Life Together
Book Review (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
I think it would be foolish of me to 'review' a work that is such a classic, and is short enough that most of you could read it yourself, and I'd just be quoting large slabs of it to you anyway. So instead, I’m just going to quote some personal highlights from this book for me1:
The Secret of the Psalter:
A psalm that we cannot utter as a prayer, that makes us falter and horrifies us, is a hint to us that here Someone else is praying, now we; that the One who is here protesting his innocence, who is invoking God's judgment, who has come to such infinite depths of suffering, is none other than Jesus Christ himself. He it is who is prayer here, and not only here but in the whole Psalter
On the relation of time together and apart:
Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. let him who is not in community beware of being alone.
On intercession:
A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses. I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me... Intercession means no more than tot bring our brother into the presence of God, to see him under the Cross of Jesus as a poor human being and sinner in need of grace. .. [it] is also a daily service we owe to God and our brother. He who denies his neighbor the service of praying for him denies him the service of a Christian.
On reproof:
Nothing can be more cruel than the tenderness that consigns another to his sin. Nothing can be more compassionate than the severe rebuke that calls a brother back from the path of sin.
On honesty about sin:
The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship. We dare not be sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy. The fact is that we are sinners!
I’ve retained the gendered language of the translation I read.