an end in and of itself. A church that does that is not experiencing “Christian community” but community that happens to be between people who are Christians. There is a big difference.
The foundation for Christian community must be the Lord Jesus Christ, the recognized reality that in him we share fellowship with each other, that this is a divine reality which we cannot escape nor create, but instead must live out.
Bonhoeffer warns us then that if we want community for community sake, we are “poisoning the roots”. We are failing before we begin. If this happens, then that which we long for will elude our grasp. So again, fix your eyes on the divine reality that Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension have purchased for us – namely, union with God through the Holy Spirit, and thus union with each other, Christian community.
*I have used “community” instead of “brotherhood” in this quote.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together. Translated by John W Doberstein. 5th ed. London: SCM Press, 2015. Pg 14
Bigvai and Shiphrah 