Sublime

From the centre of life certain questions, and their answers, are seen to be wholly irrelevant (I’m thinking of the judgment pronounced on Job’s friends). In Christ there are no ‘Christian problems’. - Enough of this; I’ve just been disturbed again.

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).

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.

By sheer grace God will not permit us to live in a dream world even for a few weeks and to abandon ourselves to those blissful experiences and exalted moods that sweep over us like a wave of rapture.

Where we trust, we have learnt to put our very lives into the hands of others; in the face of all the different interpretations that have been put on our lives and actions, we have learnt to trust unreservedly.

and he argued that Christian life and the faith can never be lived in the abstract.

We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.

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