Bonhoeffer On: Community
What is community, for us today, really?
It seems that the word “community” is thrown around a lot these days, both in Christian circles and in more secular spaces. Online spaces, political movements, churches, musical fandoms, friend groups, work environments, even people who watch the same TV shows-all of these can be, and often are, referred to as “communities.” If such a diverse group of phenomena can be described using the same word, what does the word actually mean, and what should it mean?
Bonhoeffer wrote his dissertation on the concept of community, and was pretty much obsessed with it throughout the course of his adult life. Perhaps his most-read book, Life Together, is a kind of manifesto on Christian community, and a reflection upon his time forming and leading a community of illegal seminarians at Finkenwalde from 1935-1937, which was broken up by the Gestapo and forced further and further underground.
A few years ago, I wrote a chapter on Bonhoeffer’s experience of and reflection upon community, and how it changed over the course of his life, called “Singular Community: The Changing Significance of Friendship for Spiritual Formation in Bonhoeffer’s Life and Thought” in a book about Bonhoeffer and Marilynne Robinson called Christian Humanism and Moral Formation in a World Come of Age. The following thoughts on Bonhoeffer and community are based on that chapter.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer often reflected upon the communal aspects of the Christian life. From his doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, to his spiritual classic Life Together, to his magnum opus Ethics and even his collected letters and papers from prison, Bonhoeffer argues that following or relating to Jesus means relating to the concrete Body of Christ, that is, the Church. To have communion with Jesus as a disciple is to live in community with other followers of Jesus. Clifford Green has drawn attention to the central role of sociality in Bonhoeffer’s Christology and theological anthropology and has identified it as one of the most important aspects of Bonhoeffer’s body of work. Sociality and the importance of relationships in and among a community are indeed important themes for Bonhoeffer, but phenomena such as “community” and “life together” seem to correspond with what Eberhard Bethge has called “plural” friendships, and may not reveal the deepest or most particular level of Bonhoeffer’s relational spirituality. Indeed, Bethge himself represented in Bonhoeffer’s life what may be the deepest layer of this area of Bonhoeffer’s thought, namely “friendship.”
In his essay on “Bonhoeffer’s Theology of Friendship,” Bethge distinguishes between “singular” and “plural” friendships in the thought of his best friend. Bethge notes that Bonhoeffer reflected on friendship only late in his life, a contention that is borne out by a close reading of the passages in Bonhoeffer’s work and personal correspondence that address the concepts of friends and friendship. Whereas in Bonhoeffer’s earlier writings the topic of friendship is addressed in a limited way, his prison writings offer a much more robust treatment of the phenomenon. Given this development, it seems that over the course of his adult life, friendship came to occupy a more important place in Bonhoeffer’s thought and practice. For Bonhoeffer, “friendship” (Freundschaft) became the deepest or highest form of community or highest form of community (Gemeinschaft) and a richer and more concrete extension of his earlier concept of “brotherhood” (Bruderschaft) for all of life.
To save you the time of reading the entire chapter, the general thrust of the argument is that “community” as a concept can be pretty flabby, ambiguous, fungible, and impractical, and over the course of his adult life, Bonhoeffer realized (through experience and reflection) that a certain kind of friendship is the most real and transformative kind of community.
This kind of friendship is based on speaking the truth out loud (or confession of reality, as Bonhoeffer wrote about it), being honest about our failings and shortcomings with our friend, encouraging one another in the calling or work we are doing, praying for one another, eating together, serving one another and serving others together, and playing together, whether that is music, sports, games, or other similar activities. This kind of friendship takes place within the context of a larger community, and is supported by other relationships, but it is core to a certain kind of personal and moral growth over time that starts with spiritual realities, and extends outward to relational, humanist (cultural), and political realities and endeavors.
Lisa E. Dahill has argued that friendship was profoundly significant for Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s spiritual formation, and that it represented “a further deepening of the grace and trust that Bonhoeffer experienced as so healing and revelatory” in Christian community. Sabine Bobert-Stützel described friendship as the relationship in which the Bonhoeffer of “religionless Christianity” could envision the disciplines of prayer, confession, and communion in the context of every day life in the world. I argue that friendship took on this increased significance when and how it did because of Bonhoeffer’s conversion, his experience of a deep Christian friendship that grew out of communal life and brotherhood, his praxis-oriented theology, his later theological turn to “a world come of age,” his attraction to the concrete and the particular, and the practical details of the last years of his life. Bonhoeffer and Bethge both found this friendship to be a source of help, strength, spiritual growth, stability, security, freedom, forgiveness, and love. Community with Jesus Christ was formational for Bonhoeffer, and friendship became an increasingly important way to live in (singular) community. Freundschaft for Bonhoeffer became the best way to experience Gemeinschaft mit Jesus Christus.
Spiritual formation and discipleship necessarily involve following Jesus, hearing the call of Jesus, and communing with Jesus. Bonhoeffer’s own spiritual formation involved reading the Bible, praying, serving others in community, and confession, and friendship was the locus in which all of these disciplines came together. For Bonhoeffer, friendship as a source of spiritual sustenance and friendship as an opportunity for discipleship are two aspects of the same reality; one aspect enables the other. This mirrors the widely held Christian belief that God through the Holy Spirit works both in and with human beings, especially with regard to vocation.
It may be helpful for Christians seeking to form genuine, concrete community, to see in Bonhoeffer’s conception of Christian community not only a general or plural reality, but an opportunity for disciples of Jesus to cultivate Christian friendships that may be even more sustaining, freeing, and challenging than Christian groups, gatherings, or even communal living. More generally speaking, Bonhoeffer’s concern for the concrete and the particular might be helpful in contexts where ideas of Christian community tend to be idealistic or ambiguous. Finally, theologians, educators, pastors, and other Christian leaders can appreciate the value of having fellow laborers to lean upon, to confess to, and to be challenged by. Friendship as experienced and articulated by Bonhoeffer can offer something deeper than collegiality or even brother-and-sisterhood. Friends among colleagues can help sharpen ideas, guide projects, question claims, sustain weary ministers, and nurture spiritual and personal growth. Dietrich Bonhoeffer would not have been the theologian, ethicist, and exemplar we know without his best friend Eberhard Bethge, nor would Bethge have lived the life he did without Bonhoeffer. The world is richer for their collaboration and for the fruits of their faithful friendship, a singular community that still helps transform lives today.
In our own Here and Now, most of us have been failed by one form of “community” or another. We may have idealized a church community or group of friends, only to be disappointed and embittered by betrayal, abuse, neglect, or other realities of human frailty. We may have placed our trust in work relationships that turned out to be transactional and un-enduring in nature. Many of us have discovered that our political or cultural affiliations were shallow, or lacked real meaning. Our “communities” may have turned out to be relationships of mutual convenience that people opt out of as soon as life gets difficult. Charismatic leaders in various religious, cultural, political, and commercial arenas continue to fail their communities, and many turn away in disappointment, disbelief, and despair.
What I take from Bonhoeffer’s journey with and reflection upon community, especially as it related to his own spiritual and ethical growth, is that we need to risk specific, honest, real relationships with other specific people in our broader communities, people we can be our flawed, frail selves with, people who will accept and challenge us to be better, people who will confess to us and hear our confessions, people who want to serve others like us and serve others with us, people who are willing to play, to take themselves un-seriously, people who don’t expect perfection yet extend grace, people who are willing to sacrifice time, energy, attention, and reputation for us. We need these friendships, built slowly and carefully, over time, grounded in something larger than ourselves. We need these kinds of relationships, and we need these kinds of people. But for this to be possible, for us to experience and build these kinds of friendships, for us to find this kind of people, we have to become this kind of people. Bonhoeffer believed this pursuit of real, concrete, singular community was a risk worth taking, and so do I. How about you?
Glen Stassen and I used to talk about how there are implied covenants in friendships (based on Bonhoeffer). I am delighted to read this post and want to seek out your book!