Life Together

Currently Reading Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer



My job actually has resparked my interest to be reading more, and when things are quiet I can get in a few chapters everyday which is nice. I had read Bonhoeffer's Cost of Discipleship (Link) and am finding Life Together to be an amazing book. Its about Christian community - what it really means to have fellowship and to live together as the body of Christ.

The book is incredibly packed. I've read the 20 page first section a couple times, and I feel that I have to reread it some more to really digest what Bonhoeffer is saying. I feel that in 20 pages he so clearly identifies our misconceptions about fellowship. I've been extremely challenged by it. I've been meaning to read more Bonhoeffer, but what really pushed me was noticing that Schloss Mittersill specifically listed the book as being influential in shaping how they do community life.

The accolades are impressive, Richard Foster, author of the staple The Celebration of Discipline (a fine book also) wrote this high praise: "Most books can be skimmed quickly; some deserve careful reading; a precious few should be devoured and digested. Life Together... belongs to the third category."

I have been debating what snippet of the book I ought to share with you all... perhaps the one on the forefront of my mind is Bonhoeffer distinguishing between human love and spiritual love:

Human love is directed to the other person for his own sake, spiritual love loves him for Christ's sake. Therefore, human love seeks direct contact with the other person; it loves him not as a free person but as one whom it binds to itself. It wants to gain, to capture by every means; it uses force. It desires to be irresistible, to rule... Human love makes itself an end in itself. It creates of itself an end, an idol which it worships, to which it must subject everything. It nurses and cultivates an ideal, it loves itself, and nothing else in the world. Spiritual love, however, comes from Jesus Christ