Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote Life Together in 1938, quickly, about a community that no longer existed. The Gestapo had shut down the underground seminary at Finkenwalde the year before. He was setting down what those two years had taught him while he could still remember it clearly.
He was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp on 9 April 1945, weeks before the camp was liberated.
Check which translation you are getting
This matters more than it sounds. There are two Life Together editions in common circulation and they read quite differently.
The John W. Doberstein translation, published by Harper in 1954, is the one most people have read. It is warm, fluent, and slightly smoothed. The Daniel Bloesch translation in the Fortress Press critical edition (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, volume 5) is more literal, heavily annotated, and paired with Prayerbook of the Bible. It is the better scholarly text and the harder read.
Neither is wrong. But if you buy a cheap edition without checking, you will not know which one you have. Look at the listing before you order.
The argument
Bonhoeffer’s opening move is the one that stops people. Christian community, he says, is not something we build. It is a gift, and the fastest way to destroy it is to arrive with a vision of what it should be. The man who loves his dream of community will wreck the actual community he is in, because the real people in front of him keep failing to be the people in his head.
From there it is concrete and unsentimental: how a household prays together, how it eats, how it works, and how it handles the day alone. He is firm that a man who cannot be alone should beware of community, and a man who cannot bear community should beware of being alone. Both are ways of avoiding other people.
The final chapter, on confession, is the one Protestant readers find most uncomfortable. Bonhoeffer argues that sin confessed only to God stays theoretical, and that a man needs to say the true thing out loud to another Christian who will not flinch. He is Lutheran and he means it more strongly than most American evangelicals will expect.
What we removed from this page
Two reader quotations we could not trace, and a quotation attributed to Bonhoeffer that we could not confirm against the text. The book is short enough that you can find its best lines yourself.
Limits
It is short, about 120 pages, and dense in a way that punishes skimming. It is also written for a residential seminary of young men living under one roof, and some of the practical counsel does not transfer cleanly to a men’s group that meets on Tuesdays.
Read Bonhoeffer knowing he is not a modern evangelical. His Lutheranism shapes his view of the Word, the sacraments, and confession, and you will run into places where he assumes things you do not. That is a reason to read carefully, not a reason to skip him.
Who should read it
Any man who has been disappointed by a church. Bonhoeffer diagnoses that disappointment better than anyone, and he is not kind about where it comes from.
It works well for a group, with the caution that it is not a study guide and will not carry the discussion for you. Take a chapter a week and expect arguments.
Life Together on Amazon (check the translation on the listing before ordering)