The Great Disillusionment

Dietrich Bonheoffer, in the book Life Together, speaks of what he calls the “great disillusionment” with which all Christian communities must come to grips with if they are to embody not just a human ideal but a divine reality:

Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves…Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it (Bonheoffer 27).

Our task as a church is to come together embracing and rejoicing in the reality that we are, in the words of one contemporary, “painfully uncool,” that the church is fundamentally comprised of “dropouts, and losers, and sinners, and failures and fools.” In Jesus' parable of the Great Banquet, after the original guests refuse the invitation, the master of the house commands his servants, “Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and crippled and blind and lame” (Luke 14:21).

Luther said it like this,

“If you are a preacher of Grace, then preach a true, not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, then you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious [or imaginary] sinners. Be a sinner and let your sins be strong [sin boldly], but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly still. For he is the victor over sin, death, and the world.”

We are not imaginary or fictitious sinners, we are real sinners who rejoice and trust in a real Savior. The plain truth of the matter is that other people are going to fail you, other Christians are going to fail you and, as Bonheoffer says, we are going to fail as well. True community isn’t about hiding our failures, it isn’t about ignoring or sweeping them under the rug of superficial and shallow relationships, nor is it about God making us into super-Christians who are so spiritual and so mature that we never fail one another and therefore cannot tolerate failure in others. True community is about gospel re-enactment; it’s about coming together again and again and exposing and confessing our sins, exposing and confessing that we are sinners. Any vision of the church you have that isn’t big enough to deal with the truth that people are going to fail you, that people are going to hurt you, that you yourself are going to fail and hurt others, any vision of community that isn’t wide enough to incorporate this reality simply isn’t Christian and until that vision is shattered by the “great disillusionment” of what Christian community really is you will find yourself constantly complaining, constantly at odd, constantly without peace and friendship in the church.