Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Reflections on Bonhoeffer’s Life Together – 106


“It is not experience with life but experience with the cross that makes one suited to hear confession.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, Fortress Press, 2015 (Reader’s Edition), page 94.

I want to follow yesterday’s post up quickly before both I and you, the reader, lose the train of thought from yesterday, for there are other cautious considerations that one should ponder regarding confession one to another. Yet again I wish Bonhoeffer were here to discuss this with. Is he writing as a seminary professor to ministerial students? Is he writing as a pastor to a broad spectrum of Christians? What is in his mind as he writes about confession? What might this look like in a congregation? It may be easier to visualize what this looks like with seminary students than in a typical Christian congregation.

Bonhoeffer has more to say regarding confession, and I think you’ll see that he is hard-hitting as he crosses the finish line of Life Together, but before we cross the finish line with him I want to pause and think about what I’m styling “cautious considerations.”

Regarding the above quote, while it is true that to hear confession one should have “experience with the cross”, often experience with the Cross walks hand-in-hand with life experience – there was a reason men were to be thirty-years old before entering into the priesthood under the Levitical Law. There is a reason New Testament leaders are to be proved and tested and evaluated. The Bible recognizes the importance of experience, of seasoning, and certainly this idea is important within the priesthood of all believers – we are all (hopefully) in some stage of maturation; I am not sure that as a rule novices ought to be expected to bear the burden of hearing confession – nor am I sure that we want to risk having those making confession hurt by the immaturity of others. This is something that ought to be worked out – I am not working it out on a blog, it is to be worked out in life together. On an organic basis I can see that seasoning may not be critical, such as when all brothers are at roughly the same mile post marker on their journey, but I can also see the opposite.

Also, if you are reading this without having read Life Together, or without having read the preceding blog posts (over 100 now) – please do not read what Bonhoeffer is writing about confession in isolation from his entire book, and if you are tempted to introduce what he is writing about confession to a group of Christians please don’t do it…unless you have read the entire book and thought deeply about it. Confession, the way Bonhoeffer presents it, should not (cannot?) be practiced without a commitment to what goes before it. Bonhoeffer begins Life Together with submission to Christ and His Word, this must come before anything else. Without submission to Christ and His Word confession is reduced to some kind of group therapy and can become something self-centered, theatrical, and those engaged in it can open themselves and others up to confusion, manipulation, and narcissistic introspection. Life Together is about life in Christ together, not about a therapeutic methodology.

Perhaps there ought to be mentoring of sorts in all this, as in all of the Christian life. The older and seasoned mentoring the younger in hearing confession and speaking the Word of forgiveness. I also think that a seasoned brother or sister ought to practice circumspection in their confession to others – not to preserve a façade, but simply because we ought not to burden younger brothers and sisters with confessions that may not be helpful.  Here again Bonhoeffer is on point when he emphasizes that we need to realize that we are capable of any and all sin, we need to see our sin and our sins nailing Jesus Christ to the Cross, then and only then can we, I think, perform the sacred service of hearing the confession of another.

I am sure there are many other “cautious considerations”, the reader may have thought of them and may be far ahead of where I am in my thinking –  I am not very far. Bonhoeffer thought this so important that he concludes Life Together with this discussion, and he writes passionately about it. Whether we agree with him or not, I think we owe it to him and ourselves and those we love to ponder what he is saying – just maybe he has something we need. Yes, it is unfamiliar territory for most of us, and perhaps some of us have previously ventured into that territory and been hurt – but consider that Bonhoeffer is writing to guide the church through the darkness descending on Europe and the world, and that in doing so he concludes his book with the importance confessing our sins to one another…why? Why is he doing this? Why is he so passionate? What can we learn from him? What are we not seeing?


What are we seeing?

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