Quotes About Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Principles are only tools in the hands of God; they will soon be thrown away when they are no longer useful.

The Incarnation is the ultimate reason why the service of God cannot be divorced from the service of man.

It is a wicked sophistry to justify the worldliness of the Church by the cross of Christ.

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...

Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of the church

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

Everything would be spoiled if we were to reserve Christ for the church while granting the world only some law, Christian though it may be.

The Psalter occupies a unique place in the Holy Scriptures. It is God's Word and, with few exceptions, the prayer of men as well. How are we to understand this? How can God's Word be at the same time prayer to God?

The restoration of the church must surely depend on a new kind of monasticism, which has nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising discipleship, following Christ according to the Sermon on the Mount. I believe the time has come to gather people together to do this. —DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

The rich world of his ancestors set the standards for Dietrich Bonhoeffer's own life. It gave him a certainty of judgment and manner that cannot be acquired in a single generation. He grew up in a family that believed the essence of learning lay not in a formal education but in the deeply rooted obligation to be guardians of a great historical heritage and intellectual tradition.

Gandhi was not a Christian, but he lived in a community that endeavored to live by the teachings set forth in the Sermon on the Mount. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In October Bonhoeffer sent a novelty postcard to Rüdiger Schleicher. It pictured him behind a life-sized cardboard picture of a matador and a bull so that his head was on the matador's body: "The quiet hours in which I cultivated the Arte taurina, have, as you can see, led to tremendous success in the arena. . . . Greetings from the matador. Dietrich.

Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic . . . Do not defend God's Word, but testify to it . . . Trust to the Word. —DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

written with his wife Elisabeth Sifton, the renowned historian turned his attention to Metaxas's account only to note the "amazing ignorance of the German language, German history, and German theology." Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern, No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans Von Dohnanyi, Resisters against Hitler in Church and State (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013), 147.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German Protestant theologian who died opposing Hitler's holocaust, believed that the test of the morality of a society is how it treats its children. We flunk Bonhoeffer's test every hour of every day in America as we let the violence of guns and the violence of poverty relentlessly stalk and sap countless child lives."6

The Incarnation is the ultimate reason why the service of God cannot be divorced from the service of man.