Top 500 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

452. “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.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

453. “Slowly it gets to be a waiting whose outward sense I cannot comprehend; the inward reason must be found daily. Both of us have lost infinitely much during the past months; time today is a costly commodity, for who knows how much more time is given to us.7 Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Maria von Wedemeyer, 20 September 1943.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

454. “Jesus is Lord of the ages and is always with his own, even when things are difficult, and will abide with us; that is our comfort. If tribulation and anxiety come upon us, Jesus is with us and leads us over into God’s eternal kingdom.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

455. “God loves his work and therefore wills to preserve it. Creation and preservation are two aspects of the one activity of God.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

456. “Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of the church.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

457. “That it is Peter, the rock of the church, who incurs guilt here immediately after his own confession to Jesus Christ and after his appointment by Jesus, means that from its very inception the church itself has taken offense at the suffering Christ. It neither wants such a Lord nor does it, as the Church of Christ, want its Lord to force upon it the law of suffering.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

458. “In Christ we are invited to participate in the reality of God and the reality of the world at the same time, the one not without the other.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

459. “At the same time, however, for antiquity the holiest sign of the presence of God, the cross, is the symbol of utter disgrace and remoteness from God. Antiquity becomes our historical heritage in this twofold relationship to Christ, in its nearness and its opposition to Christ.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

461. “Where the beginning begins, there our thinking stops; there it comes to an end.121.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

462. “Only where God is can there be a new beginning. We cannot command God to grant it; we can only pray to God for it.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

463. “Through the life and death of Jesus Christ, history becomes not the transient bearer of eternal values but, for the first time, thoroughly temporal.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

464. “Will not the very moment of great disillusionment with my brother or sister be incomparably wholesome for me becuase it so thoroughly teaches me that both of us can never live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and deed that really binds us together, the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ? The bright day of Christian community dawns wherever the early morning mists of dreamy visions are lifting.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

465. “Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian “conception” of God.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

466. “The fearful danger of the present time is that above the cry for authority, we forget that man stands alone before the ultimate authority, and that anyone who lays violent hands on man here, is infringing eternal laws, and taking upon himself superhuman authority, which will eventually crush him.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

467. “From it came the constancy of mind, persistency of purpose, love of suffering humanity and of truth, justice and goodness. But it was not enough for him to seek justice, truth, honesty and goodness for their own sake and patiently to suffer for them. No, according to Bonhoeffer, we have to do so in loyal obedience to Him who is the source and spring of all goodness, justice and truth and on whom he felt absolutely dependent.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

468. “Here we have another instance of an Old Testament law finding its truest fulfilment in the crucified body of Jesus Christ. As they contemplate this body which was given for them, and as they share its life, the disciples receive strength for the chastity which Jesus requires.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

469. “The Roman church’s unmistakable claim is that there is only one church and only one faith and that Christendom needs a visible head, a chief shepherd, to guide the church and to care for the faithful with fatherly care. The longing for a lost Western empire, longing for the corpus christianum in which emperor and pope together are guardians of the unity of the Christian West, cannot fade away as long as there is a papacy.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

470. “The question of why evil exists is not a theological question, for it assumes that it is possible to go behind the existence forced upon us as sinners. If we could answer it then we would not be sinners. We could make something else responsible... The theological question does not arise about the origin of evil but about the real overcoming of evil on the Cross; it ask for the forgiveness of guilt, for the reconciliation of the fallen world.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

471. “Only those who in following Christ leave everything they have can stand and say that they are justified solely by grace. They recognize the call to discipleship itself as grace and grace as that call. But those who want to use this grace to excuse themselves from discipleship are deceiving themselves.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

472. “Therefore, people cannot make a new beginning at all; they can only pray for one. Where people are on their own and live by their own devices, there is only the old, the past.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

473. “Any honours that come our way are only stolen from him to whom alone they really belong, the Lord who sent us.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

474. “To follow Jesus means self-renunciation and absolute adherence to him, and therefore a will dominated by lust can never be allowed to do what it likes.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

475. “We are not to forget but to overcome. That happens through gratitude. We are not supposed to solve the unsolved puzzle of the past and fall into tortuous brooding, but to let even the incomprehensible stand and return it peacefully to God’s hand. This happens through humility. “He has done everything well.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

476. “The whole of the past is embraced by the word “forgiveness”; the whole of the future is preserved in the faithfulness of God.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

477. “Holy theology arises from knees bend before the mystery of the divine child in the stable.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

478. “If we would answer the question of the existence of the Evil then we would not be sinners, we could make something else responsible.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

479. “What will really matter is whether those in power expect more from people’s folly than from their wisdom and independence of mind.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

480. “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.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

481. “But because Christ is both the incarnate and the crucified, and wills to be recognized as both equally, the proper reception of the historical heritage of antiquity is still an open task for the West.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

482. “What had happened to all those warnings of Luther’s against preaching the gospel in such a manner as to make men rest secure in their ungodly living?”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

483. “All that matters is whether one opts for Christ – not Christian opinions.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

484. “But I’m afraid I’m bad at comforting; I can listen all right, but I can hardly ever find anything to say.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

485. “God is not free from human beings but for them.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

486. “In short, it is much easier to see a thing through from the point of view of abstract principle than from that of concrete responsibility.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

487. “We cannot establish direct contact outside ourselves except through him, through his word, and through our following of him. To think otherwise is to deceive ourselves.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

488. “God is never in the world in any way except in his absolute transcendence of it.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

489. “The proper relation of the Church to the world cannot be deduced from natural law or rational law or from universal human rights, but only from the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

490. “Things are much simpler here than we like. Not that we do not know God’s commandments, but that we do not do them – and then gradually, as a consequence of such disobedience, we no longer know what is right – that is our predicament.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

491. “It is not surprising, of course, that those who attempt to discredit the evidence of Scripture are the people who themselves do not seriously read, know, or make a thorough study of the Scriptures.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

492. “But because Jesus is the Christ, it has to be made clear from the beginning that his word is not a doctrine. Instead, it creates existence anew.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

493. “For we cannot speak of the beginning; where the beginning begins our thinking stops, it comes to an end.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

494. “Just as Christ is Christ only in virtue of his suffering and rejection, so the disciple is a disciple only in so far as he shares his Lord’s suffering and rejection and crucifixion.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

495. “Blessed are those who are alone in the strength of the community. Blessed are those who preserve community in the strength of solitude. But the strength of solitude and the strength of community is the strength of the Word of God alone, which is meant for the individual in the community.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

496. “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.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

497. “God’s word to me – new every day – in the infinite riches of interpretation.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

498. “The cross is the sign that stands in judgment on all the false security in our lives and restores faith in God alone.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

499. “The throne of God in the world is not on human thrones, but in human depths, in the manger. Standing around his throne there are no flattering vassals but dark, unknown, questionable figures who cannot get their fill of this miracle and want to live entirely by the mercy of God.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

500. “Certainly one must try everything, but only to become more certain what God’s way is.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer