Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works Vol. 5

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, James H. Burtness

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780800683252
• eBook ISBN: 9781451410389
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER WORKS, VOLUME 5

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DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

Life Together

Translated from the German Edition
Edited by
GERHARD LUDWIG MÜLLER AND ALBRECHT SCHÖNHERR

English Edition
Edited by
GEFFREY B. KELLY

Translated by
DANIEL W. BLOESCH

FORTRESS PRESS

MINNEAPOLIS

GEFFREY B. KELLY

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

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IN AN IRONICAL WAY we are indebted to the Gestapo¹ for this remarkable book. It was because they had shut down the preachers’ seminary at Finkenwalde that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was finally persuaded to compose his thoughts on the nature and sustaining structures of Christian community, based on the “life together” that he and his seminarians had sustained both at the seminary and in the Brothers’ House at Finkenwalde. Prior to this, except for a brief explanation of the practice of daily meditation, Bonhoeffer had been reluctant to publicize this experiment, feeling that the time was not ripe. With the closing of the seminary at Finkenwalde and the dispersal of the seminarians, however, Bonhoeffer felt compelled not only to record for posterity the daily regimen and its rationale, but also to voice his conviction that the worldwide church itself needed to promote a sense of community like this if it was to have new life breathed into it.

Life Together and the Crises of 1938

With a new sense of urgency, therefore, Bonhoeffer, along with his close friend Eberhard Bethge, went to Göttingen in late September 1938, to the empty home belonging to his twin sister, Sabine, and her husband, Gerhard Leibholz. Though a popular professor of law at Göttingen University and a baptized Christian, Leibholz had been dismissed from his professorship because of his Jewish origins. On September 9, 1938, Bonhoeffer and Bethge had helped the Leibholz family escape Germany into Basel, Switzerland. Later they would emigrate to Oxford, England, where they would be safe during the war years. Working in the Leibholz home, Bonhoeffer completed Life Together [Gemeinsames Leben] in a single stretch of four weeks. Bethge recalls that, while he himself passed the time studying Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, Bonhoeffer sat at Leibholz’s desk and worked on the manuscript almost nonstop. Though they also took breaks for tennis and a music festival and had their work interrupted by the Sudetenland crisis, Bonhoeffer was able to block out these distractions and complete the book in the short time available.²

Those detours from the writing of Life Together were highlighted by the background drama of Hitler’s bold move to gobble up the Sudetenland. The breather from this crisis came with the signing of the Munich agreement on September 30. Munich proved to be a mere deceptive prelude to Hitler’s swallowing the whole of Czechoslovakia. Bonhoeffer was working, therefore, against the clock that seemed to be ticking away the time between a shaky peace and the impending conflict with France and England over the fate of Czechoslovakia. At the same time, the military draft was escalating with apparently only one purpose: war. Bonhoeffer and Bethge were plunged, too, into the turmoil of incertitude about the future of the Confessing Church. Throughout 1937 and 1938 Bonhoeffer had been irritated by the Confessing Church’s accelerating weakness and its tendency to compromise in the face of Nazi threats. The oath of personal allegiance to Hitler that a majority of Confessing Church pastors had taken by the summer of 1938, absent any strong command to the contrary from church leaders, already filled him with bitterness and frustration. That latest failure in responsibility on the part of Bonhoeffer’s church prompted his addressing a stinging rebuke to the synod that had passed responsibility for taking the oath onto the shoulders of individual pastors. His admonition of the leadership of the Confessing Church was characteristically blunt: “Will Confessing Synods ever learn that it is important to counsel and to decide in defiance of all dangers and difficulties …? Will they ever learn that majority decision in matters of conscience kills the spirit?”³

By the time of the writing of Life Together in September 1938, the situation had worsened. Bethge described the “insane tension” of those days when, forced to interrupt their work, he and Bonhoeffer had driven to Berlin around long lines of cars and trucks in order to find out firsthand how far along the path to war Germany had marched. They also craved information about their own situation as pastors about to be inducted into the army. They wanted recognition from the Evangelical Church Council in order to be eligible for exemption from military service. It was not beyond imagining that the Nazis would dismantle the entire Confessing Church leadership. What then? In addition, both Bonhoeffer and Bethge were privy to the earliest conspiracy to overthrow the Hitler government in a coup d’etat in which Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, was heavily involved. How advanced were plans for the conspirators’ move against Hitler? The future of Jews in Nazi Germany was even more precarious. Harsher anti-Semitic measures, such as the stamping of “J” on Jewish citizens’ passports to prevent their emigration, were already set in place. Within this political and ecclesiastical maelstrom, with its unusual distractions that ate into his available time, Bonhoeffer had to set aside time for work on his manuscript.

It is not surprising, then, that the political-religious situation and the unrest of those days worked their way into several of the comments that appear in the first section of the book. Bethge notes, for example, that the Nazi strangulation of the churches lay behind Bonhoeffer’s remark that “the Christian cannot simply take for granted the privilege of living among other Christians,” adding that Christians belong “in the midst of enemies. There they find their mission, their work.”⁴ That “mission” and “work,” if we can extrapolate from Life Together, seemed to be the infusion of new life and a new sense of Christian community into a church grown cowardly and unchristlike.

The crises of 1938 made it even more imperative for Bonhoeffer to finish the book. The Finkenwalde community’s “life together” had been rudely terminated by the Gestapo. But he was determined that not even Hitler’s secret police would impede the message for the church that had taken shape during the Finkenwalde experiences of genuine Christian community. As Bonhoeffer stated in his own Preface, he wanted simply to tell others about this experiment in community and of how the life together in the Finkenwalde seminary could become a significant “contribution toward answering the extensive questions … raised” about Christian faith, Christian community, and the nature of the church in a world beset with forces destructive of them all.⁵ Theirs was an experience that, with the help of responsible Christians and church leaders, might clarify what was involved in the formation of Christian community guided by the Word of God. The book itself was published in 1939 as volume 61 in the series of theological monographs, Theologische Existenz heute (Theological existence today). Beyond all expectations on Bonhoeffer’s part, within one year it had been through a fourth printing.

The Foundations of Bonhoeffer’s Idea of Christian Community

The story of how Life Together came to be does not, however, begin in September 1938. Although the book grew out of his two years’ experience as director of the Confessing Church’s seminary in Finkenwalde and the establishment of a Brothers’ House within the seminary, Bonhoeffer had a fascination with the formation of a Christian community from the earliest days of his lectures on the church at the University of Berlin. In fact, the interpretive key to so much of Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology and, therefore, of his understanding of the nature of community, was set in his doctoral dissertation on the church, Sanctorum Communio, and in his second dissertation, Act and Being, which grounded his interpretation of the church as a primary form of God’s self-revelation. He was guided then, as he was later in the community of Finkenwalde, by the questions of how God in Christ becomes present in and among those who profess faith in the gospel—and how in turn faith, and communities of faith, must assume concrete form in the world. He claimed in that first foundational study that “God’s will is ever directed to the concrete historical human being.”⁶ In short, the will of God is expressed in a tangible word spoken to specific human beings and their communities. God’s “will” should never be allowed to die the death of abstraction through its institutional, dogmatic, or biblicist reductionism. Life Together was hardly a study in abstraction. The reality behind the book was the church in its most palpable, somatic form, the Christian community.

In Sanctorum Communio we see, too, the guiding spirit of Martin Luther strongly influencing Bonhoeffer during those student days, in this case through the seminars at Berlin and the popular studies of Luther by the church historian, Karl Holl. It was Holl who had emphasized the genius of Luther’s binding together a scripturally validated doctrine of justification with a reformed understanding of church. For Holl, the church can be conceptualized only as a community. If Luther’s theology of church was to have any meaning in the light of God’s Word, then confession of faith in the presence of Jesus Christ and the community’s structuring of that confessed presence had to be integrated. This integration is behind Bonhoeffer’s adroit refinement of the Hegelian definition of church into the expression for which Sanctorum Communio has been noted: “Christ existing as community” [Christus als Gemeinde existierend].⁷

For Bonhoeffer this was more than a theological device to explain the nature of church. The expression emanated from a deeply held conviction that Christian community had to integrate the gospel into its daily life and reflect this to the world. “Christ existing as community” challenges believers to behave as Christ to one another; this same Christ promises those who gather in his name to be present in, with, and for them. We see in both the Berlin dissertations and in Life Together the traces of Bonhoeffer’s inner longing for a community life in which his call to the ministry and his love for God’s Word would merge to bring a more meaningful sense of direction into his life. What Bonhoeffer wrote in Life Together on the nature of community, the dialectic of Christians’ being together yet needing time to be alone, their service, their prayer life, and their practice of confession and the Lord’s Supper, presupposes the Christo-ecclesiological groundwork of Sanctorum Communio. The faith-searching explorations that followed in Act and Being served to deepen Bonhoeffer’s insights into the way that God’s revelatory Word breaks through the impasse of human egotism and the manipulative desires of an emotionally grounded, self-centered “love,” offering individuals and communities the chance to become hearers of that Word, as well as Christ one to another.

Though Bonhoeffer was later somewhat diffident about his Berlin dissertations, all his subsequent writings reveal an indebtedness to the insights he developed in these studies. His immersion in these projects yielded for him the conceptual grist for setting in motion a new way of being the church. The community experience of Finkenwalde was memorable because it provided a unique occasion to test out in concrete experience his understanding of what a church could and should be. At the inner core of the Christology that emerges from the Berlin dissertations is God’s Word present in the human being Jesus and in the community of those with whom Christ identifies. Life Together never strays from this form of Christocentrism.

One has only to notice coursing through Sanctorum Communio the dynamic reality of Jesus Christ, whose vicarious action [Stellvertretung] in the Christian Church is the life-giving principle of the visible communion of saints, to appreciate the connection with the way Bonhoeffer later depicts Jesus’ presence inspiriting the Christian community in Life Together. Christ is depicted as the embodiment both of God and Christians, who are moved to do what, without Christ, they would be unable to accomplish: to live together, sharing faith, hope, and self-giving love in a prayerful, compassionate, caring community. Christ is present in the community as representat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s Foreword to Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works
• Abbreviations
• Life Together
• Prayerbook of the Bible: An Introduction to the Psalms
• Chronology of Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible
• Bibliography
• Index of Scripture References
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• Editors and Translators