Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes
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By our enemies Jesus means those who are quite intractable and utterly unresponsive to our love.
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Only he who believes is obedient and only he who is obedient believes.
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A community of Jesus which seeks to hide itself has ceased to follow him. 'Neither do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on the stand.' … The bushel may be the fear of men, or perhaps deliberate conformity to the world for some ulterior motive.
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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.
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Jesus offers his disciples a simple rule of thumb which will enable even the least sophisticated of them to tell whether his intercourse with others is on the right lines or not. All he need do is to say 'I' instead of 'Thou,' and put himself in the other man’s place.
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It is the nature, and the advantage, of strong people that they can bring out the crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them. The weak always have to decide between alternatives that are not their own.
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By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which other are just as entitled to as we are.
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Distinction between person and office is wholly alien to the teaching of Jesus. He says nothing about that. He addresses his disciples as men who have left all to follow him, and the precept of non-violence applies equally to private life and official duty. He is the Lord of all life, and demands undivided allegiance.
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God's truth judges created things out of love, and Satan's truth judges them out of envy and hatred.
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How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.
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Man seeks, in his manhood, not orders, not laws and peremptory dogmas, but counsel from one who is earnest in goodness and faithful in friendship, making man free.
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The disciples realized that they too were his enemies, and that he had overcome them by his love. It is this that opens the disciple’s eyes, and enables him to see his enemy as a brother.
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The Cross is not the terrible end of a pious happy life. Instead, it stands at the beginning of community with Jesus Christ. Whenever Christ calls us, his call leads us to death.
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The will of God, to which the law gives expression, is that men should defeat their enemies by loving them.
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Love for the sinner is ominously close to love of the sin. But the love of Christ for the sinner in itself is the condemnation of sin.
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Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all he has. It is the pearl of great price to by which the merchant will sell all his goods.
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'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.'
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Beside the staff of life, taken and fashioned from the heavy earth, beside our marriage, work, and war the free man, too, will live and grow towards the sun. Not the ripe fruit alone - blossom is lovely, too. Does blossom only serve the fruit, or does fruit only serve the blossom - who knows? But both are given to us.
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One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons.
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There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated - in short, from the perspective of those who suffer. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behavior. Christians are called to compassion and to action.
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From whom are we to hide the visibility of our discipleship? Certainly not from other men, for we are told to let them see our light. No. We are to hide it from ourselves. Our task is simply to keep on following, looking only to our Leader who goes on before, taking no notice of ourselves or of what we are doing.
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By his willingly renouncing self-defence, the Christian affirms his absolute adherence to Jesus, and his freedom from the tyranny of his own ego. The exclusiveness of this adherence is the only power which can overcome evil.