Elements of Spiritual and Emotional Community
In Life Together, Bonhoeffer contrasted spiritual community with psychic, fleshly, or emotional community. Bonhoeffer saw these two kinds of community, spiritual and emotional, as another way to contrast the kind of Christ-centered, biblically sound community we have been speaking about with preference-driven, people-focused community. Spiritual community, which is built on Christ by the Spirit, produces rightly ordered love. Emotional community lacks the resources, namely Christ and his Spirit, to create spiritual love. This kind of love comes from Jesus and is displayed in the Word. The Word drives and defines what this love is. Love in a spiritual community works itself out through the mediation of Christ. This spiritual love allows Jesus to work in the lives of others, because it is only Jesus who has, can, and will work in them. Practically, spiritual love deals in the currency of the Word and prayer. Bonhoeffer contrasts the two kinds of community by showing their differences in terms of timing, how conversion works, and what loves looks like.
Bonhoeffer taught that emotional community, the community not built on Christ by the Spirit, distorts true Christian community. First, emotional community expects immediacy. All things in emotional community must happen right away, including relationships. Second, emotional community has its own type of conversion experience. A person is simply conquered by the whims of others in the community rather than being won over as in true conversion. Bonhoeffer refers to this emotional conversion as though such people are won over by other people’s perspectives and opinions rather than being won over by the gospel. Third, emotional community has its own way of loving one’s neighbor. This type of love serves itself, not Christ.
The difference between emotional community driven by human ideals and spiritual community created by God’s reality comes down to the discernment of believers. Emotional community and human ideals are likely to surface even within a Christ-centered community. However, the onus is on those in the community to rightly understand what Christian community should be and to apply the disciplines a Christian community needs to maintain and bring it to maturity. It is to these disciplines that Bonhoeffer turned for much of Life Together. It would be helpful to take a closer look at the elements of timing, conversion, and love in both of these types of communities.
For emotional community, the first element to consider is immediacy. One does not have to look far in contemporary society to see an urge for immediacy. So many things are designed to shorten waiting times, to make things go faster, to quickly complete tasks, and to deliver things almost instantaneously. The thought of having to wait too long for something to download or to stand in line for anything feels nearly outrageous to many. As Ferris Bueller has said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Such expectations of immediacy have crept into other aspects of life, not to mention church life. Certain aspects of church growth are expected to happen quickly. Spiritual progress should be noticeable after a few short weeks. Those who are to lead are ready and seasoned almost immediately after feeling a sense of call on their lives. A community burdened by such expectations is driven by human desires. For example, it can be a great temptation to grow impatient when new ministries are started in our churches or when new churches are started. Members and attenders want to see the results soon or they want to experience the benefits of a new teaching ministry right away. But all of those things take time for them to be their best. Bonhoeffer said, “At the foundation of all psychic, or emotional, reality are the dark, impenetrable urges and desires of the human soul.” Fallen desires produce expectations of immediacy.
In spiritual community, immediacy is not the standard. Relationships are not expected to simply spring up out of nowhere. Growth in the Christian community is not expected overnight. Christian community is based on God’s timetable and not man’s. As one of my pastors used to always say, “God is never in a hurry.” Spiritual community is not self-centered. It is community mediated through Christ and he decides the speed at which anything happens in his community. So that new ministry that has been thought through and prayed through for months or maybe years may not be too slow to get off the ground, but it needs that time for God to fashion it and all who are involved as he intends.
The second element of emotional community is that it has its own conversion experience. Bonhoeffer describes, “It has all the appearances 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. The result is that the weak individual has been overcome by the strong . . . One has been overpowered by something, but not won over.” Unity in the emotional community is like one’s entrance into that community—it happened by coercion. It can be like many of the things of which you may be involved, you said yes because you were voluntold or guilted into joining. Another common entry point to such communities is good, old-fashioned peer pressure—everybody is doing this and so should you! Guilt and peer pressure as a means of getting people to take part do not belong in the Lord’s church. Such conversion was not brought about by the Holy Spirit and does not last.
In contrast, one’s conversion into spiritual community happens by none other than the Holy Spirit. As the apostle Peter preached on the day of Pentecost and people responded to his sermon he instructed them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). A response of repentance and faith is the entrance into spiritual community, not coercion by a stronger, more opinionated person or group. Therefore, entrance into this spiritual community has the only true conversion experience. Anything other than a Holy Spirit-wrought repentance and faith is not true conversion. We do not follow the Great Commission (see Matt 28:19–20) by manipulating and coercing people into God’s kingdom, instead we go as heralds of the King’s message of peace and reconciliation through his Son.
The third element of emotional community is emotional love. Bonhoeffer’s way of expressing that should not be confused with the love that one has along with emotional responses. Rather, emotional love is the kind of love that springs from emotional or fleshly community. It is also the kind of love that creates emotional or fleshly community. Bonhoeffer also refers to this love as self-centered love. He makes several important distinctions about this self-centered love. First, such love has an aversion to truth and thereby makes truth relative, so the truth can never get in the way of bringing about one’s satisfaction. Furthermore, emotional love would not allow a community to be dissolved or disciplined should it stray from the truth. Emotional love wants to maintain community at any cost for the sake of the individual’s desires. Second, Bonhoeffer stated, “Emotional, self-centered love desires other persons, their company. It wants them to return its love, but it does not serve them. On the contrary, it continues to desire even when it seems to be serving.” The lack of service is a telltale sign of this kind of love. Third, emotional or self-centered love seeks to make people into one’s own image, dictating how another person should be. Finally, Bonhoeffer states, “Self-centered love results in human enslavement, bondage, rigidity.” One can look at the product of something to truly know its value; self-centered love, according to Bonhoeffer, does not produce good fruit.
“Spiritual love,” Bonhoeffer says, “however, comes from Jesus Christ; it serves him alone.” Such love desires not to serve self, but Christ. Bonhoeffer went on to definitively say, “Only Christ in his Word tells me what love is. Contrary to all my own opinions and convictions, Jesus Christ will tell me what love for my brothers and sisters really looks like.” Such Christ-dictated love is not averse to the truth but rather is a celebration of it. Spiritual love joyfully serves the other for the sake of the Lord Jesus. Spiritual love longs to see people made into the image of Christ. Therefore, spiritual love creates fruit that lasts and pleases God.
This is an excerpt from Living Together in Unity with Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Nicholas Abraham (Lexham Press, 2023). Used with permission.
Nicholas Abraham (DMin, PhD ABD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is lead pastor of Reformation Bible Church in Navarre, Ohio. He is also cofounder and professor of church history and biblical spirituality at Emmaus Theological Seminary in Cleveland, Ohio. He is husband to Anna and dad to Nora and Aden. His recent book is Living Together in Unity with Dietrich Bonhoeffer.