Two kinds of community

I must confess to some trepidation in posting this next excerpt from Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. When I first read it, I found I had to read over it a number of times to let the words sink in and face truths I didn’t really want to face.

I don’t think its quite as simple as Bonhoeffer contends, however he asks some very helpful questions about the nature of community and the nature of faith.

Only read this if you are really ready to be challenged.

In the spiritual community the Word of God alone rules; in the emotional, self centered community the individual who is equipped with exceptional powers, experience, and magical, suggestive abilities rules along with the Word.

In the one, God’s word alone is binding; in the other, beside the Word, human beings bind others to themselves. In the one, all power, honor, and rule are surrendered to the Holy Spirit; in the other, power and personal spheres of influence are sought and cultivated.

So far as these are devout people, they certainly seek this power with the intention of serving the highest and the best. But in reality they end up dethroning the Holy Spirit and banishing it to the realm of unreal remoteness; only what is self-centered remains here. Thus, in the spiritual community the Spirit rules; in the emotional community, psychological techniques and methods. In the former, unsophisticated nonpsychological, unmethodical, helping love is offered to one another; in the latter, psychological analysis and design. In the former, service to one another is simple and humble; in the latter it is to strangers treated in a searching, calculating fashion.

Perhaps the contrast between spiritual and emotional, self-centered reality can be made most clear in the following observation. Within the spiritual community there is never, in any way whatsoever, an “immediate” relationship of one to another. However, in the self-centred community there exists a profound, elemental emotional desire for community, for immediate contact with other human souls, just as in the flesh there is a yearning for immediate union with other flesh. This desire of the human soul seeks the complete intimate fusion of I and You, whether this occurs in the union of love or – what from this self-centered perspective is after all one and the same thing – in forcing the other into ones’s own sphere of power and influence. Here is where self-centered, strong persons enjoy life to the full, securing for themselves the admiration, the love, or the fear of the weak.

Here human bonds, suggestive influences, and dependencies are everything. Moreover, everything that is originally and soley characteristic of the community mediated through Christ reappears in the nonmediated community of souls in a distorted form.

There is, likewise, such a thing as “emotional” conversion. It has all the appearences of genuine conversion and occurs wherever the superior power of one person is consciously or unconsciously misused to shake to the roots and draw into its spell an individual or a whole community. Here one soul has an immediate effect on another. The result is that the weak individual has been overcome by the strong; the resistance of the weaker individual has broken down under the influence of the other person. One has been overpowered by something, but not won over.

This becomes apparent the moment a commitment is demanded, a commitment that must be made independantly of the person to whom one is bound or possibly in opposition to this person. Here is where those emotional converts fail. They thus show that their conversion was brought about not by the Holy Spirit, but by a human being. It is, therefore not enduring.