Let God Be Magnified

Everyone –

My last blog posting contained this quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

“We must learn to know the Scriptures again, as the Reformers and our fathers knew them. We must not grudge the time and the work it takes. We must know the Scriptures first and foremost for the sake of our salvation. But besides this, there are ample reasons that make this requirement exceedingly urgent. How, for example, shall we ever attain certainty and confidence in our personal and church activity if we do not stand on solid Biblical ground? It is not our heart that determines our course, but God’s Word. But who in this day has any proper understanding of the need for scriptural proof? How often we hear innumerable arguments ‘from life’ and ‘from experience’ put forward as the basis for most crucial decisions, but the argument of Scripture is missing. And this authority would perhaps point exactly in the opposite direction. It is not surprising, of course, that the person who attempts to cast discredit upon their wisdom should be the one who himself does not seriously read, know, and study the Scriptures. But one who will not learn to handle the Bible for himself is not an evangelical Christian.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Life Together,” pp. 54,55

He makes a convicting point in his book about Christian love and how it can only be defined through the Word of God. For God has left us an example in Jesus Christ, as well as the Apostles, of the love that is spiritual rather than human. He surmises, correctly, that we cannot not truly love the way Christ loves by coming to the definition on our own terms. Man is darkened by sin and therefore his thoughts, actions, and deeds are all muddied by that sin. No one seeks after God….no not one. And if man is darkened, then the Word of God is foolishness to him before God, through the Holy Spirit, quickens him and allows him to cry out to God and receive forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ. It is only at that time that the Word makes sense (..”combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words…”).

So why don’t we read it more?

In the current chapter I’m reading on “Community” and the blessings of that fellowship in true Christian love. And this love can only be defined in God’s Word. And if we don’t read God’s Word then we don’t know how to really love and therefore the love with which we end up loving is conceived in the mind of man which will, by definition, falls short of the love God.

In the following statements, Bonhoeffer shows just how important the Word of God is for it defines who we ought to be and why. I thought you might glean some blessings from them. Enjoy:

“…the Christian is the man who no longer seeks his salvation, his deliverance, his justification in himself, but in Jesus Christ alone. He knows that God’s Word in Jesus Christ pronounces him guilty, even when he does not feel his guilt, and God’s Word in Jesus Christ pronounces him not guilty and righteous, even when he does not feel that he is righteous at all. The Christian no longer lives of himself, by his own claims and his own justification, but by God’s claims and God’s justification. He lives wholly by God’s Word pronounced upon him, whether that Word declares him guilty or innocent.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Life Together,” pp. 21-22

“But God has put this Word into the mouth of men in order that it may be communicated to other men. When once person is struck by the Word, he speaks it to others.” – Bonhoeffer, p. 22

“What love is, only Christ tells in his Word. Contrary to all my own opinions and convictions, Jesus Christ will tell me what love toward the brethren really is. Therefore, spiritual love is bound solely to the Word of Jesus Christ. Where Christ bids me to maintain fellowship for the sake of love, I will maintain it. Where his truth enjoins me to dissolve a fellowship for love’s sake, there I will dissolve it, despite all the protests of my human love. Because spiritual love does not desire but rather serves, it loves an enemy as a brother. It originates neither in the brother nor in the enemy but in Christ from his Word. Human love can never understand spiritual love, for spiritual love is from above; it is something completely strange, new, and incomprehensible to all earthly love.” – Bonhoeffer, p. 35

“As only Christ can speak to me in such a way that I may be saved, so others, too, can be saved only by Christ himself. This means that I must release the other person from every attempt of mine to regulate, coerce, and dominate him with my love. The other person needs to retain his independence of me; to loved for what he is, as one for whom Christ became man, died, and rose again, for whom Christ bought forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Because Christ has long since acted decisively for my brother, before I could begin to act, I must leave him his freedom in Christ’s; I must meet him only as the person that he already is in Christ’s eyes. This is the meaning of the proposition that we can meet others only through the mediation of Christ. Human love constructs its own image of the other person, of what he is and what he should become. It takes the life of the other person into its own hands. Spiritual love recognizes the true image of the other person which he has received from Jesus Christ; the image that Jesus Christ himself embodied and would stamp upon all men. Therefore, spiritual love proves itself in that everything it says and does commends Christ.” – Bonhoeffer, p. 36

Later Eriek