The final chapter of Life Together is titled Confession and the Lord’s Supper. Bonhoeffer
beings the chapter quoting from James 5:16, “Confess your sins to one another.”
While there is much in this
chapter that I agree with and that I think critical for life together, this again is one of those passages that I would
like to talk to Bonhoeffer about to better understand what he was thinking, and
to challenge some of his terminology and (what I think) are his assumptions
about other Christians.
“Those who remain alone with
their evil are left utterly alone. It is possible that Christians may remain
lonely in spite of daily worship together, prayer together, and all their
community through service – that the final breakthrough to community does not
occur precisely because they enjoy community with one another as pious
believers, but not with one another as those lacking piety, as sinners. For the
pious community permits no one to be a sinner. Hence all have to conceal their
sins from themselves and from the community…So we remain alone with our sin,
trapped in lies and hypocrisy, for we are in fact sinners.” Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Life Together, Fortress
Press, 2015 (Reader’s Edition), pages 87.
As I will explore later in
these reflections, I think, as does Bonhoeffer, that confessing our sins one to
another is needful. I think there are times when we need to hear a brother say
to us, “Your sins are forgiven.” There are times we need to be affirmed in the
forgiveness of Jesus Christ – there is something about actually hearing words
of forgiveness spoken aloud; not just from an elder to a congregation, but from
a brother to a brother, or from a sister to a sister. There are also times when
we need to confess our sins to our brother (or to a trusted group of brothers);
there are times we need to verbalize what we have thought, what we have done;
we need to hear ourselves say the words aloud to a brother, to expose the sin;
then once we have said the words to our brother we can hear the words of forgiveness
from our brother in Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer is right when he says that we can “remain
alone with our sin, trapped in lies and hypocrisy.”
When appropriate, we ought
also to verbalize temptations we encounter. Persistent temptation, when
unveiled verbally, is often defeated for it can no longer hide, it can no
longer dig its tentacles deep into the soil of our souls. The longer a
particular temptation persists, the greater likelihood it will gain a foothold
within us, and when we give temptation a foothold we are more likely to succumb
to it – better to tell a brother and expose the temptation, better to unveil it
so that the light of Christ and His Word can do its work of deliverance. Better
to have a brother stand with us than stand alone and possibly be defeated.
Bonhoeffer fails to
distinguish who we were before knowing Christ and who we are since coming into
a relationship with Jesus; in this he, as many others, uses the language of man
and not the language of God’s Word. This demonstrates how powerfully we are
influenced by religious tradition, even those traditions that have a high view
of Scripture. When he writes, “…we are in fact sinners” he uses the language of
man and not the language of the Bible, he works within an extra-Biblical
construct. As I have written more than once, the word the New Testament uses to
refer to Christians more than any other word is “saints”, used as I recall over
80 times. We have the freedom to confess our sins to one another not because we
are sinners, but rather because we are saints.
Sinners (in the Biblical
sense) confessing sins to one another means little, if anything, because sinners
need Jesus Christ and new life in Him. Saints confessing their sins to one
another means much because as the children of God they are exposing things in
their lives which do not belong there, and they have assurance of the forgiveness
of Jesus Christ. 1 John 1:5 – 2:2 was written to saints, not sinners.
Sinners cannot experience life together in the Biblical sense of
the term because they are dead in their trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1ff);
only saints can experience life together
and it is that very life that frees them to confess their sins and disclose
their temptations to one another.
I am not sure how Bonhoeffer
uses the term “pious” in this passage. I am not an expert on Bonhoeffer.
However, based on what I have read elsewhere in his writings I tend to think
that he is referring to the pietistic element of the church in Germany. If this
is the way he is using the term then Bonhoeffer is mistaken. Pietism is often misunderstood,
and while we can certainly point to elements of pietism that are off-balance
and perhaps even extreme, we can do the same with any Christian tradition. If
those critical of pietism were to use the same yardstick to measure other
Christian traditions, including their own, I suspect they would be a little more
thoughtful about their criticisms. One of the great renewals of the Lutheran
Church in Germany came about through pietism. If nothing else, pietism, whether
we see it in Roman Catholicism or Protestantism, has often been used to breathe
new life into moribund churches.
There is a seldom-seen
contradiction when many of those critical of pietism, or even of the charismatic
movement, accuse those groups of being overly informed by experience; when these
very critics themselves often succumb to experience when they insist that
Christians are sinners – since they cannot base their insistence on express and
explicit Biblical teaching and terminology, they must base it on experience; “we
sin so we must still be sinners.” Well, if we are going to base life on natural
observation and experience then empirical evidence might suggest the death of
Jesus Christ means nothing…we believe something we can’t see and we believe
something that experience often contradicts.
If God’s Word is authoritative
in our understanding of the Atonement, then let us submit to that same Word as
it teaches us that one result of the Atonement is that those who come to know
Christ are no longer sinners but saints. Who has the courage to believe?
Bonhoeffer is also mistaken
when he argues that pietism fosters hypocrisy; while I cannot argue that there
may not be some group within the pietistic tradition that may do so, the
pietistic traditions and people with whom I am familiar often have a heightened
sense of sin and unworthiness, especially of ego and self. It seems to me that
all traditions face the danger of hypocrisy, we can find hypocrisy throughout various
traditions and the average congregation; the average congregation knows little
of what Bonhoeffer describes in life
together whether that congregation is in a pietistic tradition or not.
I think the beginning of this
chapter unfortunate in the above aspects and I think Bonhoeffer’s attitude
toward pietism (if indeed this is what he is referring to) is most unfortunate.
Consider, “Many Christians would be unimaginably horrified if a real sinner
were suddenly to turn up among the pious” (page 87). What is the purpose of
such a statement?
As you will see, there is much
in this chapter that is important for life
together, much that we do not practice, much that we need; saints do sin
and when they sin confession is critical, including (when appropriate)
confession to one another. Saints are tempted, and revealing the temptation to
another brother can be the means by which the temptation is dispelled.
We were not born with masks,
but as we grew to adulthood we were taught to wear masks; having worn masks for
so long it can be difficult to remove them, it can be frightening. Perhaps
sometimes we need to say to a friend, “Will you please help me get this off?
And once it is off, please still love me and accept me in Jesus Christ.”
No comments:
Post a Comment