Quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Christian life is participation in the encounter of Christ with the world.

Every day we must turn again to God's acts of salvation, so that we can again move forward…. Faith and obedience live on remembrance and repetition. Remembrance becomes the power of the present because of the living God who once acted for me and who reminds me of that today.

The word of cheap grace has been the ruin of more Christians than any commandment of works.

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.

Freedom for the Church comes from the necessity of the Word of God. Otherwise, it becomes arbitrariness and ends in a great many new ties.

And take up their cross." That cross is already there, ready, from the very beginning; we need only take it up. But to keep us from believing that we must simply choose any arbitrary cross, or simply pick out our suffering as we will, Jesus emphasizes that each of us has his or her own cross, ready, appointed, and appropriately measured by God.

The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as love to God begins with listening to His Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them. It is God's love for us that He not only gives us His Word but also lends us His ear. So it is His work that we do for our brother and sister when we learn to listen to them.

This whole world is sustained only for the sake of Jesus Christ, his Word, and his message.

The Christian community is not a spiritual sanatorium. The person who comes into a fellowship because he is running away from himself is misusing it for the sake of diversion, no matter how spiritual this diversion may appear. He is really not seeking community at all, but only distraction which will allow him to forget his loneliness for a brief time, the very alienation that creates the deadly isolation of man.

No one can speak of the beginning but the one who was in the beginning. Thus the Bible begins with God's free affirmation, free acknowledgment, free revelation of himself: In the beginning God created...

The justification of my life before God is to live because of and toward the living, dying, and rising of Jesus Christ.

Those who have found God in the cross of Jesus Christ know how wonderfully God hides himself in this world and how he is closest precisely when we believe him to be most distant.