Quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The mandate of the church embraces all people as they live within all the other mandates. Since a person is at the same time worker, spouse, and citizen, since one mandate overlaps with the others, and since all the mandates need to be fulfilled at the same time, so the church mandate reaches into all the other mandates.

Christ is knocking. It's still not Christmas, but it's also still not the great last Advent, the last coming of Christ.

God as a working hypothesis in morals, politics, or science has been surmounted and abolished; and the same thing has happened in philosophy and religion (Feuerbach!). For the sake of intellectual honesty, that working hypothesis should be dropped, or as far as possible eliminated.

The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15.34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.

I believe that God is not timeless fate, but that he waits for and answers sincere prayers and responsible deeds.

What is at stake is by no means the question of whether our German members of congregations can still tolerate church fellowship with the Jews. It is rather the risk of Christian preaching to say: here is the church, where Jew and German stand together under the Word of God; here is the proof whether a church is still the church or not.

Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God—the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God. Where are these responsible people?

But God has put this Word into the mouth of men in order that it may be communicated to other men. When one person is struck by the Word, he speaks it to others. God has willed that we should seek him and find his living Word in the witness of a brother, in the mouth of a man. Therefore, a Christian needs another Christian who speaks God's Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged.

All we can do is to live in assurance and faith — you out there with the soldiers, and I in my cell. — I've just come across this in the Imitation of Christ: Custodi diligenter cellam tuam, et custodiet te ('Take good care of your cell, and it will take care of you'). — May God keep us in faith.

Death cannot keep back love; love is stronger than death. The meaning of Good Friday and Easter Sunday is that God's path to human beings leads back to God.

The very hour of disillusionment with my brother becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and Deed which really binds us together--the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship.

Who is this Judas? Who is the betrayer? Faced with this question, are we capable of more than asking with the disciples: "Surely not I, Lord?