Bonhoeffer Quotes

#1. If we are to pray aright, perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to our own heart. Not what we want to pray is important, but what God wants us to pray. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#2. It is from God that parents receive their children, and it is to God that they should lead them. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#3. After death something new begins, over which all powers of the world of death have no more might. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#4. The fact that the fool is often stubborn must not mislead us into thinking that he is independent. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#5. Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#6. In the world God wills work, marriage, government, and church, and God wills all these, each in its own way, through Christ, toward Christ, and in Christ. God has placed human beings under all these mandates, not only each individual under one or the other, but all people under all four. There can be no retreat, therefore, from a "worldly" into a "spiritual" "realm." The practice of the Christian life can be learned only under these four mandates of God. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#7. Loving God means rejoicing in God, being eager to think of and pray to God. It means being glad to be in God's presence and to be with God alone. It means not grieving God, but rejoicing in God simply because it is God who is involved, and because we are permitted to know and have God, and to speak with and live with God. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#8. Seek God, not happiness - this is the fundamental rule of all meditation. If you seek God alone, you will gain happiness: that is its promise. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#9. The Christian is the man who no longer seeks his salvation, his deliverance, his justification in himself, but in Jesus Christ alone. He knows that God's Word in Jesus Christ pronounces him guilty, even when he does not feel his guilt, and God's Word in Jesus Christ pronounces him not guilty and righteous, even when he does not feel that he is righteous at all. The Christian no longer lives of himself, by his own claims and his own justification, but by God's claims and God's justification. He lives wholly by God's Word pronounced upon him, whether that Word declares him guilty or innocent. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#10. God of the gaps" Christianity seeks to present Christianity as playing a strong savior role whereby it fills the gaps and provides the missing links for all of society's questions and concerns. This entails the view of God riding into town and miraculously saving the day (deus ex machina). On this view, God delivers his people from their (and his) enemies - in Bonhoeffer's case, the Nazis. In contrast, in Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer writes that God allows us to push him out of the world and onto the cross. - Author: Paul Louis Metzger

#11. The attempt to understand reality apart from that action of God in and upon reality means living in anabstraction; it means failing to live in reality and vacillating between the extremes of a servile attitude toward the status quo and a protest in principle against it. Only God's becoming human makes possible an action that is genuinely in accord with reality. The world remains world. But it only does so because God has taken care of it and declared it to be under God's rule. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#12. We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God's coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God's coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us. The coming of God is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for everyone who has a conscience. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#13. It is a wicked sophistry to justify the worldliness of the Church by the cross of Christ. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#14. Sanctification means that the Christians have been judged already, and that they are being preserved until the coming of Christ and are ever advancing towards it. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#15. Grace is costly because it calls us through our person to the person of Jesus Christ. And when we follow the person of Jesus Christ, when we follow his call through our person, we're sent to act for the concrete person of our neighbor in the world. - Author: Andrew Root

#16. Easter is not about immortality but about resurrection from a death that is a real death with all its frightfulness and horrors, resurrection from a death of the body and the soul, of the whole person, resurrection by the power of God's mighty act. This is the Easter message. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#17. The Christian, however, must bear the burden of a brother. He must suffer and endure the brother. It is only when he is a burden that another person is really a brother and not merely an object to be manipulated. The burden of men was so heavy for God Himself that He had to endure the Cross. God verily bore the burden of men in the body of Jesus Christ. But He bore them as a mother carries her child, as a shepherd enfolds the lost lamb that has been found. God took men upon Himself and they weighted Him to the ground, but God remained with them and they with God. In bearing with men God maintained fellowship with them. It was the law of Christ that was fulfilled in the Cross. And Christians must share in this law. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#18. The person who's in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community everywhere they go. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#19. Perhaps you still think you ought to think out beforehand and know what you ought to do. To that there is only one answer. You can only know and think about it by actually doing it. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#20. Events cast their shadows ahead; before a harsh winter, wild animals grow thicker fur, and the beaver puts on a thicker layer of fat. What kind of times and what sort of tasks can lie ahead for a generation that must think so harshly, even at such a young age, in order to survive? - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#21. Nevertheless, it is the free grace of the resurrected One that now also goes after the individual, overcomes the doubter, and creates in him the Easter faith. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#22. God's truth judges created things out of love, and Satan's truth judges them out of envy and hatred. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#23. The idea that we could have avoided many of life's difficulties if we had taken things more cautiously is too foolish to be entertained for a moment. As I look back on your past I am so convinced that what has happened hitherto has been right, that I feel that what is happening now is right too. To renounce a full life and its real joys in order to avoid pain is neither Christian nor human. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#24. If any want to become my followers," Jesus says. Following him is not something that is self-evident, even among the disciples. No one can be forced, no one can be expected to follow him ... "If any want to follow me, they must deny themselves ... and take up their cross. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#25. As Christians, we needn't be at all ashamed of some impatience, longing, opposition to what is unnatural, and our full share of desire for freedom, earthly happiness, and opportunity for effective work. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#26. The lack of mystery in our modern life is our downfall and our poverty. A human life is worth as much as the respect it holds for the mystery. We retain the child in us to the extent that we honor the mystery. Therefore, children have open, wide-awake eyes, because they know that they are surrounded by the mystery. They are not yet finished with this world; they still don't know how to struggle along and avoid the mystery, as we do. We destroy the mystery because we sense that here we reach the boundary of our being, because we want to be lord over everything and have it at our disposal, and that's just what we cannot do with the mystery…. Living without mystery means knowing nothing of the mystery of our own life, nothing of the mystery of another person, nothing of the mystery of the world; it means passing over our own hidden qualities and those of others and the world. It means remaining on the surface, taking the world seriously only to the extent that it can be calculated and exploited, and not going beyond the world of calculation and exploitation. Living without mystery means not seeing the crucial processes of life at all and even denying them. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#27. We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#28. His soul really shone in the dark desperation of our prison ... [Bonhoeffer] had always been afraid that he would not be strong enough to stand such a test but now he knew there was nothing in life of which one need ever be afraid. - Author: Payne Best

#29. The truth is that so long as we hold both sides of the proposition together they contain nothing inconsistent with right belief, but as soon as one is divorced from the other, it is bound to prove a stumbling block. "Only those who believe obey" is what we say to that part of a believer's soul which obeys, and "only those who obey believe" is what we say to that part of the soul of the obedient which believes. If the first half of the proposition stands alone, the believer is exposed to the danger of cheap grace, which is another word for damnation. If the second half stands alone, the believer is exposed to the danger of salvation through works, which is also another word for damnation. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#30. In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#31. But the Christian also knows that he not only cannot and dare not be anxious, but that there is no need for him to be so. Neither anxiety now work can secure his daily bread, for bread is the gift of the Father. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#32. This makes it clear that intercession is also a daily service we owe to God and our brother. He who denies his neighbour the service of praying for him denies him the service of a Christian. It is clear, furthermore, that intercession is not general and vague but very concrete: a matter of definite persons and definite difficulties and therefore of definite petitions. The more definite my intercession becomes, the more promising it is. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#33. They get married, but their marriage will look quite different from marriage as the world understands it. Christian marriage will be undertaken "in the Lord" (I Cor. 7.39). It will be sanctified in the service of the Body of Christ and in the discipline of prayer and self-control (I Cor. 7.5). It will be a parable of the self-sacrificing love of Christ for his Church. It will even be itself a part of the Body of Christ, a Church in miniature (Eph. 5.32). - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#34. The richness of God's Word ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#35. Bonhoeffer knew that when the church stops talking about Jesus, it has nothing to say. And when it assumes dominance, it's not talking about Jesus. - Author: Samuel Wells

#36. I need the wisdom, reasoning, and apologetics of C. S. Lewis, though some of his theological beliefs are different from mine. I need the preaching and charisma of Charles Spurgeon, though his view of baptism is different from mine. I need the resurrection vision of N. T. Wright and the theology of Jonathan Edwards, though their views on church government are different from mine. I need the passion and prophetic courage of Martin Luther King Jr., the cultural intelligence of Soong-Chan Rah, and the Confessions of St. Augustine, though their ethnicities are different from mine. I need the justice impulse and communal passion of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, though his nationality is different from mine. I need the spiritual thirst and love drive of Brennan Manning and the prophetic wit of G. K. Chesterton, though both are Roman Catholics and I am a Protestant. I need the hymns and personal holiness of John and Charles Wesley, though some of their doctrinal distinctives are different from mine. I need the glorious weakness of Joni Eareckson Tada, the spirituality of Marva Dawn, the trusting perseverance of Elisabeth Elliot, the long-suffering spirit of Amy Carmichael, the transparency of Rebekah Lyons, the thankfulness of Ann Voskamp, the Kingdom vision of Amy Sherman, and the integrity of Patti Sauls, though their gender is different from mine. As St. Augustine reputedly said, "In nonessentials, liberty." To this we might add, "In nonessentials, open-minded receptivity." We Christians m - Author: Scott Sauls

#37. No one can become a new man except by entering the Church, and becoming a member of the body of Christ. It is impossible to become a new man as a solitary individual. The new man means more than the individual believer after he has been justified and sanctified. It means the Church, the Body of Christ, in fact it means Christ himself. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#38. We break bread with the hungry[78] and share our home with them[79] for the sake of Christ's love, which belongs to the hungry as much as it does to us. If the hungry do not come to faith, the guilt falls on those who denied them bread. To bring bread to the hungry is preparing the way for the coming of grace. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#39. The renewal of the Church will come from a new type of monasticism which only has in common with the old an uncompromising allegiance to the Sermon on the Mount. It is high time people banded together to do this. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#40. We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#41. Life is not a thing, an essence, or a concept,[10] but a person - more specifically, a particular and unique person. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#42. We have been silent witnesses to - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#43. Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#44. When our will wholeheartedly enters into the prayer of Christ, then we pray correctly. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#45. The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#46. This fact that we are brethren only through Jesus Christ is of immeasurable significance. Not only the other person who is earnest and devout, who comes to me seeking brotherhood, must I deal with in fellowship. My brother is rather that other person who has been redeemed by Christ, delivered from his sin, and called to faith and eternal life. Not what a man is in himself as a Christian, his spiriruality and piety, constirutes the basis of our community. What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in
what Christ has done to both of us. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#47. Oh, give our frightened souls the sure salvation for which, O Lord, You taught us to prepare. And when this cup You give is filled to brimming with bitter suffering, hard to understand, we take it thankfully and without trembling, out of so good and so beloved a hand. Yet when again in this same world You give us the joy we had, the brightness of Your Sun, we shall remember all the days we lived through, and our whole life shall then be Yours alone. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#48. Only those who obey can believe, and only those who believe can obey. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#49. Only when Christian faith in God is lost do people feel compelled to make use of all means - even criminal - to force the victory of their cause. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#50. What we are in ourselves, and what we owe to others makes us a complete whole. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#51. The child asks of the Father whom he knows. Thus, the essence of Christian prayer is not general adoration, but definite, concrete petition. The right way to approach God is to stretch out our hands and ask of One who we know has the heart of a Father. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#52. We cannot approach the manger of the Christ child in the same way we approach the cradle of another child. Rather, when we go to his manger, something happens, and we cannot leave it again unless we have been judged or redeemed. Here we must either collapse or know the mercy of God directed toward us. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#53. It seems to me more important actually to share someones distress than to use smooth words about it. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#54. God wants to see human beings, not ghosts who shun the world ... Our marriage must be a 'yes' to God's earth. It must strengthen our resolve to do and accomplish something on earth. I fear that Christians who venture to stand on earth on only one leg will stand in heaven on only one leg too. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#55. Not hero worship, but intimacy with Christ. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#56. Time lost is time not filled, time left empty. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#57. Only he who gives thanks for the little things receives the big things. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#58. Only the suffering God can help. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#59. Through our daily meals He is calling us to rejoice, to keep holiday in the midst of our working day. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#60. If I should still be kept in this hole over Christmas, don't worry about it. I'm not really anxious about it. One can keep Christmas as a Christian even in prison - more easily than family occasions, anyhow. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#61. Bonhoeffer categorically refuses to demythologize the resurrection ... he finally walked to his execution, saying that for him it was the beginning of life. - Author: K Hamilton

#62. The root of all sin is pride, superbia. I want to be my own law, I have a right to my self, my hatred and my desires, my life and my death. The - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#63. It is the voice of the Church that is heard in singing together. It is not you that sings, it is the Church that is singing, and you, as a member of the Church, may share in its song. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#64. If you believe, take the first step, it leads to Jesus Christ. If you don't believe, take the first step all the same, for you are bidden to take it. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#65. Why do Christians sing when they are together? The reason is, quite simply, because in singing together it is possible for them to speak and pray the same Word at the same time; in other words, because here they can unite in the Word. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#66. How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge ... We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know; God wants us to realize his presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved ... God is no stop-gap; he must be recognized as the center of life, not when we are at the end of our resources. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#67. You can only learn what obedience is by obeying - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#68. Discipleship means adherence to Christ, and, because Christ is the object of that adherence, it must take the form of discipleship. An abstract Christology, a doctrinal system, a general religious knowledge on the subject of grace or on the forgiveness of sins, render discipleship superfluous, and in fact they positively exclude any idea of discipleship whatever, and are essentially inimical to the whole conception of following Christ. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#69. May we be enabled to say "No" to sin and "Yes" to the sinner. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#70. What is the "extraordinary"? It is the love of Jesus Christ himself, love that goes to the cross in suffering obedience. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#71. The Incarnation is the ultimate reason why the service of God cannot be divorced from the service of man. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#72. Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#73. Many persons seek community because they are afraid of loneliness...those who take refuge in community while fleeing from themselves are misuing it to indulge in empty talk and distraction, no matter how spiritual this idle talk and distraction may appear...it is precisely such misuse of community that creates deadly isolation of human beings. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#74. The cross is God's truth about us, and therefore it is the only power thatcanmakeustruthful.Whenwe know the cross we are no longer afraid of the truth. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#75. I'm now reading Tertullian, Cyprian, and others of the church fathers with great interest. In some ways they are more relevant to our time than the Reformers, and at the same time they provide a basis for talks between Protestants and Roman Catholics. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#76. Help must come from the outside, and it has come and comes daily and answers in the Word of Jesus Christ ... - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#77. Who am I? They often tell me I would step from my cell's confinement calmly, cheerfully, firmly, like a squire from his country-house.

Who am I? They often tell me I would talk to my warden freely and friendly and clearly, as though it were mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me I would bear the days of misfortune equably, smilingly, proudly, like one accustomed to win.

Am I then really all that which other men tell of, or am I only what I know of myself, restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage, struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat, yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds, thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness, trembling with anger at despotisms and petty humiliation, tossing in expectation of great events, powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance, weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making, faint and ready to say farewell to it all.

Who am I? This or the other? Am I one person today, and tomorrow another? Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others, and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling? Or is something within me still like a beaten army, fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.

Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine! - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#78. Why are we so afraid when we think about death? Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God's Word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in Him. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#79. It is not that God is the spectator and sharer of our present life, howsoever important that is; but rather that we are the reverent listeners and participants in God's action in the sacred story, the history of the Christ on earth. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#80. Why does the Old Testament law never punish anyone by depriving him of his freedom? - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#81. One who loves his community destroys community; one who loves its members builds community. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#82. To deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ and no more of self, to see only him who goes before and no more the road which is too hard for us. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#83. Discipleship can tolerate no conditions which might come between Jesus and our obedience to him. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#84. One's task is not to turn the world upside down, but to do what is necessary at the given place and with a due consideration of reality. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#85. For the rest of mankind to be with Christ means death, but for Christians it is a means of grace. Baptism is their assurance that they are "dead with Christ", "crucified with him", "buried with him", "planted together in the likeness of his death". All this creates in them the assurance that they will also live with him. "We with Christ"
for Christ is Emmanuel, "God with us." Only when we know Christ in this way is our being with him the source of grace. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#86. That fact that Jesus Christ died is more important than that fact that I will die. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#87. It's much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#88. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy ... He who is alone with his sins is utterly alone. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#89. The Psalter is the prayer book of Jesus Christ in the truest sense of the word. He prayed the Psalter and now it has become his prayer for all time ... we understand how the Psalter can be prayer to God and yet God's own Word, precisely because here we encounter the praying Christ ... because those who pray the psalms are joining in with the prayer of Jesus Christ, their prayer reaches the ears of God. Christ has become their intercessor ... - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#90. The Call to Discipleship And as he passed by he saw Levi, the son of Alpaeus, sitting at the place of toll, and he saith unto him, Follow me. And he arose and followed him. (Mark 2.14) THE CALL goes forth, and is at once followed by the response of obedience. The response of the disciples is an act of obedience, not a confession of faith in Jesus. How could the call immediately evoke obedience? - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#91. Jesus' commandment never wishes to destroy life, but rather to preserve, strengthen, and heal life. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#92. Those sentimental radio hits, with their artificial naivete and empty crudities, are the pitiful remains and the maximum that people will tolerate by way of mental effort; it's a ghastly desolation and impoverishmment. By contrast, we can be very glad when something affects us deeply, and regard the accompanying pains as an enrichment. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#93. When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#94. Is Christian ethics merely a specific set of Christian answers to the question of good and evil, right and wrong? To make it no more than this is to forget that man's fall was a fall into the knowledge of good and evil, reinforced by the inexorable knowledge of a condemning law, and that man's restoration in Christ is a restoration to freedom and grace, to a love that needs no law since it knows and does only what is in accord with love and with God. To imprison ethics in the realm of division, of good and evil, right and wrong, is to condemn it to sterility, and rob it of its real reason for existing, which is love. Love cannot be reduced to one virtue among many others prescribed by ethical imperatives. When love is only "a virtue" among many, man forgets that "God is love" and becomes incapable of that all-embracing love by which we secretly begin to know God as our Creator and Redeemer - who has saved us from the limitations of a purely restrictive and aimless existence "under a law."

So Bonhoeffer says very rightly: "In the knowledge of good and evil man does not understand himself in the reality of the destiny appointed in his origin, but rather in his own possibilities, his possibility of being good or evil. He knows himself now as something apart from God, outside God, and this means that he now knows only himself and no longer knows God at all…. The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God. Only against God can man know good and evil. - Author: Thomas Merton

#95. Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot. But all too often the greedy eyes are only deceived; the fruit that seemed so precious is still green on the inside, and disrespected hands ungratefully toss aside what has so disappointed them. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#96. Once again, Jesus calls those who follow him to share his passion. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#97. Jesus is the only significance. Beside Jesus nothing has any significance. He alone matters. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#98. No, God and the world, God and its goods are incompatible, because the world and its goods make a bid for our hearts, and only when they have won them do they become what they really are. That is how they thrive, and that is why they are incompatible with allegiance to God. Our hearts have room only for one all-embracing devotion, and we can only cleave to one Lord. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#99. The essence of chastity is not the suppression of lust, but the total orientation of one's life towards a goal. Without such a goal, chastity is bound to become ridiculous. Chastity is the sine qua non of lucidity and concentration. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#100. Death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#101. The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from a Christian community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; in the poor brother Christ is knocking at the door. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#102. And so the unseen Lord of the eternal kingdom and of the church sends out ambassadors into this world, giving them a mission that is greater than that of any other, just as heaven is greater than earth, and eternity is greater than time. And the authority that this Lord gives these ambassadors is that much greater than all the authorities in this world. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#103. The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. On this subject I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#104. If Jesus Christ is not true God, how could he help us? If he is not true man, how could he help us? - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#105. Bonhoeffer's recurring theme of incarnation - that God did not create us to be disembodied spirits, but flesh-and-blood human beings - led him to the idea that the Christian life must be modeled. Jesus did not only communicate ideas and concepts and rules and principles for living. He lived. And by living with his disciples, he showed them what life was supposed to look like, what God had intended it to look like. It was not merely intellectual or merely spiritual. It was all these things together; it was something more. Bonhoeffer aimed to model the Christian life for his students. - Author: Eric Metaxas

#106. Not everyone can wait: neither the sated nor the satisfied nor those without respect can wait. The only ones who can wait are people who carry restlessness around with them. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#107. The first demand which is made of those who belong to God's Church is not that they should be something in themselves, not that they should, for example, set up some religious organization or that they should lead lives of piety, but that they shall be witnesses to Jesus Christ before the world. Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Author: Gregory A. Boyd

#108. No one should be surprised at the difficulty of faith, if there is some part of his life where he is consciously resisting or disobeying the commandment of Jesus. Is there some part of your life which you are refusing to surrender at his behest, some sinful passion, maybe, or some animosity, some hope, perhaps your ambition or your reason? ... How can you hope to enter into communion with him when at some point in your life you are running away from him? - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#109. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#110. There is meaning in every journey that is unknown to the traveler. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#111. Life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent; one waits, hopes, and does this, that, or the other- things that are of no real consequence- the door is shut, and can be opened only from the outside."
,Letters from Prison - November 21, 1943 - Author: Dietrech Bonhoeffer

#112. A major theme for Bonhoeffer was that every Christian must be "fully human" by bringing God into his whole life, not merely into some "spiritual" realm. To be an ethereal figure who merely talked about God, but somehow refused to get his hands dirty in the real world in which God had placed him, was bad theology. Through Christ, God had shown that he meant us to be in this world and to obey him with our actions in his word. So Bonhoeffer would get his hands dirty, not because he had grown impatient, but because God was speaking to him about further steps of obedience. - Author: Eric Metaxas

#113. Your life as a Christian should make non believers question their disbelief in God. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#114. The word of cheap grace has been the ruin of more Christians than any commandment of works. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#115. Take courage and confess your sin, says Luther, do not try to run away from it, but believe more boldly still. You are a sinner, so be a sinner, and don't try to become what you are not. Yes, and become a sinner again and again every day, and be bold about it. But to whom can such words be addressed, except to those who from the bottom of their hearts make a daily renunciation of sin and of every barrier which hinders them from following Christ, but who nevertheless are troubled by their daily faithlessness and sin? Who can hear these words without endangering his faith but he who hears their consolation as a renewed summons to follow Christ? - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#116. Where is love more glorified than where she dwells in the midst of her enemies? - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#117. Time is lost when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#118. But it is the grace of the Gospel, which is so hard for the pious to understand, that it confronts us with the truth and says: You are a sinner, a great, desperate sinner; now come, as the sinner that you are, to God who loves you. He wants you as you are; He does not want anything from you, a sacrifice, a work; He wants you alone. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#119. Salvation is free, but discipleship will cost you your life - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#120. Christ became our Brother in order to help us. Through him our brother has become Christ for us in the power and authority of the commission Christ has given him. Our brother stands before us the sign of the truth and the grace of God. He has been given to us to help us. He hears the confession of our sins in Christ's stead and he forgives our sins in Christ's name. He keeps the secret of our confession as God keeps it. When I go to my brother to confess, I am going to God. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#121. We shall be judged according to our works – this is why we are exhorted to do good works. The Bible assuredly knows nothing of those qualms about good works, by which we only try to excuse ourselves and justify our evil works. The Bible never draws the antithesis between faith and good works so sharply as to maintain that good works undermine faith. No, it is evil works rather than good works which hinder and destroy faith. Grace and active obedience are complementary. There is no faith without good works, and no good works apart from faith. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#122. The author likens crisis, and particularly war, to stop motion photography in its capacity to make changes plain that are ordinarily too gradual to be seen. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#123. In the gospels the very first step a man must take is an act which radically affects his whole existence. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#124. Christ took upon himself this human form of ours. He became Man even as we are men. In his humanity and his lowliness we recognize our own form. He has become like a man, so that men should be like him. And in the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God. Henceforth, any attack on the least of men is an attack on Christ, who took the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all that bears a human form. Through fellowship and communion with the incarnate Lord, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time we are delivered from that individualism which is the consequence of sin, and retrieve our solidarity with the whole human race. By being partakers of Christ incarnate, we are partakers in the whole humanity which he bore. We now know that we have been taken up and borne in the humanity of Jesus, and therefore that new nature we now enjoy means that we too must bear the sins and sorrows of others. The incarnate Lord makes his followers the brothers of all mankind. The "philanthropy" of God (Titus 3:4) revealed in the Incarnation is the ground of Christian love towards all on earth that bears the name of man. The form of Christ incarnate makes the Church into the Body of Christ. All the sorrows of mankind fall upon that form, and only through that form can they be borne. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#125. Gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#126. The purity of unison singing, unaffected by alien motives of musical techniques, the clarity, unspoiled by the attempt to give musical art an autonomy of its own apart from the words, the simplicity and frugality, the humaneness and warmth of this way of singing is the essence of all congregational singing. This, - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#127. No one knows God unless God reveals Himself to him. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#128. At the end of a life spent in the pursuit of knowledge Faust has to confess:
"I now see that we can nothing know."
That is the answer to a sum, it is the outcome of a long experience. But as Kierkegaard observed, it is quite a different thing when a freshman comes up to the university and uses the same sentiment to justify his indolence. As the answer to a sum it is perfectly true, but as the initial data it is a piece of self-deception. For acquired knowledge cannot be divorced from the existence in which it is acquired. The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ. Such a man knows that the call to discipleship is a gift of grace, and that the call is inseparable from the grace. But those who try to use this grace as a dispensation from following Christ are simply deceiving themselves. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#129. So many people come to church with a genuine desire to hear what we have to say, yet they are always going back home with the uncomfortable feeling that we are making it too difficult for them to come to Jesus. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#130. When people complain, for instance, that they find it hard to believe, it is a sign of deliberate or unconscious disobedience... The outcome is usually that self-imparted absolution confirms the man in his disobedience, and makes him plead ignorance of the kindness as well as the commandment of God. He complains that Godís commandment is uncertain, and susceptible of different interpretations. At first he was aware enough of his disobedience, but with his increasing hardness of heart that awareness grows ever fainter, and in the end he becomes so enmeshed that he loses all capacity for hearing the Word, and faith is quite impossible... It is time to take the bull by the horns, and say: 'Only those who obey believe.'... 'You are disobedient, you are trying to keep some part of your life under your own control. That is what is preventing you from listening to Christ and believing in His Grace. You cannot hear Christ because you are willfully disobedient. Somewhere in your heart you are refusing to listen to his call. Your difficulty is your sins.' Christ now enters the lists again and comes to grips with the devil, who until now has been hiding. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#131. And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#132. In a word, live together in the forgiveness of your sins, for without it no human fellowship, least of all a marriage, can survive. Don't insist on your rights, don't blame each other, don't judge or condemn each other, don't find fault with each other, but accept each other as you are, and forgive each other every day from the bottom of your hearts ... - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#133. In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#134. Every wedding must be an occasion of joy that human beings can do such great things, that they have been given such immense freedom and power to take the helm in their life's journey ... - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#135. I wonder why it is that we find some days so much more oppressive than others, for no apparent reason. Is it growing pains - or spiritual trial? Once they're over, the world looks quite a different place again. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#136. God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge one another and even God accordingly. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#137. It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who more than anybody else realized that nothing less than a return to the Christian faith could save Germany. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#138. It is easily forgotten that the fellowship of Christian brethren is a gift of grace, a gift of the Kingdom of God that any day may be taken from us, that the time that still separates us from utter loneliness may be brief indeed. Therefore, let him who until now has had the privilege of living a common Christian life with other Christians praise God's grace from the bottom of his heart. Let him thank God on his knees and declare: It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#139. Certainly one must try everything, but only to become more certain what God's way is. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#140. The figure of the crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#141. It is a costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#142. all thinking about human beings without Christ is unfruitful abstraction. The counterimage to the human being taken up into the form of Christ is the human being as self-creator, self-judge, and self-renewer; these people bypass their true humanity and therefore, sooner or later, destroy themselves. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#143. Before Jesus leads His disciples into suffering, humiliation, disgrace, and disdain, He summons them and shows Himself to them as the Lord in God's glory. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#144. Luther had said that grace alone can save; his followers took up his doctrine and repeated it word for word. But they left out its invariable corollary, the obligation to discipleship ... The justification of the sinner in the world degenerated into the justification of sin and the world. Costly grace was turned into cheap grace without discipleship. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#145. The church can only defend its own space by fighting, not for space, but for the salvation of the world. Otherwise the church becomes a "religious society" that fights in its own interest and thus has ceased to be the church of God in the world. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#146. The awareness of a spiritual tradition that reaches through the centuries gives one a certain feeling of security in the face of all transitory difficulties. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#147. No abyss of evil can remain hidden from him through whom the world is reconciled to God. But the abyss of the love of God[26.] embraces even the most abysmal godlessness of the world. In an incomprehensible reversal of all righteous and pious thought, God declares himself as guilty toward the world and thereby extinguishes the guilt of the world. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#148. Simplicity is an intellectual achievement, one of the greatest. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#149. If any man would come after me, let him deny himself." The disciple must say to himself the same words Peter said of Christ when he denied him: "I know not this man." Self-denial is never just a series of isolated acts of mortification or asceticism. It is not suicide, for there is an element of self-will even in that. To deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ and no more of self, to see only him who goes before and no more the road which is too hard for us. Once more, all that self denial can say is: "He leads the way, keep close to him. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#150. The God of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with what God, as we imagine him, could do and ought to do. If we are to learn what God promises, and what he fulfils, we must persevere in quiet meditation on the life, sayings, deeds, sufferings, and death of Jesus. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#151. It is only when he is a burden that another person is really a brother and not merely an object to be manipulated - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#152. I discovered later, and I'm still discovering right up to this moment, that is it only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world. That, I think, is faith. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#153. There was one activity that Bonhoeffer would enjoy in Barcelona, but could never enjoy in Berlin. That was the arte taurina (bull fighting). Though an aesthete and an intellectual, Bonhoeffer was neither effete nor squeamish. His brother Klaus arrived for a visit on Easter Saturday, and on Easter afternoon - Bonhoeffer preached that morning - they were "dragged" by a German teacher, presumably Thumm, to the "great Easter corrida." He - Author: Eric Metaxas

#154. [Christ] is the Mediator, not only between God and man, but between man and man, between man and reality. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#155. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life ... Grace is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: My yoke is easy and my burden is light. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#156. For Bonhoeffer, the relationship with God ordered everything else around it. A number of times he referred to the relationship with Jesus Christ as being like the cantus firmus of a piece of music. All the other parts of the music referred to it, and it held them together. To be true to God in the deepest way meant having such a relationship with him that one did not live legalistically by "rules" or "principles." One could never separate one's actions from one's relationship to God. It was a more demanding and more mature level of obedience, and Bonhoeffer had come to see that the evil of Hitler was forcing Christians to go deeper in their obedience, to think harder about what God was asking. Legalistic religion was being shown to be utterly inadequate. - Author: Eric Metaxas

#157. Anybody who does not feel that he would be much happier were he only permitted to understand and obey the commandments of Jesus in a straightforward literal way, and e.g. surrender all his possessions at his bidding rather than cling to them, has no right to this paradoxical interpretation of Jesus' words. We have to hold the two together in mind all the time. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#158. Must the Christian go around looking for a cross to bear, seeking to suffer? No, insisted Bonhoeffer. Opportunities for bearing crosses will occur along life's way and all that is required is the willingness to act when the time comes. The needs of the neighbor, especially those of the weak and downtrodden, the victimized and the persecuted, the ill and the lonely, will become abundantly evident. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#159. The person who waits upon moods in impoverished. If the painter only wanted to paint when in the mood for it, he would not get very far. In religion, as in art and science, along with the times of high excitement, there are times of sober work and practice. We must practice our communion with God, otherwise we will not find the right tone, the right word, the right language, when God surprises us with his presence. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#160. Neighbourliness is not a quality in other people, it is simply their claim on ourselves. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#161. In other times it may have been the business of Christianity to champion the equality of all men; its business today will be to defend passionately human dignity and reserve. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#162. The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events, - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#163. When people are deeply affected by the Word, they tell it to other people. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#164. Bonhoeffer said it's not about hero worship, but intimacy with God. - Author: Jan Karon

#165. No one can say yes to God's ways who has said no to his promises and commandments. Acceptance of the will of God comes in the daily submission under his Word. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#166. [29]The only fruitful relation to human beings - particularly to the weak among them - is love, that is, the will to enter into and to keep community with them. God did not hold human beings in contempt but became human for their sake. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#167. It is precisely when a person, who is borne down by inner emptiness and weariness or a sense of personal unworthiness, feels that he would like to withdraw from his task, that he should learn what it means to have a duty to perform in the fellowship, and - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#168. The love for our enemies takes us along the way of the cross and into fellowship with the Crucified. The more we are driven along this road, the more certain is the victory of love over the enemy's hatred. For then it is not the disciple's own love, but the love of Jesus Christ alone, who for the sake of his enemies went to the cross and prayed for them as he hung there. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#169. The Christian life is participation in the encounter of Christ with the world. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#170. No one can speak of the beginning but the one who was in the beginning. Thus the Bible begins with God's free affirmation, free acknowledgment, free revelation of himself: In the beginning God created... - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#171. Judgement is the forbidden objectivization of the other person which destroys single-minded love. I am not forbidden to have my own thoughts about the other person, to realize his shortcomings, but only to the extent that it offers to me an occasion for forgiveness and unconditional love, as Jesus proves to me. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#172. Earthly goods are given to be used, not to be collected. In the wilderness God gave Israel the manna every day, and they had no need to worry about food and drink. Indeed, if they kept any of the manna over until the next day, it went bad. In the same way, the disciple must receive his portion from God every day. If he stores it up as a permanent possession, he spoils not only the gift, but himself as well, for he sets his heart on accumulated wealth, and makes it a barrier between himself and God. Where our treasure is, there is our trust, our security, our consolation and our God. Hoarding is idolatry. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#173. The Advent season is a season of waiting, but our whole life is an Advent season, that is, a season of waiting for the last Advent, for the time when there will be a new heaven and a new earth. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#174. Human love has little regard for the truth. It makes the truth relative, since nothing, not even the truth, must come between it and the beloved person. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#175. A shaking of heads, perhaps even an evil laugh, must go through our old, smart, experienced, self-assured world, when it hears the call of salvation of believing Christians: "For a child has been born for us, a son given to us."5 Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#176. What is worse than doing evil, is being evil" (Ethics, p.67). To lie is wrong, but what is worse than the lie is the liar, for the liar contaminates everything he says, because everything he says is meant to further a cause that is false. The liar as liar has endorsed a world of falsehood and deception, and to focus only on the truth or falsity of his particular statements is to miss the danger of being caught up in his twisted world. This is why, as Bonhoeffer says, that "(i)t is worse for a liar to tell the truth than for a lover of truth to lie" (Ethics, p.67). - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#177. Are you afraid of God's wrath? Then go to the child in the manger and receive there the peace of God. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#178. But still Adam holds his ground. The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the fruit of the tree, and I ate. He confesses his sin, but as he confesses, he takes to flight again. 'You have given me the woman, not I. I am not guilty, you are guilty.' The double light of creation and sin is exploited. 'The woman is surely your creature, it is your own work that has caused me to fall. Why have you brought forth an imperfect creation, and is it my fault?' So instead of surrendering Adam falls back on one art learned from the serpent, that of correcting the idea of God, of appealing from God the Creator to a better, a different God. That is, he flees again. The woman takes to flight with him and blames the serpent; that is, she really blames the Creator of the serpent. Adam has not surrendered, he has not confessed. He has appealed to his conscience, to his knowledge of good and evil, and out of this knowledge he has accused his Creator. He has not recognized the grace of the Creator which proves itself true by the fact that he calls Adam, by the fact that he does not let him flee. Adam sees this grace only as hate, as wrath, and this wrath kindles his own hate, his rebellion, his will to escape from God. Adam remains in the Fall. The Fall accelerates and becomes infinite. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#179. In religion, as in art and science, there are - in addition to times of great excitement - times of sober work and practice. Interaction with God must be practiced; otherwise we will not find the right tone, the right word, the right language, when he surprises us. We must learn God's language, laboriously learn it. And we must work at it, so that we will be able to talk with him. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#180. Whenever the Psalter is abandoned, an incomparable treasure is lost to the Christian church. With its recovery will come unexpected power. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#181. Most people have forgotten nowadays what a house can mean, though some of us have come to realize it as never before. It is a kingdom of its own in the midst of the world, a stronghold amid life's storms and stresses, a refuge, even a sanctuary." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#182. Jesus himself did not try to convert the two thieves on the cross; he waited until one of them turned to him. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#183. Because I am a Christian, therefore, every day in which I do not penetrate more deeply into the knowledge of God's Word in Holy Scripture is a lost day for me. I can only move forward with certainty upon the firm ground of the Word of God. And, as a Christian, I learn to know the Holy Scriptures in no other way than by hearing the Word preached and by prayerful meditation. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#184. Justification is the means whereby we appropriate the saving act of God in the past, and sanctification the promise of God's activity in the present and future ... Justification is primarily concerned with the relation between man and the law of God, sanctification with the Christian's separation from the world until the second coming of Christ ... Justification is the new creation of the new man, and sanctification is his preservation until the day of Jesus Christ. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#185. In total reality, he comes in the form of the beggar, of the dissolute human child in ragged clothes, asking for help. He confronts you in every person that you meet. As long as there are people, Christ will walk the earth as your neighbor, as the one through whom God calls you, speaks to you, makes demands on you. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#186. So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes. There is his commission, his work. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#187. ...grown up with very bad contemporary literature, and they find it much more fifficult to approach earlier writing than we do. The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#188. Jesus goes on before to Jerusalem and to the cross, and they are filled with fear and amazement at the road he calls them to follow. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#189. Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of the church - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#190. The gospel is not to take the form of hole-in-the-corner sectarianism, it must be set forth by public preaching. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#191. Good Friday and Easter free us to think about other things far beyond our own personal fate, about the ultimate meaning of all life, suffering, and events; and we lay hold of a great hope. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#192. But the disciple had the advantage over the Pharisee in that his doing of the law is in fact perfect. How is such a thing possible? Because between the disciples and the law stands one who has perfectly fulfilled it, on with whom they live in communion ... Jesus not only possesses this righteousness, but is himself the personal embodiment of it. He is the righteousness of the disciples ... This is where the righteousness of the disciple exceeds that of the Pharisees; it is grounded solely upon the call to fellowship with him who alone fulfills the law. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#193. There remains an experience of incomparable value ... to see the great events of world history from below; from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled
in short, from the perspective of those who suffer ... to look with new eyes on matters great and small. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#194. Discipline

If you set out to seek freedom, then learn above all things to govern your soul and your senses,
for fear that your passions and longings may lead you away from the path you should follow.
Chaste be your mind and your body, and both in subjection, obediently, steadfastly seeking the aim set before them;
only through discipline may a man learn to be free.

Action

Daring to do what is right, not what fancy may tell you,
valiantly grasping occasions, not cravenly doubting –
freedom comes only through deeds, not through thoughts taking wing.
Faint not nor fear, but go out to the storm and the action,
trusting in God whose commandment you faithfully follow;
freedom, exultant, will welcome your spirit with joy.

Suffering

A change has come indeed.
Your hands, so strong and active, are bound; in helplessness now you see your action is ended;
you sigh in relief, your cause committing to stronger hands; so now you may rest contented.
Only for one blissful moment could you draw near to touch freedom;
then, that it might be perfected in glory, you gave it to God.

Death

Come now, thou greatest of feasts on the journey to freedom eternal;
death, cast aside all the burdensome chains, and demolish the walls of our temporal body, the walls of our souls that are blinded,
so that at last we may see that which here remains - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#195. God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#196. Unless he obeys, a man cannot believe. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#197. Love, in the sense of spontaneous, unreflective action, spells the death of the old man. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#198. We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There God dealt with us, and there he still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and grace. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#199. Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream ... Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. 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. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#200. Originally man was made in the image of God, but now his likeness to God is a stolen one. As the image of God man draws his life entirely from his origin in God, but the man who has become like God has forgotten how he was at his origin and has made himself his own creator and judge. - Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer