Quotes from Eric Metaxas

Bonhoeffer was simply saying that if we wished truly to live, we must be prepared to die. And this was not bad news at all, but rather was the very best of good news imaginable. In fact it is called the good news or the gospel, and it is simply that Jesus has purchased for us a passage to eternal life, something so outrageous and unbelievable that most people really don't believe it and therefore ignore it.

Wilberforce was greatly renowned for his singing voice and came to be known as the "Nightingale of Commons"—probably not only for the remarkable quality of his voice but for the hours at which he sang.

To help them was tantamount to shaking one's fist at God. Raising their sights from the vulgar spectacle of things like public hangings could rock the boat of civil society and mustn't be attempted.

Thus," he said, "the Christian message is basically amoral and irreligious, paradoxical as that may sound".

It wouldn't be entirely clear to him until 1787, but in the meantime, as a first step in the right direction, Wilberforce championed two bills, both of which failed. One was for parliamentary reform and the other was a strange and ghoulish bill combining two macabre issues: putting an end to the burning of women at the stake, and selling the corpses of hanged criminals for dissection.

Don Quixote was for Bonhoeffer an important picture of the human condition.

The idea that people of faith cling to God to avoid science has been replaced with the idea that atheists cling to their invented God-of-the-gaps idea to avoid the real God who created the universe that science is discovering, and whose existence is increasingly undeniable because of those very discoveries.

The term "noblesse oblige"—the idea that those who have been blessed with much are to use it to help those who have not been so blessed—would not be coined for another half-century, and Wilberforce had yet to discover the relevance of any such idea to his own life.

I thank God that I live in the age of Wilberforce and that I know one man at least who is both moral and entertaining.

I fancy it must be this which, when I am with you, prevents me considering you an object of compassion, tho' Prime Minister of England; for now, when I am out of hearing of your foyning…I cannot help representing you to myself as oppressed with cares and troubles.

Formerly they had been the bitterest foes, but behold, they were now united against their common enemies—common decency and common sense!

We may say what we like about his politics, but the king was a faithful husband who sincerely felt that those in power ought to comport themselves with decorum and restraint for the sake of the country.