Bonhoeffer’s Life Together

Last month I finished reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s little book, Life Together. It is truly a spiritual classic. There is so much depth and wisdom here about living the Christian life, particularly living in communion with fellow believers and living in light of the truth having been freely justified in Christ (the imprint of Luther is clear). I was encouraged as I saw much of the practice of my fellow church members reflected here.

In a day when (in Phil Ryken’s words) “church has become a place you go rather than the community to which you belong” Bonhoeffer’s message is particularly needed.

Here are a couple of quotes about the value of community:

“The Physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer.” (p 19)

“The believer feels no shame, as though he were still living too much in the flesh, when he yearns for the physical presence of other Christians. Man was created a body, the Son of God appeared on earth in the body, he was raised in the body, in the sacrament the believer receives the Lord Christ in the body, and the resurrection of the dead will bring about the perfected fellowship of God’s spiritual-physcial creatures.” (pp. 19-20)

Bonhoeffer also deals with the false community we tend to establish where fake closeness by never really facing sin. He powerfully argues that there is no real intimacy until sin is faced and we can come out on the other side.

“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, begins 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, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community.” (p. 27)

Similarly, true love will not call us to indulge one another but to help one another toward Christ-likeness. And our own personal ideas of love will not do. We must look to the Scriptures to teach us what love really looks like.

“I do not know in advance what love for others means on the basis of the general idea of love that grows out of my human desires-all this may rather be hatred and an insidious kind of selfishness in the eyes of Christ. What love is, only Christ tells in his Word.” (p. 35)

“Where Christ bids me to maintain fellowship for the sake of love, I will maintain it. Where his truth enjoins me to dissolve a fellowship for love’s sake, there I will dissolve it, despite all the protests of my human love.” (p. 35)

Challenge of Lack of Discipline in SBC

Last month I came across a very interesting discussion of the loss of discipline in Southern Baptist churches. This topic has been much discussed recently, but what made this essay particularly interesting is that it was written 50 years ago as part of a discussion held at Southern seminary when it was much less conservative. This quote from Theron Price seems to be all the more accurate as the decades have passed and is fruitful for consideration in light of the upcoming conference at Union.

“Finally, there is a current need to recover the sense of the dignity and authority of the church. This is increasingly difficult for Southern Baptists to achieve within the greatly changed patterns of Southern life. In principle Baptists have viewed a church as a congregation of saints, have stressed informed and responsible discipleship on the basis of personal regeneration. The Christian life has been viewed as one of ‘separation from the world and unto God.’ But success itself has risen up to threaten this! In becoming a mass movement and, in the South, all but a territorial church, Baptist have found it difficult to ‘separate.’ The Southern Baptist Convention is no longer in actual practice of a group of ‘gathered and disciplined churches.’ The more Southern Baptists succeed – at the surface level of mere numerical increase without
corresponding growth in biblical knowledge, theological competence, and ethical sensitivity – the more difficult it will become for them to be as Baptist in fact as they are in name. It is to this situation that a proper discipline must be directed. And it is, moreover, to this that realistic attention and earnest prayer need to be given.”

- Theron Price, “Discipline in the Church,” in Duke K. McCall,, ed. What is the Church? A Symposium of Baptist Thought(Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1958), 184-185.

"Education with Force"

In one of our Wednesday night classes we are reading and discussing Thabiti Anyabwile’s What is a Healthy Church Member? (which I have commented on here previously). Last night we came to this quote which Anyabwile cited from Jay Adams:

“When we are baptized into the church, we thereby matriculate into Christ’s school. Then, for the rest of our earthly life, we are to be taught (not facts alone, but also) to obey the commands of Christ. This is education with force, education backed up by the discipline of good order that is necessary for learning to take place.”

That is a great quote getting at the heart of what it looks like to mature in the Christian life and the role of the church in that maturation. Many today talk about the lack of discipleship, but often people fail to realize the missing link is “education with force.” The church has mirrored many of our schools- the removal of discipline has made it impossible for real learning and formation to take place.

Plodding Along

Doug Wilson has a beneficial post on his approach to getting things done. I found it a good reminder- challenging, refreshing and encouraging. It reminded me of a story I have been told about William Carey (though I have not checked it out). Carey accomplished an amazing amount of work in his missionary labors from Bible translation, to preaching, to founding institutions. When someone asked him how he got it all done, reportedly Carey answered, “I am a plodder.”

I aspire to faithful plodding.

HT- Jim Hamilton

There Goes the Bride—The Decline of Church Discipline, 19th Century

The most recent Kairos Journal updated included an article by this title. You can view it here. This is a well done succinct piece on the decline of discipline in the church.

KJ is a great resource for pastors. For registration (free) go here.