5. Confession and the Lord’s Supper

Bonhoeffer believed that one of the pernicious effects of sin and sinfulness is to drive human beings into isolation: “those who remain alone with their evil are left utterly alone.”1 Confession is a means of overcoming this isolation, and it works in four related ways: it is a breakthrough to community (transferring the burden of the sin from the individual to the community); a breakthrough to the cross (marking the confessing sinner with the humiliation of his sin and drawing him to the “promise and glory of such humiliation”2); a breakthrough to new life (“Everything has become new”, 2 Cor 5.17, Bonhoeffer quotes approvingly); and a breakthrough to assurance (if we are able to confess our sins to another sinful Christian, how much more meaningful does the forgiveness of the sinless and ever-loving God become?). Bonhoeffer makes it clear that confession works most effectively, that is, is most effectively a medium for God’s grace, when it deals with “concrete sins”, rather than a general and unspecific sense of sinfulness: “Jesus dealt with people whose sins were obvious, with tax collectors and prostitutes. They knew why they needed forgiveness, and they received it as forgiveness of their specific sins. … it is in confessing these particular sins that we receive the forgiveness of all our sins, both known and unknown.”3 So confession can become, in the words of Kelly and Nelson, “a unique way for Christians vicariously to experience the cross of Jesus Christ as they themselves, with some pain, contribute to their deliverance from the sins that could tear a community apart.”4

Confession is an appropriate preparation for participating in the Lord’s Supper. All malice and envy and wickedness are to be set aside so that the feast may be celebrated, in the resurrection presence of Jesus (1 Cor 5.8): “what takes place in the Christian community [is] in the power of the present Jesus Christ.” Once reconciled to one another in their reconciliation to God, the Christian community is then able to receive
the gift of Jesus Christ’s body and blood, therein receiving forgiveness, new life and salvation. New community with God and one another is given to it. …Here joy in Christ and Christ’s community is complete. The life together of Christians under the Word has reached its fulfillment in the sacrament.5

The source of all life within the community is the person of Jesus Christ: it is only in seeking to follow Christ that the building blocks of the community’s life together can find expression:

Such commitment to Jesus Christ opens up a number of elementary Christian concepts: community, solitude, service, Scripture reading, prayer, intercession, meditation, the ability to listen, forgiveness, confession and the forgiveness of sins, Christians’ breaking of bread together, the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in the church of Christ, as well as the hope of breaking bread together eternally.6

Which seems an admirable summary of Bonhoeffer’s concept of Christian community (in the particularity of Finkenwalde, and in general).

1. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 108. [↩]
2. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 111. [↩]
3. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, pp. 113-114. [↩]
4. Kelly and Nelson, Cost of Moral Leadership, p. 171. [↩]
5. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 118. [↩]
6. Gerhard Ludwig Müller and Albrecht Schönherr, ‘Editors’ Afterword to the German Edition’, in Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 128. [↩]