The Final Breakthrough

Life Together
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The final break-through to fellowship does not occur, because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and fro the fellowship…

In confession the break-through to community takes place. Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation. Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the whole being of a person…

The expressed, acknowledged sin has lost all its power. It has been revealed and judged as sin. It can no longer tear the fellowship asunder. Now the fellowship bears the sin of the brother.

In Whose Image?

Life Together
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God does not will that I should fashion the other person according to the image that seems good to me, that is, in my own image; rather in his very freedom from me, God made this person in His image. I can never know beforehand how God’s image should appear in others.

A Truly Free Man

Media, Journalism, and Communication
Mercer Schuchardt

It is worth noting that Jesus began his life’s work as a servile artist (a carpenter) and ended the last three years of his life as a liberal artist (a rabbi, or teacher). Yet central to his teaching was the idea that a slave of Christ was the truly free man, because Christ’s followers did not define their freedom in exclusively political or economic terms. It was for this reason that the New Testament could admonish slaves to obey their masters, yet also encourage them to gain their political or economic freedom if possible. Paul’s point about being able to sing while imprisoned and in chains was precisely this interior freedom that Christ alone was able to grant: it yielded a psychic freedom for the bearer that neither economic structure nor political fate could remove. This was a radically new definition of freedom that allowed its bearer to despise the world while simultaneously sympathizing with its self-induced plight. Thus there was no contradiction between a Christian who was persecuted for Christ’s sake and a Christian who was also called to care for the orphan, the widow, and the poor (James 1:27). To be “poor in spirit” did not mean to be without resources; it simply meant that one’s resources were not measured in exclusively economic terms (Matt. 5:3). In today’s job market this is called psychic compensation, and it is the personal or subjective benefits you get from a job that are not measurable by its objective or financial benefits.

The Liberal Arts

Media, Journalism, and Communication
Mercer Schuchardt

Look in your college viewbook or website, and somewhere you’ll find one of the ultimate goals of your institution: to turn you into a lifelong learner. Your school says this, like most schools do, because it is indeed a noble and worthy aspiration. The only problem is that your school, like most schools these days, has no real idea how to achieve it. 

But the ancient world did have a program.  Around five hundred years before Christ, and fifty years before Malachi wrote his last prophetic words, the ancient Greeks devised a system that would guarantee the student, regardless of grade-point average, to become a lifelong learner. They understood that in order to teach the student the maximum number of individual-to-particular relations using the fewest number of subject areas, they would have to create a system that was cumulative, integrative, and irreducibly complex. In what later evolved into today’s modern university, their system stood for centuries as the one best way to impart the knowledge of unity in all the diversity of the world around them. 

This system, of course, was the original liberal arts. The liberal arts (Latin: artes liberales) were those subjects worthy and essential for a free person to know in order to participate in civic life, such as debating in public, defending yourself in court, serving on a jury, and doing your military service. Liberal arts didn’t just mean free; it also meant the opposite of the servile arts (Latin: artes vulgares). If you were free, you studied these particular subjects to understand the entire cosmos and increase your wonder at the beauty, goodness, and intricacy of the created world. If you were not free, then you were a slave, and you studied the servile arts in order to better serve your masters. The world was divided into the power relationship of master or slave, and if you wanted to maintain your freedom, it behooved you to study well.

Jesus Didn’t Think So

Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes
E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien

It is readily accepted in American public discourse, and among many American Christians, that “Freedom is worth fighting for.” Jesus didn’t think so. Jesus could have joined the Jewish resistance that was fighting for the liberty of Israel from Roman rule. But he didn’t. Worse, he told his disciples not to. Instead of resisting the Romans, he taught radical obedience…

Leadership is a Western virtue; submission is a biblical virtue.

Jesus Takes It for Granted

The Cost of Discipleship
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Matthew 6:16–18

[16] “And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. [17] But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, [18] that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. (ESV)

Jesus takes it for granted that his disciples will observe the pious custom of fasting…We claim liberty from all legal compulsion, from self-martyrdom and mortification, and play this off against the proper evangelical use of discipline and asceticism; we thus excuse our self-indulgence and irregularity in prayer, in meditation and in our bodily life. But the contrast between our behavior and the word of Jesus is all too painfully evident.

Willing Captives

Christless Christianity
Michael Horton

If we are slaves, it is not to an external oppressor but to our own trivial desires. We are willing captives–until God appears on the scene and utters his solemn command to the powers and principalities we have enthroned: “Let my people go!”

Image Making

Jan Milic Lochman

We human beings have a notorious and almost incorrigible tendency to “image making” in relation to our neighbors. We make our own image of them, seek to “capture” them, take possession of them, to define for ourselves and for them what they “really” are…caricatures of this sort obstruct our real access to one another and diminish our mutual human freedom, just as God’s freedom is endangered when we make a fetish of our theological images and concepts.

Actions That Destroy What We Seek

Walter Harrelson

The first thing people need to know is that they can have no real life, no real freedom, no real joy in life save as they lay aside the kinds of actions that destroy the very things they are seeking.  The Ten Commandments ward off conduct on our part which, if engaged in, will make impossible the love of God and of neighbor.

One Hundred Permissions

Alphonse Maillot

The Decalogue presents itself more like a series of prohibitions than a series of precise orders…It is curious that a prohibition is much less acceptable to us than an order…But it is truly by a fundamental perversion that we get to this point. Because the prohibition is often much more open than the order. A prohibition is often one hundred permissions.