“There is probably no
Christian to whom God has not given the uplifting and blissful experience of genuine Christian
community at least once in her or his life. But in this world such experiences
remain nothing but a gracious extra beyond the daily bread of Christian
community life…It is not the experience of Christian community, but firm and
certain faith within Christian community that holds us together…We are bound
together by faith, not by experience.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, Fortress Press, 2015
(Reader’s Edition), page 21.
There are congregations that
need more firm and certain faith, and then there are congregations that need
more experience.
Is Bonhoeffer using the word “experience”
in the same sense he has used the word “emotional” in this chapter? Is he using
the word “faith” the way he has used the word “spiritual” in this chapter?
I don’t see a dichotomy of
faith and experience in the Bible, that seems to be something we’ve
constructed. There is false faith and there is false experience; there is true
faith in Christ and there is true experience in Christ. I need to ask myself,
and ask my brother about myself, “Is my experience an experience in Christ? Is
Christ the mediator of my experience?” I ought to also ask myself and my
brother the same about my faith, both its content and its object.
There are professing
Christians who worry about experience, about emotion, who are afraid of it – it
is as if they said wedding vows and then never consummated the marriage. And
then there are professing Christians to whom experience is the litmus test of legitimacy
– it is as if they bypassed the wedding vows.
Everyone has experience, life
is experience, we experience life. So
the question isn’t whether we have an experience, the question is what is the
nature of our experience? The nature of koinonia, of life together, takes many forms, just as life takes many forms.
There is deep sorrow, there is euphoric joy, there is peaceful communion, there
is challenging discussion, there is relational heartbreak, and there is healing
of relationships. A rock doesn’t experience life, people do. What is the nature
of our experience?
When Bonhoeffer uses the word “experience”
he likely means an emphasis on feeling and the emotional. Again, there is
feeling in life and there is emotion in life – and if we can’t feel and
experience emotion when we have eternal life, the life of heaven, then maybe we
ought to ask ourselves why we can’t. However, when feeling and emotion is not
informed, educated, and transformed by “firm and certain faith” then the nature
of our emotion is rightly called into question – as is its durability.
An “experience of genuine
Christian community” is a foretaste of heaven, a foretaste of eternity, and a
call to make the foretaste a manifested reality on earth. Our problem is when
we don’t understand the context of this experience, it is when the experience
in and of itself becomes the recurring goal rather than the reality of life together in Christ. If I desire to
gather with brothers and sisters in order to experience an experience then I may
be a child; but that may not be always the case – for there is joy and peace
and transcendent worship when sisters and brothers touch Christ together,
through each other, and in each other – and so the experience of experience is
transposed upward into the heavens in Christ and flows from God to us and from
us back to God; heaven and earth kiss each other.
The experience of koinonia, of
life together, contains within it a
desire for heaven and the face of God, a desire for the Holy of Holies, and the
desire is metamorphosed into the reality and the reality is a holistic
experience for the experience is Christ and Christ is most certainly alive – He
is not an idea, nor an ideal, but the Person. Our souls yearn and thirst for
Christ, and then for more of Christ, and then for more of Christ. We find and
experience Christ individually and in our life
together. I think a time comes when perhaps there is no time when I
experience Christ apart from my brother, for my brother lives in me, the church
lives in me and I live in the church. Can my thumb experience life apart from
the rest of my body? Can my eye?
Where is the transformation of
my mind? Where is the transformation of my emotions? Where is the
transformation of my experience from Adam to Christ? Does my faith see the
unseen and seeing the unseen is it firm and certain in its knowledge of eternal
reality in Jesus Christ? I am a person (Psalm 139) and I find my personhood in
the Person, in Christ. We are a people, and we find our identity as we
collectively grow up into “the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the
Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the
fullness of Christ,” (Ephesians 4:13). We are “growing into a holy temple in
the Lord,” (Ephesians 2:21) - certainly this
is something to be experienced!
Experience in Christ rooted in
firm and certain faith in Christ; firm and certain faith in Christ experientially
manifested in Christ.