Top 500 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “If religion is onlya garment of Christianityand even this garment has looked very different at different timesthen what is religionless Christianity?”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

352. “If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian community in which we have been placed, even when there are no great experiences, no noticeable riches, but much weakness, difficulty, and little faith – and if, on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so miserable and so insignificant and does not at all live up to our expectations – then we hinder God from letting our community grow according to the measure and riches that are there for us all in Jesus Christ.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

353. “Jesus himself had called and chosen Judas! That is the real mystery, for Jesus knew from the beginning who would betray him.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

354. “Suffering means being cut off from God. Therefore those who live in communion with him cannot really suffer.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

355. “If you believe, take the first step, it leads to Jesus Christ. If you don’t believe, take the first step all the same, for you are bidden to take it.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

356. “Anxiety creates its own treasures and they in turn beget further care. When we seek for security in possessions we are trying to drive out care with care, and the net result is the precise opposite of our anticipations. The fetters which bind us to our possessions prove to be cares themselves.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

357. “Human beings have freedom toward death and the right to death, in the sense of sacrifice, but only when the good sought through sacrifice, and not the destruction of one’s own life, is the reason for risking one’s life.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

358. “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.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

360. “Not enslaved to principles but bound by love for God, they have become free from the problems and conflicts of ethical decision. They are no longer weighed down by them. They belong completely and solely to God and God’s will.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

361. “We are certainly not Christ; we are not called on to redeem the world by our own deeds and sufferings, and we need not try to assume such an impossible burden. We are not lords, but instruments in the hand of the Lord of history; and we can share in other people’s sufferings only to a very limited degree.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

362. “Here all fear of one another, all timidity about praying freely in one’s own words in the presence of others may be put aside where in all simplicity and soberness the common, brotherly prayer is lifted to God by one of the brethren. But likewise all comment and criticism must cease whenever words of prayer howsoever halting are offered in the name of Jesus Christ. It is in fact the most normal thing in the common Christian life to pray together.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

363. “I have never seen the swing from “Hosanna!” to “Crucify!” more graphically evoked than in the virtually insane way the crowd goes berserk when the toreador makes an adroit turn, and they immediately follow this with insane howling and whistling when some mishap occurs. The momentary character of this mass mood goes so far that they applaud for the bull and against the toreador if, for example, the latter proves to be cowardly and – quite understandably – his courage fails him for a moment.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

364. “Yet neither father nor mother, neither wife nor child, neither nationality nor tradition, can protect a man at the moment of his call. It is Christ’s will that he should be thus isolated, and that he should fix his eyes solely upon him.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

365. “The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

366. “We can of course shake off the burden which is laid upon us, but only find that we have a still heavier burden to carry – a yoke of our own choosing, the yoke of our self.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

367. “With the birth of Jesus, the great kingdom of peace has begun.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

368. “It is much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

369. “The world upon whom grace is thrust as a bargain will grow tired of it.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

370. “The immanent righteousness of history rewards and punishes only men’s deeds, but the eternal righteousness of God tries and judges their hearts.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

371. “Christianity without the living Jesus Christ remains necessarily a Christianity without discipleship; and a Christianity without discipleship is always a Christianity without Jesus Christ. It is an idea, a myth.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

372. “Be glad. Celebrate! Lose your mindless fear, and take courage today. No, don’t ever be afraid, no matter what’s happened to you before. That’s right, don’t be afraid, no matter what you may see coming. Take courage because Christ was crucified for you.”2 Catherine of Siena, Letters.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

373. “Nietzsche could have arisen only from the soil of the German Reformation. Here, the contradiction between the natural and grace is starkly opposed to the reconciliation of nature with grace in the Roman heritage.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

374. “May we be enabled to say “No” to sin and “Yes” to the sinner.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

375. “Had Levi stayed at his post, Jesus might have been his present help in trouble, but not the Lord of his whole life. In other words Levi would never have learnt to believe.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

376. “Total war uses every conceivable means toward the end of national self-preservation. Everything is right and permitted that serves the cause of one’s own people.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

377. “Therefore, let those who until now have had the privilege of living a Christian life together with other Christians praise God’s grace from the bottom of their hearts. Let them thank God on their knees and realize: it is grace, nothing but grace, that we are still permitted to live in the community of Christians today.32.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

378. “But when we create our own God and our own world, what we are really doing is to deify our own lust. We are then bound to hate our fellow-men, as obstacles standing in the way of our wills.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

379. “How could one person pray the prayer of the community without being held up and supported in prayer by the community itself? At precisely this point every word of criticism must be transformed into more faithful intercession and mutual help. How easily a community can split apart if this is not done!”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

380. “The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more assuredly and consistently will community increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

381. “You are called into the community of faith; the call was not meant for you alone. You carry your cross, you struggle, and you pray in the community of faith, the community of those who are called.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

382. “With that we have articulated a basic criticism of the most grandiose of all human attempts to advance toward the divine – by way of the church. Christianity conceals within itself a germ hostile to the church. It is far too easy for us to base our claims to God on our own Christian religiosity and our church commitment, and in so doing utterly to misunderstand and distort the Christian idea.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

383. “Since God, however, as ultimate reality is no other than the self-announcing, self-witnessing, self-revealing God in Jesus Christ, the question of good can only find its answer in Christ.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

384. “No sacrifice which a lover would make for his beloved is too great for us to make for our enemy.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

385. “One doesn’t cling anxiously to life, but neither does one throw it lightly away. One is content with measured time and does not attribute eternity to earthly things. One leaves to death the limited right that it still has. But one expects the new human being and the new world only frombeyond death, from the power that has conquered death.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

386. “They believe that a good intention already means a new beginning; they believe that on their own they can make a new start whenever they want. But that is an evil illusion: only God can make a new beginning with people whenever God pleases, but not people with God.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

387. “Events cast their shadows ahead; before a harsh winter, wild animals grow thicker fur, and the beaver puts on a thicker layer of fat. What kind of times and what sort of tasks can lie ahead for a generation that must think so harshly, even at such a young age, in order to survive?”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

388. “The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

389. “There is also a false serenity that is not at all Christian. We need feel no shame as Christians about a measure of impatience, longing, protest against what is unnatural, and a strong measure of desire for freedom and earthly happiness and the capacity to effect change. In.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

390. “The real trouble is that the pure Word of Jesus has been overlaid with so much human ballast – burdensome rules and regulations, false hopes and consolations – that it has become extremely difficult to make a genuine decision for Christ.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

391. “This makes it clear that intercession is also a daily service we owe to God and our brother. He who denies his neighbour the service of praying for him denies him the service of a Christian. It is clear, furthermore, that intercession is not general and vague but very concrete: a matter of definite persons and definite difficulties and therefore of definite petitions. The more definite my intercession becomes, the more promising it is.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

392. “Desires repeatedly mastered for the sake of present duty make us richer. Lack of desire is poverty.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

393. “It is the wonderful theme of the Bible, so frightening for many people, that the only visible sign of God in the world is the cross.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

394. “Whoever despises another human being will never be able to make anything of him. Nothing of what we despise in another is itself foreign to us.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

395. “The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our community is in Jesus Christ alone, the more calmly we will learn to think about our community and pray and hope for it.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

396. “Jesus does not enjoin his disciples to marry, but he does sanctify marriage according to the law by affirming its indissolubility and by prohibiting the innocent party from remarrying when the guilty partner has broken the marriage by adultery.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

397. “And if we ask how are we to know where our hearts are, the answer is just as simple – everything which hinders us from loving God above all things and acts as a barrier between ourselves and our obedience to Jesus is our treasure, and the place where our heart is.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

398. “God has reserved to Himself the right to determine the end of life, because He alone knows the goal to which it is His will to lead it. It is for Him alone to justify a life or to cast it away.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

399. “The attempt to understand reality apart from that action of God in and upon reality means living in anabstraction; it means failing to live in reality and vacillating between the extremes of a servile attitude toward the status quo and a protest in principle against it. Only God’s becoming human makes possible an action that is genuinely in accord with reality. The world remains world. But it only does so because God has taken care of it and declared it to be under God’s rule.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

400. “The cross is not the suffering tied to being natural existence, but the suffering tied to being Christians. The cross is never simply a matter of suffering, but a matter of suffering and rejection, and even, strictly speaking, rejection for the sake of Jesus Christ, not for the sake of some other arbitrary behavior or confession.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer