Life together

I finished Dietrich Bonhoeffer's  Life Together in the wee hours of the morning (I couldn't sleep). It was originally published in 1939 (German), and was published in English in 1954 by John W. Doberstein.

And... I gotta be honest... I'd heard a lot of hype about this work over the years. I expected to really like it (and not just because it's only 122 pages). I WANTED to like it! Maybe it was my foul mood, or the archaic language, but it did not match the blurb on the linked Amazon site in my opinion. I was disappointed.

As someone else summarized, "He aims to describe the nature of Christian community through five concepts and devotes a chapter to each: Community, The Day with Others, The Day Alone, Ministry, and Confession and Communion." That's an apt description.

Certainly it is not without any substance. I thought this sort of set the tone for not only this work, but Bonhoeffer's life in general:

"Bonhoeffer was born in a family of seven children in Breslau, in what is now East Germany. He grew up, however, in Berlin, where his father, a noted physician, was the first to occupy a chair of psychiatry in Germany. From his father, as he wrote in his last letter from prison, he learned, what characterizes all that he wrote, an insistent realism, a 'turning away from the phraseological to the real.' For him Christianity could never be merely intellectual theory, doctrine divorced from life, or mystical emotion, but always it must be responsible, obedient action, the discipleship of Christ in every situation of concrete everyday life, personal and public. And it was this that led him in the end to prison and death..." (8)

 This clip from pp.26-27 under the heading 'Not an Ideal but a Divine Reality' also hit home for me:

"Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream... 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... God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious..."

 

Meh, I don't know, it's not that the book was bad... it was just so difficult to read. I'll also admit that my expectations were likely a tad high as well. So, I'm glad I read it, but I'm also glad it's been moved to the 'finished' pile...