Quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Only when I forgo visible proof, do I believe in God.

So the call to discipleship is a commitment solely to the person of Jesus Christ, a breaking through of all legalisms by the grace of him who calls.

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.

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.

The church must bear witness to Jesus Christ as living lord, and it must do so in a world that has turned away from Christ after knowing him.

All thinking about human beings without Christ is unfruitful abstraction. The counterimage to the human being taken up into the form of Christ is the human being as self-creator, self-judge, and self-renewer; these people bypass their true humanity and therefore, sooner or later, destroy themselves.

To be conformed to the one who has become human—that is what being really human means.

Discipleship is commitment to Christ. Because Christ exists, he must be followed.

Nothing is easier than to stimulate the euphoria of community in a few days of life together and nothing is more fatal to the healthy, sober, everyday life in community of Christians.

The Scriptures speak of three kinds of community at the table that Jesus keeps with his own: the daily breaking of bread together at meals, the breaking of bread together at the Lord's Supper, and the final breaking of bread together in the reign of God.

It is in this light that the good works of the disciples are meant to be seen. Men are not to see the disciples but their good works, says Jesus. And these works are none other than those which the Lord Jesus himself has created in them by calling them to be the light of the world under the shadow of his cross.

You are disobedient, you are trying to keep some part of your life under your own control. That is what is preventing you from listening to Christ and believing in his grace. You cannot hear Christ because you are willfully disobedient. Somewhere in your heart you are refusing to listen to his call. Your difficult is your sins.