Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together. Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1939. 122 pages.
What does it mean to live together in Christian community? Few questions can be so crucial for the pastor, or for any Christian, because no calling is so inescapable; this is our calling to be the church.
It’s hard to think of any richer resource for this task than Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s nearly century-old classic, Life Together. Its mere 120 pages are packed with profound spiritual insight, distilling Bonhoeffer’s experience leading a clandestine seminary of the Confessing Church at Finkenwalde in Nazi Germany during the late 1930s. Given the extraordinary anxiety of those political circumstances, nothing is so remarkable about the book as its complete serenity—a powerful lesson to us in our own time of intense political and cultural anxiety. Whatever may be happening in the world around us, Bonhoeffer reminds that the day-to-day burdens and conflicts of Christian community should remain our top priority.
Although the central theme of the book is life together in Christian community, Bonhoeffer begins with the crucial reminder that the Christian life may not always be a life together. Some Christians in some times and places are called to a solitary discipleship—in the wilderness,
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