The path, too, to the "God-given reality" of my fellow-man or woman with whom I have to live leads through Christ, or it is a blind alley. We are separated from one another by an unbridgeable gulf of otherness and strangeness which resists all our attempts to overcome it by means of natural association or emotional or spiritual union. There is no way from one person to another. However loving and sympathetic we try to be, however sound our psychology, however frank and open our behaviour, we cannot penetrate the incognito of the other man, for there are no direct relationships, not even between soul and soul. Christ stands between us, and we can only get into touch with our neighbours through him. That is why intercession is the most promising way to reach our neighbours, and corporate prayer, offered in the name of Christ, the purest form of fellowship.
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 98.
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So I was puzzling over this quote with my brother this evening, and he thinks it might be Barthian. According to Mirk, Barth suggests that we mirror the relationship between Father/Son/Holy Ghost as we relate to God, Self, and Others. Just as our relationship with God was broken in the Fall, so also was our ability to 'know' ourselves and others. So Christ mediates our relationships with one another the just as he mediates our relationship with God. What this means in practical, concrete terms...Mike couldn't say. But that may be the context for what Bonhoeffer writes.
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