Loving Christ and the Church
Written by Dan McDonald
Among the church fathers it was
generally agreed that one could not love Christ without loving the church. That
might strike some modern Christians as strange. It may be problematic for some,
for there are those who have suffered abuse from churches and church leaders.
In seeking to write about how one ought to love Christ and the Church I want to
write in a way which does not set aside the real sufferings of those who have
faced abuse from the Church and have lost faith in the Church. At the same time
I want us to realize afresh why any commitment to love Christ ought to lead us
to a commitment to love his church.
Perhaps one of the best things I
could do to write upon this subject is to encourage my readers to read Life
Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But since many won’t do that I’ll reiterate
points regarding loving Christ and loving the church that are expressed in
Bonhoeffer’s first chapter in Life Together.
Bonhoeffer first gives us a picture
of the blessing of living together in Christian community. Bonhoeffer wrote Life
Together at a time when people in his land of Germany were being forced to
choose between a persecuted church and a favored state church which was being
manipulated by the National Socialist Party and its leader Adolph Hitler.
Bonhoeffer chose to leave the safety of exile in the United States to return to
Germany in order to encourage those following Christ underneath during Hitler’s
rule over Germany. Bonhoeffer realized that Christian fellowship was not a
given, but a blessing to be desired and respected.
He wrote of the blessing of Christian
community: “So between the death of Christ and the Last Day it is only by a
gracious anticipation of the last things that Christians are privileged to live
in visible fellowship with other Christians. It is by the grace of God that a
congregation is permitted to gather visibly in this world to share God’s Word
and Sacrament. Not all Christians receive this blessing. The imprisoned, the
sick, the scattered lonely, the proclaimers of the Gospel in heathen lands
stand alone. They know that visible fellowship is a blessing. They remember, as
the Psalmist did, how they went ‘with the multitude . . . to the house of God,
with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holy day.”[i]
(Psalm 42:4)
Perhaps it was because Bonhoeffer
was having to deal with a church being attacked, manipulated, seduced and hated
by those in power that he could write with such a sense of the importance of
Christian community, “It is easily forgotten that the fellowship of Christian
brethren is a gift of grace, a gift of the kingdom of God that any day may be
taken from us, that the time that still separates us from utter loneliness may
be brief indeed. Therefore, let him who until now has the privilege of living a
common Christian life with other Christians praise God’s grace from the bottom
of his heart. Let him thank God on his knees and declare: It is grace, nothing
but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren.”[ii]
Bonhoeffer wants us however to
realize that the grace of Christian community is not something that we provide
to one another, but that God provides for us in and only in and through Jesus
Christ. He writes, “Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in
Jesus Christ. No Christian community is more or less than this. Whether it be a
brief, single encounter or the daily fellowship of years, Christian community
is only this. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.”[iii]
Nowhere is this more focused in the
Christian life or in the expression of the Scriptures than in the partaking of
Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper, or the Eucharist. We, who partake of Christ
in the bread and the wine, partake of Him with and in the Church. We are one
body and one blood even as we partake of one body and one blood. We do not come
alone to Christ but we come in his grace participating and partaking of his
redemption which is a cosmic redemption. He came and died in connection with
God’s love for the world or Cosmos. For God so loved the Cosmos that he gave
his only begotten Son. It was not just for you or me that Christ came, but for
a world and when we come to him we come to him with a world of sinners being
granted to know God’s love and God’s patience and God’s forgiveness of our
sins.
This is in part why it is so easy to
want to have Christ and to want to be done with his church. It is because we do
not have the cosmic vision of redemption that Jesus has. Those of us who are
Conservatives like that God has forgiven conservative sins but we aren’t
comfortable with his accepting and forgiving sins that are too far out of our
comfort zone. Those of us who embrace a bit of Progressivism enjoy forgiving
sins except those sins of those conservatives who seem not to be with the
program that we have embraced. But when we partake of the Eucharist, of the
Lord’s Supper, of Holy Communion we come as God’s people with all of our
remaining sins. That is what the Church is. It is the gathering not only of
God’s people but also the gathering of our remaining sins needing cleansed,
needing forgiven, needing forsaken, needing time to be rooted out, put away and
exchanged for the beauties of righteousness, grace, and Christian love.
This is why it is so difficult to love both Christ and
the Church. It is because we love him as sinners with remaining sins. It is
easy to come to him in our persons seeking forgiveness and embracing his love.
But the gathered church comes to him with all of our sins and it is such a
mess. Yet this is where Christ meets us to give us his body and blood as we
remember that we who partake have been made in him one body and blood. We do
not get to choose which unrespectable sins aren’t allowed to be in the mix and
we don’t get to choose which sins of hypocrisy aren’t allowed forgiveness. We
come to the table of the Lord with messy sinners, and sinners that don’t sin in
the way we do and they rub us the wrong way and for this reason we learn here
as we learn nowhere else what it means to love Christ, who has loved us. Of
course we would like to distance ourselves from the Church. In the
Church we get frustrated with other people’s sins, and by comparison we begin to learn how frustrated they must be with our sins. We are one body,
one blood, redeemed by one Redeemer and it is frequently frustrating as well as liberating. But this is where we are granted the joy of discovering salvation, not only for ourselves but those being redeemed alongside of us.
Bonhoeffer stresses in his opening chapter on community
how Christian community is not an ideal but a divine reality. He warns us of something
that almost every one among us will from time to time bring to the ruination of
a Christian community. He writes: “Innumerable times a whole Christian
community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious
Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to
bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be
and try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as
surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian
fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by great disillusionment with
others, with Christians in general, and if we are fortunate, with ourselves.”[iv]
We who are Christians are called to believe in a
sinner’s Gospel, but we are so prone to try to turn it into a wish dream gospel
where we discover perfection on earth instead of redemption, awakening,
struggling, growing and struggling with our weaknesses and those weaknesses of
those living in community with us. Ultimately we cannot separate the love of
Christ and the love of church. Ultimately we can only discover that our sins
are not forgiven alone and that our love for Christ is not learned in a life
separated from others in Christ, but in a life connected with others in Christ.
It is in becoming frustrated with the sins of others that I learn to accept
that is how my sins must frustrate others. We learn to pray not merely that God
might forgive my sins, but rather “Forgive us our sins as we forgive others.”
How do we do that apart from life in a community where our sins rub the wrong
way against one another?
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