Dietrich Bonhoeffer quote #2

In this quote Bonhoeffer is making the point that the Church at one point had become so secularized, in his words, that it reacted by implementing the monastic movement to offset the "worldliness" (my word).

Thus, he says...

"...the Church evolved the fatal conception of the double standard-- a maximum and a minimum standard of Christian obedience. Whenever the Church was accused of being too secularized, it could always point to monasticism as an opportunity of living a higher life within the fold, and thus justify the other possibility of a lower standard of life for others. And so we get the paradoxical result that monasticism, whose mission was to preserve in the Church of Rome the primitive Christian realization of the costliness of grace, afforded conclusive justification for the secularization of the Church. By and large, the fatal error of monasticism lay not so much in its rigorism (though even here there was a good deal of misunderstanding of the precise content of the will of Jesus) as in the extent to which it departed from genuine Christianity by setting up itself as the individual achievement of a select few, and so claiming a special merit of its own."