Life Together

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

Christians should recognize the true image of the other person from the perspective of Christ himself, resisting all attempts to coerce and dominate others rather than loving them for who they are: as those for whom Christ became incarnate among his people and with whom Christ became bonded in their brotherly love.

On innumerable occasions a whole Christian community has been shattered because it has lived on the basis of a wishful image.

First, Christian community is not an ideal, but a divine reality; second, Christian community is a spiritual [pneumatisch] and not an emotional [psychisch] reality.

They meant by this expression that Christians are dependent on the Word of God spoken to them. They are directed outward to the Word coming to them. Christians live entirely by the truth of God’s Word in Jesus Christ. If they are asked “where is your salvation, your blessedness, your righteousness?,” they can never point to themselves.

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.

Every human idealized image that is brought into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be broken up so that genuine community can survive.

The bright day of Christian community dawns wherever the early morning mists of dreamy visions are lifting.

Spiritual love, however, 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. I do not know in advance what love of others means on the basis of the general idea of love that grows out of my emotional desires.