Bonhoeffer: Salt and Light, Community and Discipleship

“Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him.”  Psalm 34: 8

In his 7^th Chapter entitled “The Visible Community”, Bonhoeffer discusses Matthew 5: 13-16, where the disciples are described as salt and light to the world.  Since starting this re-read of The Cost of Discipleship, I’ve heard critiques that Bonhoeffer is too heavy-handed with his demands of the law—that is, he takes a works-righteousness approach, or somehow clouds the application of the uses of the law.  

I’ll digress for a moment for my own edification and clarity to talk about the “three uses of the law”.  These are my own words and I suppose I could be off in my understanding, but this is a topic worthy of understanding.  God’s law—His holy expectations as outline in, for example, the Ten Commandments—are viewed as having three distinct purposes.  The law is a curb, mirror and guide.  When the law serves as a curb, its existence causes people to reconsider or revise their actions out of fear of divine retribution—or possibly out of fear of punishment by a civil justice system, which is an extension of God’s continued rule on earth through the secular government.  The law in this context serves a very general purpose, upholding good order and discipline. When the law serves as a curb, it blesses people by keeping in check the innate sinfulness of humanity.  Secondarily, the law serves as mirror; this is a specific use of the law which reveals individual human sinfulness and creates the helpless need to be saved from God’s holy, implacable requirements.  This use of the law convicts each as an individual.  We look in the mirror of God’s holiness, His perfection and His demand for holiness in all things, and we feel the burden of guilt and shame.  It is the use of the law as a mirror that opn Rens the hearts of people to their need for an individual savior—as Paul says in Romans 7: 24-25: “What a wretched man I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death [which does what we don’t want to do, what we know is wrong, see 7: 14-23]?  Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” The second use of the law, the law as mirror, shows us our need for a Savior and creates the hunger and thirst for the gospel, the good news of God’s mercy in Christ.  When the law is used as a guide—the third use of the law—it serves to show those redeemed and sanctified by Christ how then they should live.  The good works we do under the third use of the law are not works to appease God, but to give Him glory and to honor Him.  As baptized children of God, washed and brought into new life in Christ, heirs of salvation, we are filled with God’s Spirit and grafted into The Vine of Christ—so we produce good fruit.  

We could say that the use of the law as a curb says “civilized people don’t go around murdering other people who get in their way.”  The law as a mirror says “I am a selfish, wretched person—I may not kill people, but I want some of them dead some days!  I am the opposite of God’s love and holiness! I could never call myself a good person.”  The law as a guide says “I am a child of God, forgiven where I fail but always striving to care for and love my neighbor, for the people of the world whom God would draw to Himself.”

So when I read Bonhoeffer’s discussion of being salt and light, I read it with a third-use understanding of the demands of the law.  What do God’s holy, redeemed children do?  They do good deeds—it is simply who they are, in light of their redemption and calling as children!  Bonhoeffer makes a point of emphasizing the words Jesus uses:  you ARE the salt; you ARE the light.  Not you have salt, or you will be light, but you ARE.   We are justified, declared righteous, in Jesus Christ; His holiness becomes our holiness.  What else can we do but be salt and light?  

I thought I understood justification and sanctification.  Justification is the declaration of holiness because of the redeeming sacrifice of Christ; sanctification is the life of joyful obedience, empowered by Word and Spirit and the physical elements of Water, Bread and Wine of the sacraments.  But I went out for some more information to Dr Google and discovered a lengthy treatise by Rev. Matthew Harrison, current president of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS). He takes a view of sanctification—one which, had I read it on its own, I would have agreed with as truth—and he turns it on its head.  The view is (to quote Rev Harrison) “You wanna be holy like Jesus?  Develop in every way naturally yet constantly and uninterruptedly in organic union with the indwelling principle of your Christian life, Jesus.”  Harrison says that this incorrectly emphasizes the individual, with an internal/selfish focus and one which is devoid of emphasis on community and the Sacraments.   He states that true sanctification is a communal thing, a reflection of the life of the church; it is a “communal, corporate reality…. “Individual holiness flows from communal realities.”   He discusses the innate communal nature of Christianity; God Himself—Unity in Trinity—is communal; the Body of Christ is not just analogy, but a reality.  Harrison also highlights the essentiality of Word and Sacraments in the sanctification of the Christian.  I need to read Harrison’s tract in more detail to digest it; but for the purposes of my reading of Matthew 5 and Bonhoeffer’s discussion of salt and light, I find this emphasis on community vs individuality interesting and relevant.  Bonhoeffer’s title for this chapter—The Visible Community—ties salt and light to community; service together, service to others.   

“They [the disciples] are the salt that sustains the earth, for their sake the world exists, yes, for the sake of these, the poor, ignoble and weak, whom the world rejects.”  In rereading Bonhoeffer in light of my skimming of Harrison, there is an underlying assumption of community present in Bonhoeffer’s discussion of salt and light.  It is not “you” it is “the disciples” it is “we.”  And it is “we” in service to the world.  And it is not just me, by myself with my bible working on growing in faith.  It should be me—and us—worshipping together, praying together, hearing and reading God’s Word and sharing together in the gift of Holy Communion, and being salt and light to the world around us.  And it is only through the Gospel—the good news of forgiveness in Christ—that we are declared “good”; by ourselves or through our own efforts, we can do nothing good.  The law in any of its uses only shows us what good looks like; it cannot create good in us.

Reading Jesus’ discussions about salt and light, it creates a frisson of fear—“what if I’m not salty enough?  What if I’m inadvertently putting my light under a basket?”  Bonhoeffer says “[the discipleship community has the] mission to save the world, but which, if it ceases to live up to this, is itself irretrievably lost.”  This is a scary thought—the pressure is on—be salt and light or lose your salvation.  I think, in light of Harrison’s emphasis on community and the life of the church—and indeed on Bonhoeffer’s use of “discipleship community”—this is less about the risk to individuals to lose faith, and more about the failure of Christ’s church on earth to remain in Him; and therefore a failure of Christians to remain in fellowship.  As Jesus Himself says in John 15, He is the true vine and His Father is the gardener Who prunes and cleans; we are to remain in Him and thereby bear much fruit.  As Ecclesiastes 4: 9-12 says, two are better than one but a cord of three strands is not quickly broken—we are better in community, a community is centered around Christ Jesus, His gifts and His Spirit.  If we, the discipleship community, seek to be salt and light without remaining in Christ, we will fail.  We will become unsalty, we will be hidden under a basket.  How do we remain in Christ?  We remain in His Word, the inspired Word of God given to us in Scripture as “God with us” now in this present age. We also remain in Him through the gifts He gives, through His Word connected with the physical elements of water, and of bread and wine—God is present with us and for us in these physical sacraments, the purpose of which is to grant us forgiveness of sins and strengthen our faith.  

But what happens if we abandon this community, if we reject the Word and Sacraments entrusted to the church and strike out on an individual pursuit of piety; or pursue good works that reflect only worldly goodness?  Harrison and Bonhoeffer appear to agree that we then would risk unsaltiness and basket-covered-darkness.  If we fail to remain in Christ; if we abandon the strength of that three-fold cord—if we abandon the community of believers and the Word and Sacraments our Three-In-One God offers to us—we will be quickly broken. 

But I feel I’m out in deep water, past my qualifications as an amateur.  I’ll leave this discussion of salt and light, but leave it with these thoughts.  I am salt and light because God in Christ has made me so; He gives me—and the community of disciples—to the world so that when I do good deeds, God my Father is praised by the world. We remain in Christ and therefore bear good fruit, good works; if we remove ourselves from Christ—from His Body, from His Community of believers, from the Word and Sacraments He gives us—we will fail to bear good fruit, we will no longer be salt and light.  The good works of the believer are not “do” but they are “are”—they are the nature of the baptized and redeemed children of God, something which in the newness of life that we posses through Christ, we cannot help but be. 

1)      Consider your perspective on “good deeds” and the three uses of the law.  How does an understanding of the separate uses of the law preserve you in the comfort of salvation in Christ, while simultaneously challenging you to do good works?

2)      Bonhoeffer lived in an era when the German Christian church had become extremely secular, working hand-and-glove with the German government and ultimately with the Nazi regime. He decries the behavior of his contemporaries, where their “good deeds” were not visible to the world, but blended in perfectly with the expectations and zeitgeist of that age.  How is it tempting for us, in our society, to equate the “good deeds” and the “salt and light” of Christ-followers with what looks good to the world—political correctness, tolerance, generic generosity etc?  In what ways are the “good deeds” of Christians very different from the world?

3)      American Christianity heavily discusses a “personal relationship with Jesus” and often de-emphasizes the role of church and community.  If sanctification—a growth in holiness—relies upon participation in the community of believers, the body of Christ, the Church, what does that mean for you and your life?  

4)      In Christ, you are a new creation—the old is gone, the new has come (2 Cor 5: 12).  You have Christ’s righteousness; it is not something you do, it is something you are.  You are salt and light.  How does this free you to joyfully live life as a Christ-follower?