life together

Please pardon my French, but Dietrich Bonhoeffer is kicking my ass this week. Martyrdom may give one special powers of persuasion, it's true. Even when I catch myself daring him to produce some community that validates his claims about Christian fellowship, I quickly recess into that corner of my secondhand memory reserved for Word War II and am stopped short: this German member of the Greatest Generation is staring me down even from the grave and warning me to behave myself. My cynicism, he seems to say, is not welcome here for many reasons. I should say that I currently have no better model to offer. As for my nascent theories of what Christian community ought to be, I have little to show in the way of putting my money where my mouth is. (I also ruthlessly pursue a little pipe-dream every Sunday in which my congregation of relaxed-urban hipsters--who never wear too much makeup or hair gel--avoid drivelly testimonies and repetitive, artistically and theologically defunct songs, while the pastor always delivers pithy, insightful sermons whose logic I can't troubleshoot with one eye closed. There are no awkward silences.) I pull out my best Coleridge-induced "willing suspension of disbelief" and proceed through a systematic rebuttal of my personal pathology of churchgoing and Christian discipleship.

One who wants more than what Christ has established does not want Christian brotherhood. He is looking for some extraordinary social experience that he has not found elsewhere; he is bringing muddled and impure desires into Christian brotherhood (p. 26).

I am floored by the realization that perhaps the source of my malcontent with other Christians in recent years is because in fact, I would make the church--and other believers--in my own image. Merciful, then, that I have been largely unsuccessful...

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.

Innumerable times a whole Christian community is sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God's grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.

By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not [only] a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight, beings to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis ...will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

...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 acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as is his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. ...So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself (pp. 26-28).
More to follow. There is plenty here to sip on.