Quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer

If we want to participate in this Advent and Christmas event, we cannot simply sit there like spectators in a theater and enjoy all the friendly pictures. Rather, we must join in the action that is taking place and be drawn into this reversal of all things ourselves. Here we too must act on the stage, for here the spectator is always a person acting in the drama. We cannot remove ourselves from the action.

The Reformation biblical faith in God had radically desacralized the world. Thus the ground was prepared in which rational and empirical science could blossom; and even though the natural scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were believing Christians, the disappearance of faith in God left behind only a rationalized and mechanized world.

2 Corinthians 5:20: So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

When a preacher opens the Bible and interprets the word of God, a mystery takes place, a miracle: the grace of God, who comes down from heaven into our midst and speaks to us, knocks on our door, asks questions, warns us, puts pressure on us, alarms us, threatens us, and makes us joyful again and free and sure.

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.

If God loved the world, the whole fallen creation, then he gave us no preference over others. He loved my worst enemy no less than he loved me. Jesus Christ died for his and our enemies.

Once more the daylight shines abroad, O brethren let us praise the Lord, Whose grace and mercy thus have kept The nightly watch while we have slept. We offer up ourselves to thee, That heart and word and deed may be In all things guided by thy mind, And in thine eyes acceptance find.

Even the most personal prayer no longer belongs to the individual, but to the church that gave birth to this person and through which this individual lives.

This cheap grace has been no less disastrous to our own spiritual lives. Instead of opening up the way to Christ it has closed it. Instead of calling us to follow Christ, it has hardened us in our disobedience.

God is not with the stronger battalions but with the small host of the praying, watchful congregation. God's strength is powerful in the weak.

Now he felt that it would be for him an illegitimate escape from responsibility if he were to avoid the growing contacts with the political and military resistance movement. Not that everyone ought to act as he did, but in his position he saw no possibility of escape any longer into sinlessness and innocence. The sins of the bourgeoisie became clear in the flight from responsibility.

Man at his origin knows only one thing: God. It is only in the unity of his knowledge of God that he knows of other men, of things, and of himself. He knows all things only in God, and God in all things. The knowledge of good and evil shows that he is no longer at one with this origin.