"…the church is subjected to all the weaknesses and suffering of the world. The church can, at times, like Christ himself, be without a roof over its head…real worldliness consists in the church's being able to renounce all privileges and all its property but never Christ's Word and the forgiveness of sins. With Christ and the forgiveness of sins to fall back on, the church is free to give up everything else."
"Whoever lives in love is Christ in relation to the neighbour….Christians can and ought to act like Christ; ought to bear the burdens and suffering of the neighbour…It must come to the point that weaknesses, needs and sins of my neighbour afflict me as if they were my own, in the same way as Christ was afflicted by our sins."
Sometimes I don't agree with Bonhoeffer. He is just too uncompromising in tone, an extremist in his style of writing, excessive in the demandingness of his vision of what a Christian is and what the church is. But no matter how strongly I disagree, no matter how cleverly my intellect squirms away from reality, somewhere inside me where it is harder to hide from truth, I know he is right. It's Bonhoeffer who embraces risk and cost and the high calling of God in Christ Jesus, and I who want to have it all toned down to a much more manageable Gospel, a more attainable standard, a more respectable and compliant spirituality. There is a diagnostic precision in Bonhoeffer that leaves little room for argument – it isn't that he has misunderstood the Gospel; more likely that I miscalculated the cost, or flirted once again with compromise. I don't know how easy it would have been to be in Bonhoeffer's company – we don't tend to relax in the presence of such unassuming intensity, articulated in words chosen for the truth they tell – and the truth they tell us about ourselves.
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