Jeremy L. Berg

What constitutes our fellowship and our unity as Christians/the church?

This is a serious question. Many today think we are united by a shared mission or denomination affiliation, by program or strategic goal, or united around a strong leader and his or her vision. Bonhoeffer digs deeper:

The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity.

This dismisses at the outset every unhappy desire for something more. Those who want more than what Christ has established between us do not want Christian community. They are looking for some extraordinary experiences of community… Such people are bringing confused and tainted desires into the Christian community. Precisely at this point Christian community is most often threatened from the very outset by the greatest danger … the danger of confusing Christian community with some wishful image of pious community, the danger of blending the devout heart’s natural desire for community with the spiritual reality of Christian community….. Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had 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’s 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 a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that community which enters into the experience of this great disillusionment with all its unpleasant and evil appearances begins to be what it is 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. Sooner or later it 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.

Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial….

Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves.  They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judges the others and God Himself accordingly. Such people act as if they are the creator of the community, as if their dream binds everyone together. When things do not go their way, they call the effort a failure. When their ideal picture is destroyed, they see the community going to ruin.  So, they become, first an accuser of the others, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of themselves.

Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients. We thank God for what He has done for us. We thank God for giving us brothers and sisters who live by His call, by His forgiveness, and His promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what He does give us daily.

And is not what has been given enough: brothers and sisters who will go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of His grace?  Is the divine gift of Christian fellowship anything less than this, any day, even the most difficult and distressing day?  Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the communal life, is not the sinning brother still a brother, with whom I, too, stand under the Word of Christ?  Will not his sin be a constant occasion for me to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Jesus Christ?

Thus the very hour of disillusionment with my brother becomes a great blessing, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and Deed which really binds us together — the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. When morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship.

~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, pp. 25-29