Unlike calculating, manipulative, self-serving “emotional” love, the spiritual love Bonhoeffer advocated was deferential, humble, and unconditional. Spiritual love was agapeic, like the love that Jesus Christ extended to all.

Spiritual love, however, begins right at this point. This is why emotional love turns into personal hatred when it encounters genuine spiritual love that does not desire but serves. Emotional love makes itself an end in itself. It turns itself into an achievement, an idol it worships, to which it must subject everything. It cares for, cultivates,

The bright love of Christian service, agape, lives in the spiritual community; the dark love of pious-impious urges, eros, burns in the emotional community. In the former, there is ordered, Christian service; in the latter, disordered desire for pleasure.

However, this means that I must release others from all my attempts to control, coerce, and dominate them with my love.

What may appear weak and insignificant to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as Christians should not be constantly feeling the pulse of their spiritual life, so too the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be continually taking its temperature.

The intellectual underpinnings of Bonhoeffer’s convictions on life in a Christian faith community can be traced to his early works Sanctorum Communio and Act and Being, which undergirded his interpretation of the church as a primary form of God’s self-revelation.

Thus, in the spiritual community the Spirit rules; in the emotional community, psychological techniques and methods. In the former, unsophisticated, nonpsychological, unmethodical, helping love is offered to one another; in the latter, psychological analysis and design. In the former, service to one another is simple and humble; in the latter, it

Among serious Christians in congregations today there is a growing desire to meet together with other Christians during the midday break from work for life together under the Word. Life together is again being understood by Christians today as the grace that it is, as the extraordinary aspect, the “roses and lilies” of the Christian life (Luther).

Those who want more than what Christ has established between us do not want Christian community. They are looking for some extraordinary experiences of community that were denied them elsewhere.