Bonhoeffer’s great book on community living, Life Together, is divided, as was life in the seminary, into five sections: Community; the Day Together; the Day Alone; Service and Confession and the Lord’s Supper. We examine each of these sections in turn.

2. The Day Together

This “life together under the Word” is enacted in the second section of the book, the Day Together, which describes the community at worship. It is not from lack of imagination that Bonhoeffer begins, rests, and ends the community’s communal activity in worship. This is the purpose of a Christian community, its raison d’etre. The daily life of the Christian community should begin and end in worship: “the first thought and first word of the day belong to God”, and evening prayer should be the last activity of the day, so that “[w]hen night falls, the true light of God’s Word shines brighter for the community of faith.”¹ Bonhoeffer has very clear ideas about the way in which community worship should be structured, the parts in which long, continuous readings from Scripture, the Psalter and unison hymn singing should play, as well as a stability of leadership. All these things will help the community to avoid “mere reverie” and to participate in the “holy, divine reality”². The divine reality is experienced also in the work undertaken by members of the community, and the table fellowship they will share:

The breaking of bread together has a festive quality. In the midst of the working day given to us again and again, it is a reminder that God rested after God’s work, and that the Sabbath is the meaning and the goal of the week with its toil.³

1. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, pp. 51, 78
2. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 62.
3. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 73.

Bonhoeffer’s great book on community living, Life Together, is divided, as was life in the seminary, into five sections: Community; the Day Together; the Day Alone; Service and Confession and the Lord’s Supper. It is worth examining each of these sections in turn.

1. Community

Very often, the Christian community is regarded as, at best, a necessary burden in being a Christian: we all have crosses to bear and mine is other Christians. This was not so for Bonhoeffer. The dominant theme for both the book written and the life lived is set in the book’s lines: “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity” (Psalm 133.1).

Christian community means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. There is no Christian community that is more than this, and none that is less than this. Whether it be a brief, single encounter or the daily community of many years, Christian community is solely this. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.¹

There are three ways in which this is worked out. First, Christians need each other for Christ’s sake; second, Christians are only able to encounter each other through Christ; third, Christians encounter Christ and each other in a looping movement that passes from eternity, through this world of time and back to eternity (“We who live here in community with Christ will one day be with Christ in eternal community”²). We see in this the radical Christocentric nature of Bonhoeffer’s community: Christ is the Mediator. Often when that title is used of Jesus of Nazareth it refers to Christ’s role as go-between for God the Father and humanity: Christ is the intercessor and friend of sinners, and no one can come to the Father except by him. Bonhoeffer means this and more: for him, Christ as Mediator means that no one can encounter anyone else except through Christ: he is the Mediator for person-to-person as well as person-to-God relationships:

I have community with others and will continue to have it only through Jesus Christ…

Elsewhere Bonhoeffer says, in relation to the difference between spiritual and emotional love:

Spiritual love… comes from Jesus Christ; it serves him alone. It knows that it has no direct access to other persons. Christ stands between me and others.³

So, for Bonhoeffer, Christian community should be thought of as “life together under the Word”⁴: a position that implies both hierarchy (a submission to Christ’s judgement) and protection (gathered under his loving arms). Here we can see how Bonhoeffer the theologian has become Bonhoeffer the Christian.

1. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 31.
2. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 33.
3. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, pp. 34, 43.
4. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, n. 2, p. 27, or p. 47.

Especially when the opportunity means travelling to the US to give a paper on the subject at an international conference!

In October, your 3MinuteTheologian has been invited to deliver a paper: If you meet George Herbert in the road . . . kill him! Herbertism and Contemporary Parish Ministry.

This is the conference:

GEORGE HERBERT’S
LIVING LEGACIES:
TWO CONFERENCES, 2007-2008
AN ATLANTIC WORLD INITIATIVE

Co-Sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA
Sarum College, Salisbury, England

More details from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s website.

Bonhoeffer’s Sanctorum Communio is a dense book, which handles its material, Scriptural, theological and philosophical, with dazzling skill. It was quite unlike anything else that was coming out of the German Church in the between war years, and so it is not surprising that it was so overlooked then. It could also have been dismissed as the demonstration work of a very young man, one without experience in university or parish life. And yet, in the work Bonhoeffer showed his ability to find the memorable phrase, and in his subsequent ministry he showed how serious he was in following this path.

Bonhoeffer continued his work as a theologian, but he also began to work as a pastor: in the German church in Barcelona, as a catechist in the proletarian parishes of Berlin, as a student chaplain, as pastor to the German churches of East and south east London. In each place he attempted to gather around him and to minster to a community of believers. Eventually, in 1935, he was called back from London to a Germany and a Church in crisis. The Nazi seizure of power in early 1933 (the Machtergreifung) led to deep divisions within German society. There were some who welcomed the simple, strong leadership, based upon national pride and identity, which the Nazis promised. Others feared, even at this early stage, the loss of important parts of German self-understanding in an onslaught of national self-worship. The divisions convulsed the churches in Germany as much as wider society. The Lutheran Church was also subject to the Nazi Gleichschaltung (the euphemistically entitled ‘co-ordination’ actions of the new government), in which any possible opposition or dissent, within trade unionism, political parties, school and university educational institutions, was forcefully (and sometimes forcibly) removed. The Lutheran Church was split between the so-called “German Christians”, who recognised the authority of the (Nazi-imposed) National Bishop, Ludwig Müller, and the ministers of the Pastors’ Emergency League (the Pfarrernotbund), who went on to form the Confessing Church. The new church movement needed pastors, and so illegal ad hoc seminaries were formed: Bonhoeffer, as the ablest young theologian of the church, was invited back from London to become director of the seminary for Brandenburg and Pomerania.

In an old school house in the out-of-the-way town of Finkenwalde, Bonhoeffer and twenty three students took up residence in the summer of 1935. The seminary was able to last just over two years, until it was raided and closed down by the Gestapo. Bonhoeffer had very firm ideas on how the seminary was to be organised: he visited English theological colleges in his last weeks in London, and had even made a tour of Anglican monastic communities. He brought with him some very unlutheran ideas:

The programme for the day began and ended with two long services. In the morning the service was followed by half an hour’s meditation, an exercise that was not interrupted by the circumstances of the removal, though packing cases and youth hostel bunks were the only furniture. The services did not take place in church but round the ordinary dinner-table. They invariably began with a Psalm and a hymn specially chosen for the day. There followed a lesson from the Old Testament, a set verse from a hymn (sung daily for several weeks), a New Testament lesson, a period of extempore prayer and the recital of the Lord’s Prayer. Each service concluded with another set verse from a hymn. Readings from the Psalms and the Scripture took the form of a lectio continua, for preference without any omissions. In structure this very much resembled Anglican evensong. Bonhoeffer believed that this sequence of readings and prayers was the most natural and suitable form of service for theologians.¹

Life in the seminary was basic. The library was mostly Bonhoeffer’s own (lost when the institution was shut down); letters were sent out to the Lutheran parishes of the surrounding countryside, and the “ordinands’ humble request” produced a startling amount of practical support (from church congregations which had never previously been required to support the training of their ministers). Eberhard Bethge, one of the ordinands, and later Bonhoeffer’s friend and biographer, recalls that the humble request produced a live pig, which required collecting from the nearest railway station!²

The seminary lasted until September 1937: before the year’s end, twenty-seven of the students had been arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned³. Even so, in existence for such a short time, it had two great lasting legacies. First, it was the place in which Bonhoeffer first delivered the lecture series which became his great work Discipleship⁴. Second, when the seminary was suppressed, Bonhoeffer was encouraged to write down an account of the experiment and experience that was Finkenwalde. He did so, and Life Together was published in 1938. Surprisingly, despite the times in which it was published, it was a popular and critical success, the best received and best selling of Bonhoeffer’s books published in his lifetime. Overshadowed now somewhat by the three posthumous ‘greats’, Life Together⁵ deserves to be better known and wider read, as it is one of the most important of Bonhoeffer’s legacies for the church⁶:

When he [Bonhoeffer] wrote his account of his community-sustained spiritual life in the Frinkenwalde seminary, he was not reminiscing about an agreeable, idyllic experience of a like-minded group of dedicated seminarians. He intended to share with others this experience, with its joys and trials, its mutual support and enduring friendships, that it might serve as a model for forming moral leaders and for the creation of new forms of church community throughout Germany.⁷

1. Quite! Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: theologian, Christian, contemporary, ed. Edwin Robertson, trans. Eric Mosbacher (London: Collins, 1970), p. 349.
2. Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 348.
3. Kelly & Nelson, Cost of moral leadership, p. 25.
4. Discipleship (DBWE Vol. 4.). Edited by Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey. Translated by Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), originally published in English as The Cost of Discipleship, trans. by R. H. Fuller (London: SCM, 1948).
5. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life together and Prayerbook of the Bible, eds. Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Albrecht Schönherr, and Geffrey B Kelly, (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, Volume 5), (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996). Another very common edition of Life Together is that translated by J. W. Doberstein and published by SCM. It is superceded in every way by the DBWE edition.
6. Bonhoeffer himself thought that Life Together would be his definitive work: he referred to the book, somewhat jokingly, as his “swan-song” (Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 582).
7. Kelly and Nelson, Cost of Moral Leadership, p. 145.

In communities, often it is difficult to distinguish between doing things in God’s way, for the glory of God, and going things in our way for our greater glory.

Bonhoeffer gives us two concepts to correct against this imposition of the human will in place of God’s will. First of all he emphasises the importance of “responsibility”, which is the translation for the German Verantwortlichkeit. This means so much than merely being answerable or accountable. For Bonhoeffer, verantwortlichkeit was the constant encountering of one ethical agent against another: we achieve maturity as human beings when we realise that the boundaries and limitations of our will are defined against the boundaries and limitations of another’s will. Here we see an echo in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s lecture on ‘The Christian Priest Today’, in which Dr Williams describes the church as being the “‘responsible’ community, answering to what is there before it”¹, called into being by the witness of the Scriptures and ordained ministry. In other words, for Bonhoeffer, and for Christian communities, “responsibility” allows us to find out who we are when we find the limits of our will and our scope for autonomy.

The second idea is that of Stellvertretung. This means, literally, ‘standing in the place of another’, but it has a much deeper resonance than a simple translation like “proxy” or “deputy” can convey. For Bonhoeffer, the ‘vicarious representation’ of Jesus’s actions (his passion and death) are means by which God takes human culpability seriously, and by which sin is punished and overcome. Humanity can only abandon ethical responsibility for ourselves in the face of this loving offer by God:

Through the Christian principle of vicarious representative action the new humanity is made whole and sustained. This principle gives Christian basic-relations their substantive uniqueness… [and] unites the new humanity with Christ, but also links its membership to each other in community.²

Christ’s free, self-giving and other-loving actions are the basis of this new community. Bonhoeffer says that it has (or should have) two modes of being, ‘being-with-each-other’ and ‘being-for-each-other’, each depending on the other. Bonhoeffer traces an expression of the former in the work of Martin Luther, most beautifully in the latter’s Fourteen Consolations:

Therefore, when we feel pain, when we suffer, when we die, let us turn to this, firmly believing and certain that it is not we alone, but Christ and the church who are in pain and are suffering and dying with us… We set out upon the road of suffering and death accompanied by the entire church.³

‘Being-with-each-other’ cannot happen without ‘being-for-each-other’: “Since I as a Christian cannot live without the church, since I owe my life to the church and now belong to it, so my merits are also no longer my own, but belong to the church.”⁴ Bonhoeffer points us to Scriptures to understand this: Christ is the measure and standard of our conduct. In John 13.15 we are told:

For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.”

and in 1 John 3.10:

The children of God and the children of the devil are revealed in this way: all who do not do what is right are not from God, nor are those who do not love their brothers and sisters.

He sets out the Pauline teaching on the unified Body of Christ:

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. [1 Cor 12.12]

and that one unified Body is differentiated and interconnecting:

For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness. [Romans 12.4ff]

and in doing so, we show the power of the love of Christ.

So, throughout Sanctorum Communio, Bonhoeffer has argued that the Church, the holy community called into being by God, is not a human society like all other human societies, a disparate group of people with something (or one thing) in common, who have gathered together to advance general interest in the something / one thing, and who, in the memorable phrase of Rowan Williams, become “a chaotic mass trying to apportion jobs”⁵. Rather, the Church is the place in which human being subject themselves to the ‘ethical other’, God and fellow humans, and in which we find ourselves under the rule of serving and being served, through mutual love:

Community with God is not an individualistic possibility, but is actual and real in the community of God’s creatures with each other; to serve and love God is simultaneously to serve and love God’s creatures, one’s fellow human beings. Community with God is simultaneously the community of co-humanity.⁶

It is all summed up in Bonhoeffer’s memorable phrase: the church is Christus als Gemeinde existerend, Christ existing as community⁷. And from this we can say that “the word of the Church to the world is the word of Christ spoken with the same authority as words spoken during his earthly life.”⁸

1. Williams, ‘The Christian Priest Today’.
2. Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, pp. 156-157.
3. Martin Luther, ‘Fourteen Consolations for those who Labour and are Heavy-Laden’ (1520), in Luther’s Works, Vol 42 (Devotional Works 1), edited by Martin O. Dietrich, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), pp. 121-166. Quoted in Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, note 47, p. 180.
4. Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, p. 183.
5. Williams, ‘Christian Priest’.
6. Clifford Green, ‘Human sociality’, p. 120.
7. See, for example, Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, p. 121.
8. Stephen Plant,’The Sacrament of Ethical Reality: Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Ethics for Christian Citizens’, Studies in Christian Ethics, 2005 18: p. 78.

According to Bonhoeffer, to be human is “to be a person before God, and in relation to God. The relation of individual persons to each other, and the relations between human communities of persons, has this theological understanding of God and human existence at its core.”¹

This has a deep impact on the meaning of community. Bonhoeffer said that it is impossible for any human, social, community to truly exist apart from the community of God:

Inherent in the Christian concept of God that we know through revelation in Christ, but ultimately through Christ’s church-community, is that community of God and social community belong together… Thus we are saying that direct community with God also demands direct human community, that the latter is absolutely necessary as the corollary to community with God, and that it is no coincidence that Genesis 2.18 reads: “It is not good that the human being [Mensch] should be alone”.²

In other words, it is impossible to be a Christian apart from community: the relational nature of being human means that if we are to be fully human, by being drawn into relationship with God, then, at one and the same time, we are being drawn into relationship with others.

This is something more than the basic huddling instinct. It is not, Bonhoeffer says, the result of mere impulse. The formation and continued functioning of the community has to be an act of conscious will:
When men are brought together by sheer impulses it is not possible to speak of human society. The impulses of imitation, subordination, sociability, and in particular of hunger and sexuality, man has in common with the animals. Specifically human community is present only when conscious human spirit is at work, that is, when community is based on purposive acts of will. Human community does not necessarily arise from such acts of will, but it has its being in them.³

The question then arises, whose community, whose will? In other words, what is the ethical component of Bonhoeffer’s theology of community? He says something about the way we should behave, towards ourselves, towards others and towards God. What will be the basis for this? Theoretically, the ethical component should be simple: human community functions best when it is completely subordinated to the will of God.

To be in community with God obviously means, first of all, the absolute identity of purpose of the divine and human wills, within the relation of the creative to the created (i.e. obedient) will— in other words, in the relation of ruling and serving.⁴

But Bonhoeffer is also a realist. He recognizes that such an “absolute identity of purpose” is no easy thing to achieve this side of the Fall:

… since every person is created with a uniquely individual character, tension between wills cannot be avoided even in the community of love. With this concession we already recognize that strife as such is by no means as a result of the fall but arises from a common love of God. The will of every individual strives to attain the single goal of serving the divine will, that is, serving the community in its own way.⁵

Which reminds me of the speech given by the vice-principal of my theological college at his farewell dinner. He touched on his relationship with another member of staff, which had been notoriously rocky, but finished by saying: “Even so, Joan and I both sought to serve God, she in her way, and I in His”!

1. Clifford Green, ‘Human sociality’, p. 115.
2. Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, note 1 on p. 60.
3. Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, pp. 80-81. The translation is taken from p. 53 of an earlier English edition (Collins, 1963).
4. Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, note 1 on p. 60.
5. Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, note 1 on pp. 60-61.

“Things you’d never hear in church”. Contestants to the performance area, please…

• Bless you, Vicar. You’re the one with the training. You decide.
• I think as a PCC we just don’t pray enough.
• No, our generation has had its own way for long enough. It’s time for you young people to show us how it’s done.
• He’s a hard working man with his heart in the right place. He needs our support.
• I’m sure we can find another £500 a year to pay for that project.
• Let’s do something spontaneous, generous and anonymous for the vicar’s family.
• I love the way children behave in church.
• Thank you for pointing out my children’s inconsiderate behaviour. I’ll have a quiet word with them.
• The diocese think we’ve paid too much quota this month.
• Are you sure you’ve taken all your annual leave this year, Rector?
• Surely we could give more to support the work of the diocese?
• No, no, we don’t need you to be at this meeting, Vicar. We can manage without you.
• Do we really need to set up another committee to decide that?
• I know she never came to church, so I suppose she wasn’t really a Christian.
• We don’t want to use this christening as just an excuse for a party. We want the service to be the important bit.
• I’d really love to learn some new hymns.
• I’m going to go home and really think about what you said in your sermon, Vicar.
• I realise now that my Sunday School faith isn’t enough.

And, finally…

• Yes. Let’s give that a go.

Bonhoeffer studied at Tübingen and the University of Berlin, and produced his doctoral thesis in 1927, subsequently published to no attention at all in 1930: it was only after the war and Bonhoeffer’s death that Karl Barth described Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church as a “theological miracle”¹.

Bonhoeffer’s first published book is still relatively overlooked (in favour of his monumental Ethics, the revolutionary Cost of Discipleship, and the profoundly moving Letters and Papers from Prison). Even so, some scholars in recent years have argued that the outline of Bonhoeffer’s theology and ministry begins with the argument of this book: if we want to understand what Bonhoeffer attempted and what he represents today, then we should read Sanctorum Communio. It is particularly relevant to our task, as in the book Bonhoeffer begins “exploring the nature and vocation of the church within the wider context of human sociality and historical concreteness.”²

In his study of what the communion of the saints actually means, Bonhoeffer begins with an exploration of what it means to talk about a “person”. Where do “persons” exist? He is very clear on this:
Every concept of community is essentially related to a concept of person. It is impossible to say what constitutes community without asking what constitutes a person. … The concepts of person, community and God are inseparably and essentially interrelated. A concept of God is always conceived in relation to a concept of person and a concept of a community of persons. Whatever one thinks of a concept of God, it is done in relation to person and community of persons.³

Bonhoeffer expressed this aphoristically when he said “… the Christian concept of the person is really exhibited only in sociality…”⁴ This is a crucial word to understanding Bonhoeffer’s concept of community. The Oxford English Dictionary can take us some of the way:

Sociality : 1. a. The state or quality of being social; social intercourse or companionship with one’s fellows, or the enjoyment of this.
2. The action or fact on the part of individuals of forming a society or of associating together; the disposition, impulse, or tendency to do this.⁵

There is, of course, a lot more to the word in Bonhoeffer’s understanding than this, a richness and complexity that has been ably drawn out by Clifford Green. In order to understand Bonhoeffer’s ideas about “sociality”, and thus to be able to understand something about “community”, we have to realise that we are performing theological anthropology, says Green. In other words, we are walking and thinking in that narrow space where what we say about humanity depends upon what we say about God, which in turn depends upon what we think about humanity. This is inescapable, because Christian words about God, Christian theology, can only be spoken in the light of the Incarnation, in which we have learnt that:
God’s being is not in transcendent isolation and absence. God is free for humanity in our history; that is, in the light of Jesus Christ, God is revealed as present to us in the world— God’s being is being-in-relation-to-us. This is the meaning of the incarnation: God with us, and God for us.⁶

Nicholas Lash explains this interconnection very well. He says

The Church is a people, an assembly of men and women. Therefore, we will not think sensibly about the Church unless we think sensibly about the kinds of things human beings are. Moreover, human beings are creatures, constituents of the world of which they form a part. Therefore, we will not think sensibly about human beings unless we think sensibly about the world which God creates.⁷

Because of the self-revelation of God in relation to humanity through the person and saving actions of Jesus Christ, the very nature of being human has been changed: we are fundamentally people in relationship— with each other and with God. “To be human is to be a person before God, and in relation to God. The relation of individual persons to each other, and the relations between human communities of persons, has this theological understanding of God and human existence at its core.”⁸

1. This is actually Clifford Green’s gloss on Barth. Less succinctly but in reality, Barth regarded Sanctorum Communio with “the deepest respect”, because its conclusions were so unusual in Berlin at the time (the late 1920s): Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, Vol. IV, part 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), p. 641. For the punchier judgement see Clifford Green, ‘Human sociality and Christian community’, in John W. de Gruchy ed., The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 122.
2. Geffrey B. Kelly & F. Burton Nelson, The cost of moral leadership : the spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Grand Rapids, Mich. : Eerdmans, 2003), p. 8.
3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church, eds. Clifford J. Green and Joachim von Soosten, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, Volume 1, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), p. 34. Emphasis in the original. Most quotations from Bonhoeffer’s works will be taken from the definitive series being produced by Fortress Press, translations of the German critical edition Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke (DBW), 17 vols. Edited by Eberhard Bethge, et al. (Munich and Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser-Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1986-1999).
4. Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, p. 33.
5. “Sociality, a.1.a, 2” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989, OED Online. Oxford University Press, 2008
6. Clifford Green, ‘Human sociality’, p. 114.
7. Nicholas Lash, ‘Conversation in Context’, in Theology for Pilgrims, (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2008), pp. 157-158. Lash glosses his explanation further: “For those readers who prefer to have these things clothed in academic dignity, I am suggesting that our ecclesiology is shaped by whatever anthropology we simply take for granted, and that our anthropology, in turn, is shaped by whatever ontology we simply take for granted.” (note 12 on p. 158).
8. Clifford Green, ‘Human sociality’, p. 115.

What is a community? Consider these four newspaper reports:

“In the broadest sense, community involvement is how a company interacts with the communities in which it operates,” says Hannah Jones, Nike’s head of corporate responsibility. “For us, it’s the 800,000 workers in our supply chain.”
“… if the intelligence community is to be believed, the breeding grounds have spread ominously within our own boundaries.”
“The school community should take more interest in the behaviour of adults who are neither employees nor members of the school. If we find an adult taking drugs within the community we will ask them to leave.”
“…the British Army Rumour Service at arrse.co.uk, prides itself on being ‘The unofficial British Army community website’”.¹

All four reports are taken from the British national press in the summer of 2007. In those three months newspapers used the word “community” more than three thousand times. In fact, the word was used so often that Lexis-Nexis, the newspaper database, is unable to give an accurate count, which is a shame, because there are a lot of communities out there; along with the business community, the intelligence community², the school and army communities in the reports above, we also find mention of the “gay”, the “Muslim”, the “sporting” and even (surprisingly?) the “criminal community”. What can all these communities possibly signify?

As Rowan Williams has pointed out “communities, in spite of the sentimental way we sometimes think of them, don’t just happen. They need nurture, they need to be woven into unity”³. In order to think intelligently and unsentimentally about community, we need some help. We can find that help in the life and work of another German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Born to a prosperous upper-middle class family in Breslau in 1906, Bonhoeffer moved with his family to Berlin when his father, Karl Bonhoeffer became professor of Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases at the University of Berlin in 1912. An exceptionally bright boy, with gifts in sport and music, Bonhoeffer’s family at first assumed that he would follow his father into psychiatry. He surprised them, and himself, by wanting to become a theologian: the family were no more than “cultural Christians” and Bonhoeffer’s family experience of Christianity mostly came from the telling of exemplary tales from the Scriptures by his mother. Later on, this academic drive to theology drew him into a vocation as a Lutheran minister. Only much later, paradoxically, did he accept the need to become a Christian as well (the meaning of which we will explore in a later post).

1. Sarah Murray, ‘Responsible neighbours invest in local causes’, Financial Times, 3 July 2007, p. 10; William Keegan, ‘Gordon has fought for sterling – but can he now defend the realm?’, The Observer, 17 June 2007, p. 8; Siân Griffiths, ‘Don’t blame us’, The Sunday Times, 22 July 2007, p. 12; Michael Evans, ‘Blogs and chat rooms out of bounds in MoD gag order on troops’, The Times, 10 August 2007, p. 2.
2. HIGGINS: It’d have to be somebody in the community. TURNER: Community? HIGGINS: Intelligence field. TURNER: [soft laugh] ‘Community!’ [then to Higgins] Jesus, you guys are kind to yourselves. ‘Community!’ (From Three Days of the Condor, written by Lorenzo Semple, Jr and David Rayfiel, directed by Sydney Pollack, Paramount Pictures, 1975).
3. Rowan Williams, ‘The Christian Priest Today’, a lecture give at Ripon College, Cuddesdon, 28 May 2004. Available online here. Accessed 25 January 2008.

Using the example of Bosch’s only painting in the National Gallery, Christ Mocked (Crowning with Thorns), it explores the political, scientific, psychological and devotional world of early modern Europe, and applies those insights to our own time. It shows how sophisticated Bosch was as a painter and how he used his artistic skill to convey a similarly sophisticated understanding of humanity. The painting was, and is, a challenge to its viewers, a challenge to answer the question posed by Christ to his disciples: “Who do you say that I am?”. In Christ Mocked, Christ’s Passion is shown so we must reassess the cosmic significance of Christ’s death, and its profound implications for what we think it means to be human.

An outline of the book

The first, short, chapter is a detailed description of the painting, where it is hung in the National Gallery, and the questions that occur to the inquisitive viewer on first looking. Who are these people? What is going on in the painting? Why are they dressed in that way? What do their gestures mean?

The book then follows five ‘circles’ around the painting (consciously evoking the circle of thorns held behind Christ’s head). Each circle looks in turn at the subtexts of the painting, explored by Bosch.

First, we explore a circle of politics. Each of the four tormentors in the painting represents a particular social, religious and political power in the Europe of 1500. What was Bosch saying by depicting agents of the Holy Roman Empire, the Church, Jewry and the Muslim world as Christ’s tormentors? What is the interplay between religion and power represented, and what assumptions do we make about their relationship today?

Second, we explore a circle of science, which I call elements. The four tormentors represent the pre-modern scientific understanding of the four basic units of the universe; fire, earth, air and water. Each element had particular characteristics, and said something about God’s relationship with the universe and the possibility of our comprehension of creation. What is the proper relationship of science and religion in our own day? Is Richard Dawkins the last word on the matter, or does Bosch give us a way of expressing, in renewed confidence, a religious understanding of science?

The third circle builds on the elemental interpretation, by looking at the temperaments. For Bosch, human character was determined by the humoral theory; every person was governed by a particular temperament: melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric. Where did this theory come from, and what is its relationship to modern psychological understandings of human psychology? What challenge to our personality does Bosch’s painting pose?

The fourth circle looks at the way Bosch’s painting was probably used in devotions. What was the spiritual atmosphere of Bosch’s day, and how does it relate to our own? The connection between the ‘devotio moderna’, Bosch’s life and Etty Hillesum (the Dutch writer and diarist killed at Auschwitz) is explored, with lessons for new forms of disciplined spiritual living for today.

The final circle, Quiddity, centres on the still subject of the painting, Christ himself. It does so by teasing out the differences in emphasis in the Gospel accounts of Christ’s passion, and asking what meaning we can find in the Incarnation and Passion today. A proper understanding of the mystery that Bosch has so subtly painted will transform our understandings of trust and time, two categories of thought most fruitful for proclaiming the Gospel today.

As such, the book is not a work of art history, although its art historical conclusions are sound. Writers and artists such as Keith Ward, Terry Pratchett, St Bonaventure, Etty Hillesum, Rowan Williams, Bill Viola and Brian Eno are referred to, and the relevance of their ideas for the painting and theme of the book are described and tested.