Hello friends, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
We are thrilled to have you with us
for this final episode here
as we finish out our series on life together.
It has been a great book study.
It’s a short book,
but that would betray its depth.
And so as we’ve gone through this,
Clint and I have mentioned that there’s a few themes
that have run throughout
that we think deserve returning to in conclusion.
So in this conversation,
we’re not going to be looking
at any particular chapter in the book.
We’re going to be looking at the book as a whole
and just some of our general reflections
about what we saw in it,
in this reading of it.
So definitely want to invite you.
Feel free to put in the comments your own thoughts
as you’ve maybe read the book with us
or if you’ve been part of the discussion,
maybe something that has been meaningful to you.
But that’s the focus to which we turn our attention today. Yeah, I said this to Michael.
I think on my rereading of this book this time around,
I was really struck with the idea
that of the various pastoral books I can think of,
this is the one that for me comes closest
to sounding like scripture.
And I’m not suggesting it should be in the Bible.
What I mean by that is if you read the New Testament,
it is very much this pattern of Paul the pastor
talking to congregations,
solving practical struggles, dealing with real relationship kind of stuff.
And Bonhoeffer captures that amazingly well
as he works his way through this material.
You know, this is not a long book
or not even 125 pages,
but there is on nearly every page something
that you can stop and think about.
I know that in my experience,
several times felt convicted by many things.
I didn’t get to read very far at a time
before I thought something kind of struck me
and stuck with me.
And then sometimes even produced
maybe a little challenge or guilt,
which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
And I’m certainly not suggesting that this book
would replace reading of the scripture,
but I do think one could with fairly regular,
on a fairly regular schedule,
Michael, turn to this and read it devotionally.
I mean, it is educational,
but this has a very kind of spiritual spirit to it.
And it really, I think stands out
as wonderful devotional material. I don’t wanna stretch this.
And also we mentioned this
in some of our previous conversations.
So I won’t linger here too long.
But one of the things that makes this particular book
so unique,
I think,
is the fact that it does combine
what you call spiritual,
almost a devotional sense.
And it does so in the midst of a very thoughtful,
and even in some places,
academic theology that happens.
And that may not seem to you to be incredibly unique,
but if you survey modern theology in the US,
I think even around the world,
what you see is there tends to be
very sort of specific genres of Christian writing.
You’ll have very academic,
very deep and thoughtful,
scholarly kind of work being done,
and that’s good and that’s important.
Now, on the other hand,
you will find far more practical,
sort of the kinds of books that you’re gonna find
in your favorite bookstore,
if you still have one of those nearby,
or those sort of popular Christian books
that make their rounds.
Those tend to be less on the theological side
and more on the practical,
how to think about this
or do this or approach this in your life kind of thing.
What Bonhoeffer does is bring all of the kind of academic insight,
and he combines it
with a very deep spiritual fervor.
It is clear,
as he writes,
that this for him
is not firewalled in his mind.
This isn’t just a mental experiment.
This is theology that he is practicing
with those around him,
and in that way,
I think he’s portraying for us the right
sort of use of this book.
In other words,
this isn’t the kind of thing that you read,
reflect on, and then you just carry on
in the world of ideas.
This is the kind of book that you turn to
as it helps guide the ship in the midst
of your journey of faith,
and I think that’s one of the things that presents
that kind of depth of content that you’re speaking of. I don’t know what the equivalent would be
in other disciplines, but this is on the surface
a how-to book.
It is full of kind of step-by-step movement
toward experiencing Christian community,
both in terms of what I need to bring to the community
and what I need to address in myself,
but it is not simple.
It is not cookie-cutter.
It would be very difficult to turn this book
into some kind of grocery list or checklist
and simply say, “Yes, did that, did that, did that,” as if that would somehow lead us to spiritual maturity
and to an experience of Christian community.
There’s so much depth here that the further you go into it,
the more it shows you both what is possible
and the difficulty of arriving there,
and I think this in its own way,
this is a simple book that is extremely advanced,
and I think often in our characterization of the faith,
we get one or the other.
To your point, Michael, I think we get sort of mass market
Christian bookstore devotional stuff or we get theology,
and this seems to bring them together in a way that is, I think,
incredibly helpful for people,
for instance, in our tradition, who like to think that we pursue
a thinking person’s approach to the faith,
that we are thoughtful Christians,
and I don’t know of anyone
who does that better than Bonhoeffer. Yeah, and let’s just look here briefly
at those chapter markers,
sort of that broad overview of the book.
He starts with the idea of community,
moves to the day with others, the day alone,
ministry, and then ends with this idea of confession and communion,
and what I love about this,
Clint, is that it is reflective
of a very particular ordering of life.
From the very start,
he orders this book
with that definition of what community is,
and if you remember that first chapter,
it’s surprising the amount of time
that he talks about the idea of singleness
or individuality in the midst of community.
He’s not trying to call the church
to some sort of dreamland that doesn’t exist,
a kind of imaginary utopia,
and that’s actually a real danger throughout history.
So many religious leaders of many different stripes
have taken religious ideas
and turned them into the opportunity to capture people,
to capture their mind, literally,
to sort of dupe them into doing things
that are not in either their best interest
or in the interest of their community.
But Bonhoeffer brings very clear vision
to what he understands, the definition,
the inherent ground of what community should be.
It is ultimately a thing
that neither violates the individuality of another,
nor does it in any way keep that individual
from being knit together in this larger thing.
And so as he defines that community,
then he talks in detail about what it means
to spend the day with others,
what it means to then spend that day alone,
how that impacts practically what ministry actually means.
Remember how surprising it was,
how little he talked about what we call formal ministry
or paid ministry?
That was a few short chapters,
or excuse me, a few short paragraphs.
And then at the very end,
this idea of confession and communion,
these sort of practices of the church
that call us to an awareness of what community is.
I think we see this beautiful progression
in the book itself.
He starts with this shot across the bow
to say community is deeper and more meaningful
than you might think it is.
And then he teases it out all the ways that that is true.
And that’s one of the things,
it’s like a wave,
I think, that you could read this book over and over
and get new meaning because each one of these sections
brings a new sense of the very core thing he’s speaking to. This has perhaps been slightly less true in mainline church,
in the Presbyterian church,
but in the American church at large,
I do think we have had a tendency to personalize the faith.
We have
had in the Western world a kind of idea
that faith is really a personal matter,
that I decide my beliefs,
that I go to a church where I agree with the practices
and the people, where I fit in,
where I like the style.
And Bonhoeffer stands out to me
as a wonderful antidote to that.
I think he really pushes back against the idea,
well, we saw it a hundred times in this book,
against the idea that it’s about me,
that it’s about my preferences,
whether that preference is to go inward or outward,
whether that preference is to do study or service.
He really pushes back on any of the ways
we can try to harness the gospel
for our own personal use,
rather than stand underneath it in Christ’s authority.
And I think that it offers the American church particularly
a wonderful reminder that
we do have this brokenness in us
that points us in the direction of personalizing the faith.
If you told Bonhoeffer,
I might be leaving the fellowship I’m in
because there’s a lot of people I don’t agree with,
Bonhoeffer’s going to say,
good,
because that’s the place you can learn to be gracious.
That’s the place where you can learn to be loving,
even with people you don’t agree.
And I just think that that is for us
a needed word,
a necessary word,
one that I don’t think the American church
has done particularly well,
one well suited to his time,
but I think also to ours. Right, and that is sort of the nature maybe
of this book that does serve as a kind of prophetic critique
of our context, because there’s these phrases
that are in vogue now,
things like live your truth.
And when you really parse what that means,
I think in common parlance,
what we’re saying culturally is
that you’re being authentic to who you think you are
at whatever moment in your journey
that you actually are living right now,
sort of your own awareness.
And there’s good in hearing in that,
that there’s freedom for us as individuals
to be on a journey,
that there’s freedom for us
to be exploring who God made us to be,
that there’s no point in our life
where we see that whole picture,
and I would affirm that.
What I think Bonhoeffer does here is make a compelling case
that if you ever believe that you’re on that journey alone,
you’re missing the core of the gospel,
because fundamentally the only way for you to live
in the full reality of the truth, not your truth,
lowercase t,
capital T, personal truth, Jesus Christ, if you’re going to live in him,
in that truth,
Bonhoeffer spent so much time talking about being in Christ,
that’s intentional, that’s directly connected to a larger theological conviction of the ancient church.
If you’re going to live in Christ,
then you have to be willing to recognize
that it will cost something of your individuality.
Now, I’ve already said that it’s not gonna force you
to not get to be who God made you to be,
but Bonhoeffer’s point is going to be,
God made you to be in community,
God made you to be in relationship with other people,
and so you can’t just sort of schism off,
or you can’t jettison from your life,
the reality that you were made to do this in a fellowship,
so that even your individual time as a person
seeks on some level to serve the fellowship
where you are called,
and same with the fellowship,
the fellowship forms you for that time when you’re alone.
We see this beautiful sort of interrelationship there
that we might not see if we were simply to look at this
through our own sort of cultural lens. It seems to me that’s not something
that we think a lot about in most of our church experience.
I mean, we probably look for a church
that we like the people,
will sometimes refer to it
as our church family,
and hopefully, if things are going well,
we really will feel
a sense of connection with those people,
but I think most of us don’t think of the people
we go to church with as essential for our faith experience.
We may feel connected to them,
but I’m not sure that we feel cemented to them,
that we feel that they are absolutely necessary
for us to understand the gospel,
for us to live out the faith,
and Bonhoeffer, again, does us a great service
in painting a picture for us how deep the bonds
of faith can be among people who try
to live a faith life together,
whether that be in an intentional community,
or I think by extension,
even in a congregation together.
I don’t think most of us go to church
and think I absolutely need these people
to live my life of faith,
that I am inseparably connected to them,
and that my experience of Jesus Christ
is dependent upon and necessitated
by their connection to Jesus Christ.
That’s a depth that I just don’t think most of us
bring to our understanding of what it means
to be in a church,
what it means to be in a congregation, or quite frankly,
what it means to be Christian,
and I think there’s a lot in that
that offers us a new way of thinking,
both regionally in terms of actual physical people,
but in this new global world we live in,
in which we are connected in Christ to people
we’ll never be connected with physically.
We may never know,
but we have this kinship
with Africans and Chinese Christians
and believers in all other places,
and this powerful reminder how deeply important
and necessary this is to navigate life together,
faith together, I think there’s just so much here
for us to think about. There’s some of these smaller,
what you might even consider practical sort of notes
that Bonhoeffer interweaves in this book
that I think if you look at them in concert,
they really tell an interesting story,
and as some examples of that,
you may remember the section where he was talking about
how you should be careful when you’re singing
to not have one particular singer carry the day,
and everybody listening to them and reflecting afterwards,
well, it wasn’t their voice, beautiful.
There are other times in the book when he talks about
you need to be careful that you don’t go
and start telling everybody what’s true,
and you start correcting everybody,
because ultimately then you make it about yourself,
and you take away their own individual relationship
with God, and then there are other moments
when he reflects upon the fact that you need
to be willing to be interrupted by people.
You need to let people be able to get in the way of your life.
Sometimes it’s not gonna be the most efficient,
but yet it’s the right thing to let them do.
All of these kinds of things,
when you see them in concert,
you begin to recognize that Bonhoeffer’s very skeptical
of the human heart,
and I think rightly so,
because he believes that our original sin,
our core temptation is to bend the good of the gospel
to our own uses,
and the dangerous part of that
is not that we do it,
that it’s not a new story
to humanity, we’ve always done it.
What’s dangerous in that is that we don’t know
we’re doing it, we don’t recognize the signs
that this is us bending it to our will
and not the other way,
and what Bonhoeffer does
over and over and over throughout this book,
through the practical recommendations I think especially,
is he shows us how grounded and how connected
to the actual stuff that we do,
our spiritual practices should be
to keep us from doing that.
So when we’re in the company of others,
we should practice biting our tongue.
We should not speak, literally.
We should make it a practice,
a habit, a goal, much like you would any other goal,
to allow others to speak so that you can hear.
Listening was this significant point
that he made in the early chapters.
That is the kind of thing that we should strive to
as Christians, and I do think sometimes we’ve become lacks
and we think of our spiritual practices
as a thing that we do more ritually,
and by ritually I mean like once a week,
we go to worship,
or maybe once a week,
we go to church fellowship.
When Bonhoeffer speaks of life together,
he’s thinking seven days a week.
We are considering and mindful and shaped by this community
that we join, whether we’re physically with them or not,
and I think that’s a powerful voice in this book. I was just going to say,
Michael, that to my knowledge,
and I’m fairly confident,
there’s no section in this book
where Bonhoeffer deals with sin.
There’s no section in which he outlines what is sin
and how do we avoid it and where did it come from.
So there’s no theological section on sin,
and yet our brokenness,
our sinfulness, and the temptation of that sinfulness
is woven through this thing constantly.
If you’re a preacher,
the temptation is to make preaching about you,
or to complain about your congregation.
If you’re a singer,
the temptation is even while you sing praise music,
to want to stand out,
to want to add your own twist,
your own nuance, rather than join the group.
If you can’t sing,
then the temptation is to not sing
and therefore distance yourself and make that,
make not singing about you,
and perhaps not surprisingly,
for a man who wrote in the shadow
of the Nazi rise to power,
Bonhoeffer is amazingly sensitive to sinfulness
and its impact on the community,
but its impact on individual believers as well.
Without ever having to say,
this is what sin is,
this is what sin does,
he understands that the largest single barrier
to experiencing
Christian community
is that waywardness of our own individual heart
and that the place it will take us
instead of being faithful to Christ.
And it is,
this book,
this book is amazingly reflective on sin
without ever saying it’s doing it.
It is,
again,
I use this word over and over
in regard to his writing, but it’s incredible. Yeah, it’s amazingly profound.
And one of the things that makes it profound
is that Bonhoeffer does not shy away
from presenting Christian community
with all of its rough edges.
And I’ll be honest with you,
there’s a real temptation for really pastors
and laity alike to sell Christian community
as a thing that it never could possibly be,
a kind of utopian nostalgic vision
of what we would all like church to be.
We would like church as the representation
of the kingdom of God to be a place of perfect peace,
of tranquility,
where when you walk in the door,
all of the strife and discord of the week ceases,
people put down their weapons,
their spears,
and then they come in and they come ready to listen
and prepared to love one another.
Bonhoeffer never lets us live in a kind of utopian vision
of what church might be.
He insists that we see what the church actually is,
and that is people,
difficult people,
people that we struggle to not only live with, but to love,
to find real deep
and spiritual connection with.
And his insistence over and over and over again
is the harder the people are,
the greater the opportunity for your own spiritual growth,
for your own spiritual awareness
that you can see in them,
whatever the struggle you have with them,
the same struggle that lives in you,
the same sin that’s driving that behavior,
however great or small, it doesn’t matter.
That same sin lives in you.
And so even the people that make church hard,
whoever those people are,
whatever name you might give those people,
those people are God’s beloved children.
They are in the fellowship.
And so therefore God has a place and call for them as well.
And so there’s this sort of,
when I say the word profound,
I mean there’s a difficult tension in this book.
It’s certainly very challenging for us
because it means that we can’t write people off.
We can’t look for the part of church
that makes us feel good
so that we can avoid the parts of church that challenge us.
Bonhoeffer calls us to the full life of church,
the life that actually exists.
And that is going to be a struggle. This can be a problematic word,
but I think what Bonhoeffer points us toward
is an idea of genuine community.
Maybe you’ve had an experience,
maybe it was with
in-laws,
maybe it was with friends or some other family
where you look at them from the outside
and they just seem to have it all figured out.
They seem to be as normal as can be.
They seem not to have peculiarities and struggles
and it’s easy to become jealous
or infatuated with the idea that it looks like perfection
and many of us work hard to try
and establish that illusion as well.
But when you get inside a system,
when you get to know a family,
when you live into those relationships,
you realize,
oh no, there’s brokenness here too.
It comes out in various ways,
but it’s here.
And ironically, it’s only then that you can truly love those people.
It is only when you’ve passed the falseness
of everything is perfect and you get to the reality
of we’re all struggling to make our way in this world,
that you can genuinely and truly love someone else
for who they are.
And I think Bonhoeffer has that same vision of the church.
He has no illusions that the church
is a place that gets it all right.
Again,
think of his context,
Nazi Germany and the Confessing Church versus the State Church.
These are real struggles with real people
and Bonhoeffer deeply understands that.
And so he will not paint a false picture,
but he sees even in that struggle,
even in that genuine truth of the struggles
that we have to love one another,
our opportunity to serve Christ faithfully.
And it is, I think, very helpful.
And it is a road we’re indebted to him
for identifying for us. I’ve always felt compelled that Christian theology
should be accessible to every part of the Christian journey.
That doesn’t mean that you’re always gonna understand
every part of it,
but it should be something
that you can wait in or you can dive in.
And as you make your progress in the faith,
you should be able to come back to theology
and it should have a word for you today.
The scripture, of course, is the
example par excellence.
It’s the definition of that.
That’s what we mean by the idea of the canon,
that these writings show us the life of God,
the God’s intention, the gospel, the good news.
And what we find here in Bonhoeffer is certainly not canon,
but as you said at the beginning of the conversation, Clint,
there’s this beautiful arc that happens within this book
that is accessible to everyone.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve been a Christian for a day
or for 100 years,
you’re going to find in this book
both challenge and encouragement.
And I think that’s a testament not only to who Bonhoeffer
is, but to what we as Christians should aspire to.
That should be our own life journey.
So you don’t need to go to seminary to learn,
to grow, to be transformed by the truth of the gospel.
That’s what we mean by theology.
You don’t need to have some degree.
In fact,
in many ways that might not even help you.
What you need
is the continuing determination
to practice the kind of spiritual disciplines
that will open you to the life of others
and that will humbly allow you to question yourself
and then to grow in your realization of who God is
and what God wants for your life.
So if this book doesn’t necessarily speak to you at this moment,
I don’t
maybe even see how that’s possible,
but then at least the form of this book
should apply to every single one of us
because ultimately we should all be seeking
how we continue to grow in the place where we are
as we seek to recognize how practical
and real our faith in Christ really is
and what it should work within us
to do and be in the world. I think the best proclamation,
whether it be written or spoken,
connects our life with the word, the scripture,
particularly the capital W word,
Jesus Christ.
And it seems to me that this book
is a tremendous bridge in that regard.
This book
helps us, again, without quoting a great deal of scripture,
without being preachy, it sets for us a path
that connects the way of Jesus Christ
with our own actual individual lives.
And remarkably, it’s a pretty lean book.
I mean, it’s not a large book.
It’s not a long book.
It is maybe not even a dense book
though there’s not much fluff in it.
And I think it’s a great tool.
If you’ve enjoyed this book,
I would encourage you
maybe think on it for a while,
maybe start thumbing through it again,
maybe put it in a place where you’ll see it
and you can return to it fairly regularly
and see those places that you’ve underlined words
or things you’ve circled.
Maybe there’s a particular section
that really you felt challenged by.
Maybe return to that,
put a bookmark in there
and occasionally find your way back to it
to see where you are and how you’re doing.
I think you could use this book
in many, many devotional ways.
You could write names in this of
people perhaps you struggle to love.
When Bonhoeffer encourages us to do something,
you could challenge yourself
with a very practical example of it.
And I think this can be a wonderful tool.
We hope you’ve enjoyed it.
We hope you’ve gotten something out of it.
We think this is a tremendous piece of work
for the Christian family
and we hope that maybe you’ve come to a similar conclusion.
We appreciate you being with us throughout this study
and we’re grateful that you would continue to listen
as we have explored it together. Yeah, absolutely.
And so just a little bit of housekeeping here
for all of you who join us regularly.
We are working on a series that we’re pretty excited about.
We’ll be talking about in the near future about mission.
We’re not ready for that to come out quite yet.
And in fact,
this next series, excuse me, is going to be the season
where we break a hundred episodes here on the podcast.
So we’re looking forward to that,
but we’re gonna take a few weeks here
as we make some transitions in the studio
and we get some of that content put together
and then we’ll continue on with our normal
sort of schedule here once we get that ready to go.
We don’t have the exact date on that,
so stay tuned for more info.
We’ll give you a heads up when it’s coming out.
But for now, we hope that you continue
to be enriched by this book.
We look forward to your comments
on this series and this book.
If you have thoughts,
ways it’s encouraged you,
do let us know that in the comments,
wherever you’re watching this
or through the link in the description.
And we look forward to being with you again soon
as we continue on with the Pastor Talk podcast. Thanks for listening, everybody.