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(C, P)
"There was not a needy person among them ..."
The Gnostics are always with us, are they not? They seem to dominate the "comfortable pew" of the late twentieth century. When there is talk of "need," it is usually a psychic or spiritual need. The more earthly needs of battered, weary, inner-city folks are far beyond the suburban horizon. We have reduced our faith to a thing of the heart and maybe of the mind, and ceased to take seriously the ancient Hebrew concept (recovered by contemporary medicine) of the person as a psychosomatic unity.
But the koinonia known by the early Christians was expressed not only in worship but in everyday life in the most mundane ways. In The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer explained the relevance of this understanding of the church for our own day:
To allow a baptized brother to take part in the worship of the church, but to refuse to have anything to do with him in everyday life, is to subject him to abuse and contempt ... And if we grant the baptized brother the right to the gifts of salvation, but refuse him the gifts necessary to earthly life or knowingly leave him in material need and distress, we are holding up the gifts of salvation to ridicule and behaving as liars.
[Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York. Macmillan Publishing Co., 2nd ed., 1967).]
- Bachedler
"There was not a needy person among them ..."
The Gnostics are always with us, are they not? They seem to dominate the "comfortable pew" of the late twentieth century. When there is talk of "need," it is usually a psychic or spiritual need. The more earthly needs of battered, weary, inner-city folks are far beyond the suburban horizon. We have reduced our faith to a thing of the heart and maybe of the mind, and ceased to take seriously the ancient Hebrew concept (recovered by contemporary medicine) of the person as a psychosomatic unity.
But the koinonia known by the early Christians was expressed not only in worship but in everyday life in the most mundane ways. In The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer explained the relevance of this understanding of the church for our own day:
To allow a baptized brother to take part in the worship of the church, but to refuse to have anything to do with him in everyday life, is to subject him to abuse and contempt ... And if we grant the baptized brother the right to the gifts of salvation, but refuse him the gifts necessary to earthly life or knowingly leave him in material need and distress, we are holding up the gifts of salvation to ridicule and behaving as liars.
[Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York. Macmillan Publishing Co., 2nd ed., 1967).]
- Bachedler
