life together the classic exploration of christian community

This is no fulfillment of our obligation, and it is certain that here too our attitude toward our brother only reflects our relationship to God. It is an impatient, inattentive listening, that despises the brother and is only waiting for a chance to speak and thus get rid of the other person. “There is a kind of listening with half an ear that presumes already to know what the other person has to say. Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian in Community The brother views me as I am before the judging and merciful God in the Cross of Jesus Christ.” The psychiatrist views me as if there were no God. The Christian brother knows when I come to him: here is a sinner like myself, a godless man who wants to confess and yearns for God’s forgiveness. The psychiatrist must first search my heart and yet he never plumbs its ultimate depth. In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner. And so it also does not know that man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness. Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of man. The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is.

“The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Jesus.

Life together the classic exploration of christian community