Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together and the Challenge to the American Church

For Bonhoeffer, the Church is not a metaphor but the real, visible, Spirit-forged community where Christ Himself becomes present and restores genuine human fellowship.

A FORETASTE OF RESURRECTED COMMUNITY

If you’ve lingered around my labors over the years, you will see a distinct appreciation for Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I have lectured on Bonhoeffer and congregational music in Psalm-Tap conferences in Monroe, LA, and I have waxed poetically about Bonhoeffer’s theology of friendship, especially in the writings of his friend Eberhard Bethge.¹ In fact, I compared Augustine and Bonhoeffer’s writings on friendship for one of my chapters in my dissertation.²

In the last few years, Bonhoeffer’s life and theology have been dragged back into the public square and re-examined under a harsher light. Much of this renewed fascination stems from the groyper’s obsession with World War II conspiracies, Nazi occultism, and every shadowy rabbit trail the internet can conjure. Yet the irony is thick: only five years ago, Bonhoeffer was the darling of the evangelical world. People wept through Letters and Papers from Prison;³ they walked more soberly after reading The Cost of Discipleship;⁴ and for those of us brave enough to venture into his dissertation, we were enriched by an ecclesiology thoroughly Lutheran, yet lofty enough for Calvinists like myself. His Sanctorum Communio (1927)⁵ remains one of the finest articulations of how the incarnate Lord acts through His Church to form a new humanity. For Bonhoeffer, the Church is not a metaphor but a real, visible, Spirit-forged community in which Christ Himself becomes present and restores genuine human fellowship.⁶