Lohfink, Gerhard |Jesus and Community:The Social Dimension of Christian Faith

Jesus and Community: The Social Dimension of Christian Faith
Gerhard Lohfink

Paperback: Fortress Press, 1984, 211 pp.

Introduction

Gerhard Lohfink’s landmark book, Jesus and Community, makes a compelling case for living the Word. Although it addresses several of the key Live the Word practices, its greatest gift is the case it makes for why the local congregation is the primary context in which we live the Word. In spite of the prevailing individualism of the Western world, which has deeply saturated our understanding of Christianity, Lohfink argues that God’s work in creation is centered primarily around the gathering of a people. In the book’s introduction, Lohfink identifies the fundamental questions that he will be exploring: “What did Jesus think of community? Did he in fact abandon the Old Testament’s basic relation, God – People of God? Did he in fact address only the individual? Was he really only concerned with God and the soul, with the soul and its God?” (5). In order to offer answers to these questions, Lohfink turns to scripture, examining the biblical texts of the New Testament, with these questions in mind.

Jesus, Lohfink notes, began his ministry by gathering twelve disciples, a number chosen to allude to the twelve tribes of Israel, and “a symbolic prophetic action … [that] exemplified the awakening of Israel and its gathering in the eschatological salvific community, something beginning then through Jesus” (10, emphasis in original). Lohfink summarizes: “Jesus did not envision the people of God which he sought to gather as a purely spiritual, purely religious community … The discipleship to which Jesus called was not invisible discipleship; his eating with sinners was not invisible eating; his cures of the sick were not invisible cures – no more than his bloody death on the cross was an invisible event. Jesus’s effort to gather Israel was very concrete and visible” (28).

One of the key concepts in this book is Lohfink’s notion of the church as a contrast-society. He writes:

Christ is someone absolutely different and new, in whom the holiness and truth of God have become definitively present in the world. Wherever his word is believed and life is based on his truth, something new and different, the sacred realm of truth, emerges in the midst of the world. Those who have been sanctified by Christ and live in his truth are therefore sharply distinguished from the rest of society, from its deceit, its institutional untruth (129).

Our commitment to live the Word (which is truth) in our local church communities, forms us, Lohfink argues, into a contrast-society, a community in the midst of the world, but yet set apart from the ways and desires of the world.

Active Disciplemaking

The primary focus of Jesus’s work on earth, Lohfink emphasizes, was the making of a community of disciples. This community served the purpose of “representing symbolically what really should have taken place in Israel as a whole: complete dedication to the gospel of the reign of God, radical conversion to a new way of life, and a gathering unto a community of brothers and sisters” (34, emphasis in original). This community, however, was emphatically not a replacement for Israel, but rather a sign from within that demonstrated God’s desires and intentions for Israel.

But because Christ’s disciples were intended as a contrast-society, the ways in which they were formed and discipled were of utmost importance, in order that they were indeed embodying contrasting way of life. At the heart of Jesus’s ethical instruction for his disciples was the Sermon on the Mount. Lohfink observes that the Sermon on the Mount was addressed to “Israel, or the circle of disciples which represented Israel” (35). The Sermon on the Mount is for Lohfink (as it was for Clarence Jordan and many other pastors and theologians who have inspired our vision of living the Word) the ethical heart of what it means to follow Jesus and to be a part of the contrast-society of God’s people.

Lohfink identifies five facets of the Sermon on the Mount that play a crucial role in the formation of disciples into God’s contrast-society. First, the people of God are formed into a new family. Jesus’s calling of disciples, Lohfink notes, was not into solitude and isolation, but rather into a new family of sisters and brothers. Secondly, in this new family, none were to be called father. God is the father whom the disciples are learning to trust for guidance and provision. This facet of our discipleship is also important because it abolishes hierarchies and the twisted power dynamics that accompany them. The third facet of our formation as disciples is the renunciation of violence. The world’s way is saturated with many types of violence, and to renounce violence in all its forms, as Jesus instructed his disciples to do, is quite clearly a distinguishing mark of God’s contrast-society. Fourthly, Jesus’s burden is light. Jesus did not intend for his discipleship to be lived out by individuals in guilt and shame, but by a community that was learning and growing together, finding joy in living the counter-cultural way of Jesus and sharing the costs, the risks, and the consequences of this discipleship across the community as a whole. Finally, the community of disciples was to be a “city on a hill”; their discipleship was not just for themselves for the sake of their neighbors who would see them and be inspired and challenged by their strikingly different way of sharing life together.

Radical Kinship

As described above, Lohfink emphasizes that Christian discipleship is intended to unfold within the community of a new family, specifically one in which hierarchies have been abolished. The community of Christ’s disciples was intended to be a reconciled community: it therefore included rich and poor, educated and uneducated, rural folks and urban folks, Zealots and tax collectors, and many more (88-89). “Those who believe in Christ and let themselves be incorporated into the body of Christ through baptism,” Lohfink writes, “become a new community in Jesus Christ, a community in which oppositions which prevail in society are removed” (92-93). In the early Christian communities, as recorded in Acts and the Epistles of the New Testament, addressing one another “as brother and sister was evidently not only a pious practice; a spirit of brotherhood was also concretely tangible” (108). Although Lohfink notes that the early Christian communities had their failings (including succumbing to the temptation to protect their authority through domination), radical kinship was an essential marker of God’s contrast-society.

Table Fellowship

In this book, Lohfink only hints at the importance of table fellowship in forming this new contrast society of disciples:

[In table fellowship], Jesus was the head of the house, who gathered the new family around himself and pronounced the prayer of blessing (Mark 8:6-7). Later on the disciples would recognize him in the breaking of bread (Luke 24: 30-31, 34). Their community at table with the earthly Jesus must have impressed itself unforgettably upon them (42).

However, in his book Does God Need the Church? (a sort of companion book to this one), Lohfink elegantly unpacks the Gospel story that is often called “the feeding of the 5000” in a manner that highlights the significance of table fellowship to the superabundant economy of God’s contrast-society. The table becomes the fundamental locus of economic sharing among God’s people.

Jesus and Community is an essential theological resource for understanding what it means to live the Word, and especially how Christian discipleship was intended by Jesus to unfold within the local church community.

Book Summarized by C. Christopher Smith