“He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.”
Bonhoeffer wrote Life Together in 1938 while running an underground seminary for the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany, living in close community with his students. The warning in chapter one is precise: the man who loves his imagined ideal of community more than the real, messy community in front of him will destroy it.
There is more to this one. The full context — the events behind the words, what the author was living through, and how it applies to the specific situations of fatherhood — is in the app under Deeper Understanding.
Read the full context in DadViceDadVice matches wisdom like this to the real situations of fatherhood — the hard conversation, the long night, the moment you do not know what to say. Every quote is sourced. No motivational filler.