“When pastors lose faith in a
Christian community in which they have been placed and begin to make
accusations against it, they had better examine themselves first to see whether
the underlying problem is not their own idealized image, which should be
shattered by God.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life
Together, Fortress Press, 2015 (Reader’s Edition), page 12.
This passage is one of many in
Life Together that makes me wish we
had read and discussed Life Together
in seminary. My seminary experience was wonderful; it was not perfect, and it
raised questions about just what a seminary is and what a seminary should do –
which I think is healthy – but it was wonderful. However, as I have looked back
at the three years I was in seminary, I have often wished that we had studied
and explored and discussed the church – just what it is objectively in Christ,
what it should look like experientially on earth, and what the challenges of
ministry are in shepherding a people from where we find them to where our Lord
wants them to be. I wish we had been challenged to explore a Biblical theology
of ekklesia and to develop a theology of ekklesia and life together that would form an element of our foundation for
service to Christ and the people of Christ.
Our look at congregational
life in seminary was confined to conflict resolution, and functions such as
weddings and funerals and pastoral ethics and counseling; we did not explore a
Biblical theology of church – unless it was part of Systematic theology, which
I don’t recall it being. Even if we had touched on the church in Systematic Theology,
a “touch” would have fallen short of the need.
A fellow alumnus might say to
me, “Since our faculty and student body comprised people from many Christian
traditions and views of the church, what you are suggesting would have been
impractical.”
My response is, “We explored
different theologies and traditions in Systematic Theology, we did the same in
Spiritual Formation, we did the same in Church History – and when we did so we
were the better for it.” Biblical thinking and theology sustains us in Christ,
and Christ sustains us in our thinking about God and the Bible.
How can we differentiate
between Bonhoeffer’s reality in
Christ and our ideals of what life together should be? If we aren’t
cultivating a Biblical understanding of the church, if we aren’t consistently
looking into the Word as in a mirror, if we aren’t engaged in koinonia as a way
of life in Christ Jesus, if we aren’t submitting to the Word as opposed to
forcing the Word to submit to us – then I don’t see how we can differentiate
between what we think and see and what God sees.
Perhaps some questions
we should have on our lips are: What do I see? What does God see? What
Biblical lenses should I look through? What do I see through the lens of the
experiential? What do I see through the lens of the “already and not yet in
Christ”? How does the tension between the “already and the not yet” inform our life
together?
We’ll continue our reflection
on the above Life Together quote in
the next post in this series…
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