Bonhoeffer’s “Life Together” and Our Global Lockdown
Can the scattered church thrive while in quarantine?
by Jon Dennis
Bonhoeffer’s Life Together can help in our uncertainty.
Summary: In that darkest moment when the world was gripped by the terrors of global war, German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer composed a beautiful text on Christian unity. In this frightening moment where our globe is gripped by a pandemic, his words still offer hope.
Lockdown. The term is chilling. Confined to our homes, our entire means of social interaction has been altered. Across the world, governments are ordering citizens home. In India, 1.3 billion people have been told to stay at home. Italian Prime Minister Guiseppe Conte ordered a national quarantine on March 9, 2020, in response to the growing pandemic of COVID-19. On Friday, March 20, Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered New York to shut down, saying, “I want to be able to say to the people of New York — I did everything we could do,” Cuomo told reporters at the state capitol. “And if everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.”
Can the Christian survive this social isolation? Some, such as First Things’s editor R.R. Reno, have questioned the severity of the measures saying that Cuomo’s order “reflects a disastrous sentimentalism.” Reno argues that “we must reject the specious moralism that places fear of death at the center of life.” Reno argued on March 17 that “closing churches and cancelling services betrays [the] duty of spiritual care.” Others, such as Rod Dreher, have argued that Reno is missing the point: “Nobody is asking Reno or anyone else to deny Christ; they’re just asking him to deny himself the pleasure of others’ company for a period, for the sake of saving lives.” This is about loving one’s neighbor: “The call to social distancing is an appeal first and foremost not to self-love, but to love of neighbor,” says Brad Littlejohn.
A global lockdown is unprecedented. Individually — and at times in large groups, such as during a war — many of our heroes have experienced lockdown, such as Joseph in Genesis and the apostle Paul, who wrote his prison epistles around 65 AD. Martin Luther King Jr. is deservingly remembered for his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. Shakespeare wrote King Lear in quarantine, and Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress in jail. For some, such as Bunyan, the lockdown resulted in his most enduring work. In April 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, along with his sister and her husband, were arrested and imprisoned. Bonhoeffer remained in criminal lockdown in Tegel, Germany until October 8, 1944. On April 9, 1945, he was hanged. Can isolation foster creativity? Perhaps. But at the least, isolation from other believers challenges us to think about what true Christian identity and fellowship looks like and means.
Six and a half years before Bonhoeffer was incarcerated, in September 1938, Bonhoeffer wrote his classic Life Together cloistered in an illegal, clandestine seminary with 25 members. In that darkest moment when the world was gripped by the terrors of global war, German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer composed a beautiful text on Christian unity. In this frightening moment where our globe is gripped by a pandemic, his words of unity offer hope.
My claim is that the New Testament’s concept of deep unity (koinonia) is not only possible during a quarantine, but that the forced lockdown can enhance our spiritual growth if we listen carefully to Bonhoeffer’s writing from Life Together. And Bonhoeffer’s classic work may also correct some of our superficial perspectives on shallow fellowship.
Here are eight lessons from Bonhoeffer on how the scattered church might thrive in the day of quarantine:
1. The scattered church can thrive because our unity is in Christ and through Christ.
In no way do I mean to minimize the necessity of face-to-face encounters of “brother with brother” or “sister with sister,” but Bonhoeffer is clear that:
Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. No Christian community is more or less than this. Whether it be a brief, single encounter or the daily fellowship of years, Christian community is only this. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.
(p. 21, emphasis added)
So, while our current quarantined and Zoom-call experience of Christian unity is different — highly unusual — it is not, ultimately, broken. Why? From Bonhoeffer’s perspective, it is a spiritual reality. This idea, that distance does not break koinonia is part of Pauls’ thesis in Philippians (see 1:5, 7; 2:1; 3:10; 4:14–15). Their “oneness” continues as a spiritual reality, despite Paul being bound in jail.
2. The scattered church can thrive because there is now an increased opportunity for the “blessing and joy” of daily fellowship that many have not had before (p. 20).
Who knew conferenced prayer could be so strengthening? Who knew that so many of us would be called to prayer? Some of the richest fellowship our congregation has ever had has come through this trial. Others, however, have only felt profoundly isolated — and would cling to any morsel of human contact.
Bonhoeffer puts it this way,
But if there is so much blessing and joy even in a single encounter of brother with brother, how inexhaustible are the riches that open up for those who by God’s will are privileged to live in the daily fellowship of life with other Christians!
(p. 20)
Daily fellowship seems to be needed now more than ever.
3. Our lockdown reminds us that part of the fundamental identity of God’s people is being a scattered people.
Abraham left his home. The Israelites wandered the desert. Peter writes to the dispersed church in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia.
Bonhoeffer makes this claim, “According to God’s will, Christendom is a scattered people, scattered like seed “into all the kingdoms of the earth” (Deut. 28:25). Elaborating further, he says, “That is its curse and its promise.”
Or more accurately, within the curse is a promise. Bonhoeffer reminds us that, if scattering is indeed part of God’s will, one day we will be gathered: visibly. We will be visibly gathered together when the angels “gather together his elect from the four winds” (Matt. 24:31). (p. 18)
“Until then,” Bonhoeffer writes, God’s people remain scattered, held together solely in Jesus Christ, having become one in the fact that, dispersed among unbelievers, they remember Him in the far countries” (p. 18).
4. Our social isolation reminds us of the abandonment of Christ.
This is nothing to trivialize. Bonhoeffer begins the whole volume of Life Together by writing, “At the end all his disciples deserted him. On the Cross he was utterly alone….For this cause he had come, to bring peace to the enemies of God.”
Yes, our isolation is a trial, but it pales in comparison to our Lord’s. And, we can and should ask the Lord to use our situation to give thanks to Christ for his willing abandonment for us (p. 17).
5. Our scattering into lockdown humbles us.
For Bonhoeffer, it is a gift to see our weakness. It is true that our current state of communion with one another is weak, fragile, even broken: medical doctors greet their own children from beyond the living room window, or over a sketchy Zoom call, but this makes it more precious.
Bonhoeffer counterintuitively says,
If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even when there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith and difficult; if on the contrary we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our (disconnected, interrupted) fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.
(p. 29)
May we discover the riches.
6. Our scattered and fragile connections to one another remind us that we must be the bearers of salvation to one another.
One of the things for which I’m most grateful in this season has been hearing God’s words from the lips of others — every day — and multiple times a day. Bonhoeffer tells us this is our role,
Therefore, the Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth. He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation. He needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure. And that also clarifies the goal of all Christian community: they meet one another as bringers of the message of salvation.
(p. 23)
7. Our scattered state emphasizes the centrality and the exclusive work of Christ.
What does this mean? For Bonhoeffer, God is the author of our spiritual Christian unity. Bonhoeffer writes, “Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us” (p. 25). “In Christian brotherhood, everything depends upon its being clear right from the beginning, first, that Christian brotherhood is not an ideal, but a divine reality” (emphasis added; p. 26).
God has accomplished our unity as sisters and brothers.
8. As His scattered people, God’s work on our behalf requires us to be thankful.
We do not make demands on God for our fellowship. Demands are dangerous. Rather, we wrap frail fellowship in thanks for the meager connections we have.
Bonhoeffer writes,
Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients. We thank God for what He has done for us. We thank God for giving us brethren who live by His call, by His forgiveness, and His promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what He does give us daily.
(p. 28, emphasis added)
Can we do that together? Across this divided land, in this moment of utmost urgency and danger, despite the challenges, despite the isolation, can we be thankful for the spiritual privilege of our connections through Christ? By His grace, we can.
We are in a global lockdown. Perhaps we will one day look back upon this darkest moment when the world was gripped by the terrors of a pandemic and see a ray of beauty in the words of a martyred German pastor. Brothers and sisters in lockdown, stand firm. Hope in Christ. Serve well. Pray hard. Love your neighbor to the glory of God.
References
R.R. Reno — https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/03/say-no-to-deaths-dominion
R.R. Reno -https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/03/keep-the-churches-open
Brad Littlejohn — https://mereorthodoxy.com/moral-reasoning-coronavirus-pandemic/
Shakespeare — https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/03/broadway-shutdown-could-be-good-theater-coronavirus/607993/
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together: A Discussion of Christian Fellowship. (HarperCollins, 1954)
This blog was originally featured at Holy Trinity Church.
About the Author: Dr. Jon M. Dennis is the Chairman of Together Chicago, Co-Director for City to City North America, and Senior Pastor of Holy Trinity Church, Chicago which he helped found in 1998. He has five children and has been married to Amy for 34 years.
