Quotes from Eric Metaxas

As always, Paula Bonhoeffer's annual orchestrations of the Christmas holidays were especially beautiful, incorporating Bible reading and hymns in such a way that even those who were not particularly religious felt included.

Wilberforce says that when he was first taken to a play, "it was almost by force." It seems severe and ridiculous to us that what he had imbibed of religion would make him think the theater sinful, but we have to appreciate the circumstances and shibboleths of that era.

For refusing to swear his allegiance to Hitler, Barth would be kicked out of Germany in 1934, and he would become the principal author of the Barmen Declaration, in which the Confessing Church trumpeted its rejection of the Nazis' attempts to bring their philosophy into the German church.

human beings were taken from the earth and don't just consist of thin air and thoughts.

But so successful would Wilberforce and these other Christians be at bringing a concern for the poor and a social conscience into the society at large that by the next century, during the Victorian era, this attitude would become culturally mainstream.

Bonhoeffer's three conclusions—that the church must question the state, help the state's victims, and work against the state, if necessary—were too much for almost everyone. But for him they were inescapable. In time, he would do all three.

Part of what makes the concept of miracles and God's intervention such a hot topic for so many people is that everyone wonders how a God who is presumably running the entire universe will not heal someone of cancer but will find someone else a parking space.

Anyone on the side of truth, wherever it led, was a compatriot to be lauded.

when his father was an adolescent in Hull, his "talents for general society with his rare skill in singing rendered him everywhere an acceptable guest, and his time was wasted in a round of visits to the neighbouring gentry.

Perhaps even more important in the Bonhoeffer family was acting upon what one said one believed. One must not only think clearly but must prove one's thoughts in action. If one was unprepared to live out what one claimed to believe, perhaps one didn't believe what one claimed after all!

There's no sense to expect the fruits where the Word really is no longer being preached.

Peace means giving oneself completely to God's commandment, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of Almighty God, not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won when the way leads to the cross.

Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is; there is never loneliness. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Bonhoeffers raised their children to do the right thing, so when they behaved selflessly and bravely, it was difficult to argue.

William Pitt, who would in a few years become Wilberforce's closest friend, was the same age as Wilberforce but had already been at Cambridge three years when Wilberforce arrived, having entered at the age of fourteen.

Heinrich Heine wrote the chilling words: "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen." Heine was a German Jew who converted to Christianity, and his words were a grim prophecy, meaning, "Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too." That

Fundamentally we feel that we really belong to death already, and that every new day is a miracle. It

Forgive me for these rather personal ramblings, but they just came to me as I thought about our time together recently. And after all, we do have an interest in each other. I still have a hard time thinking that you really find all these ideas of mine completely mad. Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself.

If you board the wrong train it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.

Luther was the unwitting harbinger of a new world in which the well-established boundaries of what was acceptable were exploded, never to be restored. Suddenly the individual had not only the freedom and possibility of thinking for himself but the weighty responsibility before God of doing so.

Bonhoeffer was no mere academic. For him, ideas and beliefs were nothing if they did not relate to the world of reality outside one's mind.

the real struggle that perhaps lies ahead must simply be to suffer faithfully.

It was a case of the blind leading the blind, only worse, for Arnault seems to have been practically headless.

After his own experience in Oxford, he knew that the Christian faith was not about how one behaved but about what one believed, and if one truly believed one could do nothing to achieve salvation but believe in Jesus, one's behavior would follow.