Stealing Thunder

Not really.  Catchy title though.

This is a post for a little reading group I’m in, currently reading Bonhoeffer’s Life Together.  Ben hasn’t posted for this week though (not that I’m rebuking him on this – he’s pretty much been a sole reader so far), so I thought I’d post.  Exactly: stealing thunder.  Or a small bang.

Chapter Four is titled “Ministry” (he means serving, not an institutional role), and so covers some basic areas of life in which Christians who are living within a community serve one another.  Everything from not talking, to helping one another in mundane tasks.  It’s challenging reading, in fact: Bonhoeffer has a deep insight into the way people seek to get an upper edge on each other, and wise words for reminding one to refuse such a struggle.

The one that I think challenged me most was that of “listening”.  After holding one’s tongue, and after being helpful in day to day tasks, one can also listen.  But too often I’m impatient, or unwilling. Every time I read Proverbs, and the way it relates foolishness to being unduly talkative, I realise just how much I blabber on.

There were tonnes of wise pastoral insights in this chapter – I don’t think I could sum them up very well.  It’s very much worth reading.  In fact, even if your not Christian you might find it interesting reading as a fascinating picture of how people can live together.

Filed under: Bonhoeffer, Christian, books, experiences , Bonheoffer, Christian life, Life Together

Eighteen months later – Bonhoeffer on community

(A more theological post) That is how long it has taken me to get around to reading some Bonhoeffer, discussed way back here.  I recently had some time off and spent a little while reading Life Together.  In particular, the first chapter on community seemed to me to be very provocative regarding how people join together and why, and, thinking theologically, how church is something very different.

 ”Perhaps the contrast between spiritual and human reality can be made most clear in the following observation: Within the spiritual community there is never, nor in any way, any “immediate” relationship of one to another, whereas human community expresses a profound, elemental, human desire for community, for immediate contact with other human souls, just as in the flesh there is the urge for physical merger with other flesh.  Such desire of the human soul seeks a complete fusion of I and Thou, whether this occur in the union of love or, what is after all the same thing, in the forcing of another person into one’s sphere of power and influence.  Here is where the humanly strong person is in his element, securing for himself the admiration, the love, or the fear of the weak.  Here human ties, suggestions, and bonds are everything, and in the immediate community of souls we have reflected the distorted image of everything that is originally and solely peculiar to community mediated through Christ. “

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p.33

It seems to me that there is so much to learn here from Bonhoeffer.  And not just about church.  He seems to me to be an amazingly astute observer of power and weakness, and thus of social interaction, politics.  His comments on  a desire for immediacy have some parallels in Derrida which I’m going to try and dig up – (think presence).  It sounds a warning I think too… what – in part – feeds the growth of such things as MySpace, Facebook, blogs, all of this techno-communication world is, I think, this desire for immediacy.  Not a bad desire of course, but one that does not always have the effects we intend, and which can sometimes turn to hurt ourselves and others.  “Here is where the humanly strong person is in his element, securing for himself the admiration, the love, or the fear of the weak.”  Which are you – the strong, or the weak?

Filed under: Blogging, Bonhoeffer, books, quotations, theology , Blogging, Bonhoeffer, church, community, desire, quotations, theology