Journal: Reformed Presbyterian Theological Journal
Volume: RPTJ 11:1 (Fall 2024)
Article: The Christology Of "Life Together"
Author: Jeffrey A. Stivason

RPTJ 11:1 (Fall 2024) p. 46

The Christology Of Life Together

Jeffrey A. Stivason

Professor of New Testament Studies
Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary

Life Together was written in a four-week stretch in 1938 after the Gestapo shut down the seminary of the Confessing Church at Finkenwalde where Bonhoeffer was teaching.1 However, to interpret Life Together as a hastily written volume to establish a Lutheran monasticism2 or a “how to do church” manual is to misunderstand Bonhoeffer. For Bonhoeffer, Life Together was Christology in praxis. Christian community meant community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ.3 This slim volume is the outworking of his belief that Christ actually exists as the church, a theme that occupied two of his earliest works, Sanctorum Communio, his doctoral dissertation, and Act and Being, his second Berlin dissertation. Life Together was the vital and necessary application of Bonhoeffer’s theological thought.

The majority of Life Together is concerned with the presence of Jesus Christ in the Christian Church. Chapter one, however, is our present concern: the Christology that underpins the Christian Church. This was a serious theological and pastoral concern for Bonhoeffer, who had been exposed to the theological poverty of the German Church, after having entered the liberal university at age seventeen.4 Thus, Bonheoffer’s experiment in ecclesiology and practical Christology was meant to replace the lifelessness of the early twentieth century German Church which had supplanted the gospel of God revealed in Christ.5

Yet, this was not to be any easy task for Bonhoeffer, for within the early twentieth century church in Germany there was no small controversy over theology proper. In fact, less than fifty years earlier, Nietzsche, had made the astute observation that God has “bled to death under our knives,”6 in this case, no less than theological knives. And perhaps it could be said that theology,

RPTJ 11:1 (Fall 2024) p. 47

from Kant, the philosopher of Protestantism, to the present, was nothing more than trying to “wipe this blood off us.”7

Therefore, Bonhoeffer felt it incumbent upon himself to help the church in Germany escape Kant’s transcendentalism, which could only enable us to grasp at a...