Bonhoeffer on Life Together at a seminary

from chapter 4 in Paul House, Bonhoeffer’s Seminary Vision.

1. Bonhoeffer believed that seminary is a time for students to learn how to lead a faithful Christian community.

2. “Let them thank God on their knees and realize: it is grace, nothing but grace, that we are still permitted to live in the community of Christians today.”

3. Without Christ, students’ egos would keep them from loving one another.

4. But the greatest danger to Christian community is a wishful image.  Only when all such images are broken, and disillusionment sets in, can the community begin to be what it should be in God’s sight.

5. Students did not always stay at Finkenvalde.  Bonhoeffer himself wished to get away.  People grumbled.  The Confessing Church did not always live up to its promise.  Visions of the future got crushed.

6. “God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious.  Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves.  They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge one another and God accordingly.”

7. God calls us to a better way–not making demands but thanking God for the community He has placed us in. pastors need this too.  They often complain about their churches.  But they need to have their own illusions about church shattered, and to accept what God has given them.  “Christian community is not an ideal we have to realize but a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.”

8.  There should be times of private meditation on short passages, and communal reading of long passages so that the community learns the great stories and themes of Scripture.