I am following up my blog about the Underground
Seminary with thoughts on Bonhoeffer’s views about community and
theological education. While the
Underground Seminary founded by teaching elder Jin S. Kim, John Nelson, and
Laura Newby, of the Church of All Nations in Minneapolis, is supposedly modeled
after Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Finkenwalde seminary during the Nazi years, it is
instead, evidently, influenced by progressive ideologies and sees community as
a counter movement against western colonialism, consumerism and individualism. It is meant to develop disciples by rooting
out the ‘logic and impulses of empire.’
But Finkenwalde was created in order to train pastors who
would be faithful to the word of God. Bonhoeffer clung to a realism that was
grounded in the incarnation—Jesus Christ was truly human and truly God.
Finkenwalde was not about un-doing fascism, (a worthy cause), Finkenwalde was
about raising up pastors who loved the Lord of the Church and loved each other.
I am using Bonhoeffer’s Life
together, written during the founding of Finkenwalde, to explore his views.
I will write another posting, looking at a lecture which was sent as a letter
to those seminarians who emerged from the illegal seminary and were struggling
with faithfulness because of the German church struggle. The lecture is “Lecture
on the Path of the Young Illegal Theologians of the Confessing Church, October
26, 1938.”
Almost immediately Bonhoeffer, in his book, Life Together, lays out the only real
reasons for Christian unity and fellowship. This he hoped the seminarians would
grasp. Bonhoeffer gives three reasons and then enlarges on each one. The first
is that a Christian needs “others because of Christ.” Because humanity is
sinful and can only live from the righteousness of Christ and can only live
from the word of God they need to hear that word coming from the lips of
others, “the Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him.”
Bonhoeffer puts it strongly and clearly:
All we can say, therefore, is:
the community of Christians springs solely from the Biblical and Reformation
message of the justification of man through grace alone; this alone is the
basis of the longing of Christians for one another.
The second reason for Christian community is “A Christian
comes to others only through Jesus Christ.” As Bonhoeffer puts it, “without
Christ we would not know God, we could not call upon Him, nor come to Him. But
without Christ we also would not know our brother, nor could we come to him.
The way is blocked by our ego. Christ opened up the way to God and to our
brother” And Bonhoeffer goes on to explain that this bonding with our Christian
brothers and sisters is an eternal bonding. That is found in the third reason.
The third reason for the fellowship of Christians is “that
in Jesus Christ we have been chosen from eternity, accepted in time, and united
for eternity.” And this is where Bonhoeffer’s faith affirms the goodness of
God’s creation and takes seriously the world in which we live. It is because
Jesus has taken on human flesh and as a human he both lived, died and
experienced a fleshly resurrection. And in our unity with Christ we are forever
with brothers and sisters.
Pulling us all together in our unity with Jesus, Bonhoeffer
writes:
We who live here in fellowship
with him will one day be with him in eternal fellowship. He who looks upon his
brother should know that he will be eternally united with him in Jesus Christ.
Christian community through and in Jesus Christ. On this presupposition rests
everything that the Scriptures provide in the way of directions and precepts
for the communal life of Christians.
Here is a unity and fellowship that can only boast in Jesus
Christ. A community without the center, Christ Jesus and his righteousness
alone, is not a Christian community whether it is called church, is a simple
gathering of friends or is a seminary. Its whole purpose comes naturally and grows
naturally because of its unity with Christ. Outside of Jesus as center there is
no real Christian purpose, since there is no real Christian unity.
The rest of Life
Together covers the day’s activities from morning devotional with biblical
reading in community to singing, eating, ministry and confession, etc.
Bonhoeffer’s thoughts about biblical reading in the context of thinking about
theological education is important. He speaks of families and seminarians or
even those alone, reading the biblical books in sequence. And of how this
places us into the actual events:
Consecutive reading of Biblical
books forces everyone who wants to hear to put himself, or to allow himself to
be found, where God has acted once and for all for the salvation of men. We
become a part of what once took place for our salvation. Forgetting and losing
ourselves, we, too, pass through the Red Sea, through the desert, across the
Jorden into the promised land. With Israel we fall into doubt and unbelief and
through punishment and repentance experience again God’s faithfulness. All of
this is not mere reverie but holy, godly reality. We are torn out of our own
existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There
God dealt with us, and there He still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in
judgment and grace. It is not that God is the spectator and sharer of our
present life, however important that is; but rather that we are the reverent
listeners and participants in God’s action in the sacred story, the history of
Christ on earth. And only in so far as we are there, is God with us today also.
Bonhoeffer could have changed theological training into
political denunciation and re-education using all of the various ideologies of
his day. He chose to emphasize training in the Scripture and proclamation. That
was enough to make him an enemy, it is still enough to make enemies. Edwin
Robertson in his biography of Bonhoeffer, The
Shame and the Sacrifice, writes of the academic part of the seminary:
Bonhoeffer himself did the
teaching—homilectics, [sic] catechetics, pastoralia, exegesis – and his
lectures were given from very carefully prepared notes. His method of sermon
instruction was peculiarly his own. He would set the students a very difficult
text – often highly theoretical or remote – and require them to draft a sermon
on it. These would be read out and then he would show by example how that remote
text could be preached.
All of this is not to say that Bonhoeffer’s seminary
neglected the social and communal life of his students. The church and its ministries
are rooted in the incarnation. God both created and loved the world. A letter
from one of Bonhoeffer’s students confirms the joy and meaning that Finkenwalde
gave to the students. The student mentions “music, literature, sports, and the
beauty of the earth; a generous style of life that favorably combined the
culture of old homes with the uninhibited forms of community of young men.”[1]
Nothing in any of the information given about Finkenwalde suggests that the
students were pushed beyond their calling to do ministry and proclaim the
gospel. Their subject was Christ and the word of God.
Finkenwalde was true to Barmen, the Confessing Church’s
confession:
“The Church’s commission, upon which its freedom is founded,
consists in delivering the message of the free grace of God to all people in
Christ’s stead, and therefore in the ministry of his own Word and work through
sermon and Sacrament.
We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church in human
arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any
arbitrarily chosen desires, puposes, and plans.” (8.26-8.27)
Picture by Ethan McHenry
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theological Education
Underground: 1937-1940, Vol. 15, Dirk Schulz, editor, Victoria J. Barnett,
editor, English edition, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2012) 6.
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