The Relational Mission

For almost 25 year, I've been meditating on a passage found in in Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "Spiritual love will prove successful insofar as it commends Christ to the other in all that is says and does. It will not seek to agitate another by exerting all to personal, direct influence or by crudely interfering in one's life. It will not take pleasure in pious, emotional fervor and excitement. Rather, it will encounter the other with the clear word of God and be prepared to leave the other alone with this word for a long time. It will be willing to release others again so that Christ may deal with them. It will respect the other as the boundary that Christ establishes between us; and it will find full community with the other in the Christ who alone binds us together. This spiritual love will thus speak to Christ about the other Christian more than to the other Christian about Christ. It knows that the most direct way to others is always through prayer to Chr...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer observes in the opening paragraph of his book Ethics that those seeking a Christian ethic "must give up, as inappropriate to this topic, the two very questions that led them to deal with the ethical problem: 'How can I be good?' and 'How can I do something good?'" His words challenge the notion that the goal of Christian ethics is to find out how an individual can become good or how an individual can change the world for the good by his or her actions. He wrote, "Of ultimate importance, then, is not that I become good, or that the condition of the world be improved by my efforts, but that the reality of God show itself everywhere to be the ultimate reality." (See the translation on pages 46-7 pg Vol 6 in the Dietrich Bonhoffer Works series.) Practically speaking this means that Christian ethics is a focus on the ultimate reality that "God be known as good, even at the risk that I and the world are revealed as not good....