Quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Work is only an instrument in the hand of God for the purification of Christians from all self-centeredness and self-seeking. The work of the world can be done only where a person forgets himself, where he loses himself in a cause...

Often we are so burdened and overwhelmed with other thoughts, images, and concerns that it may take a long time before God's Word has cleared all that away and gets through to us.

That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs.

He who holds his tongue in check controls both mind and body (James 3.2ff.). Thus it must be a decisive rule of every Christian fellowship that each individual is prohibited from saying much that occurs to him.

Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. Costly

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.

The most general formulation of rights given with the natural is, in the words of Roman law, suum cuique, to each his own.

There is only one church, the church of faith ruled by the word of Jesus Christ alone. This is the true catholic church that has never disappeared and is still concealed in the church of Rome. It is the body of Christ—corpus Christi. It is the true unity of the West.

Prayer does not mean simply to pour out one's heart. It means rather to find the way to God and to speak with him, whether the heart is full or empty. No man can do that by himself. For that he needs Jesus Christ.

Chúng ta c?n h?c cách Ä'ánh giá ng??i khác không ph?i thông qua cái h? làm, hay cái h? b? sót không làm, mà qua nh?ng kh? Ä'au h? Ä'ã tr?i qua

The Christian community is not a spiritual sanatorium. Those who take refuge in community while fleeing from themselves are misusing it to indulge in empty talk and distraction, no matter how spiritual this idle talk and distraction may appear.

Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. He will only do harm to himself and to the community. ... But the reverse is also true: Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.

Without God, all seeing and perceiving of things and laws become abstraction, a separation from both origin and goal.

If we want to participate in this Advent and Christmas event, we cannot simply sit there like spectators in a theater and enjoy all the friendly pictures. Rather, we must join in the action that is taking place and be drawn into this reversal of all things ourselves. Here we too must act on the stage, for here the spectator is always a person acting in the drama. We cannot remove ourselves from the action.

The Reformation biblical faith in God[50] had radically desacralized [entgöttert] the world. Thus the ground was prepared in which rational and empirical science could blossom; and even though the natural scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were believing Christians, the disappearance of faith in God left behind only a rationalized and mechanized world.[51]

Just as Christians should not be constantly feeling the pulse of their spiritual life, so too the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be continually taking its temperature.

There is no fulfilment of the law apart from communion with God, and no communion with God apart from fulfilment of the law.

2 Corinthians 5:20: So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

When a preacher opens the Bible and interprets the word of God, a mystery takes place, a miracle: the grace of God, who comes down from heaven into our midst and speaks to us, knocks on our door, asks questions, warns us, puts pressure on us, alarms us, threatens us, and makes us joyful again and free and sure.

The existence of any Christian communal life essentially depends on whether or not it succeeds at the right time in promoting the ability to distinguish between a human ideal and God's reality, between spiritual and emotional community.

If God loved the world, the whole fallen creation, then he gave us no preference over others. He loved my worst enemy no less than he loved me. Jesus Christ died for his and our enemies.

Once more the daylight shines abroad, O brethren let us praise the Lord, Whose grace and mercy thus have kept The nightly watch while we have slept. We offer up ourselves to thee, That heart and word and deed may be In all things guided by thy mind, And in thine eyes acceptance find.

Even the most personal prayer no longer belongs to the individual, but to the church that gave birth to this person and through which this individual lives.

This cheap grace has been no less disastrous to our own spiritual lives. Instead of opening up the way to Christ it has closed it. Instead of calling us to follow Christ, it has hardened us in our disobedience.