Quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Insight, knowledge, truth without love is nothing—it is not even truth, for truth is God, and God is love. So truth without love is a lie; it is nothing. "Speaking the truth in love," says Paul in another letter [Eph. 4:15]. Truth just for oneself, truth spoken in enmity and hate is not truth but a lie, for truth brings us into God's presence, and God is love. Truth is either the clarity of love, or it is nothing.

We say that religion is a matter of mood: we must wait until the mood strikes us. And then we often wait for years —perhaps until the end of our life—until we are once again in the mood to be religious. This idea is based on a great illusion. It is alll well and good to let religion be a matter of mood, but God is not a matter of mood. He is still present even when we are not in the mood to meet with him.

The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer.

What may appear weak and insignificant to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as Christians should not be constantly feeling the pulse of their spiritual life, so too the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be continually taking its temperature.

America... a place of free expression of everything with everyone, which is made possible through the civil courage characteristic of the American and through the lack of all inhibiting officiousness in personal conversation.

He opposed the militaristic nationalism of the new Germany, rooted in "blood and soil," even as the German Evangelical Church and most of its leaders succumbed to the new ideology. By the early period of the war, the embrace of Nazi ideology at all levels of society had led to the complete corruption of social and personal ethical behavior among most Germans.

The gift of Christ is not the Christian religion but the grace and love of God, which culminate in the cross.

The only way is by mortifying our own wills which are always obtruding themselves. And the only way to do this is by letting Christ alone reign in our hearts, by surrendering our wills completely to him, by living in fellowship with Jesus and by following him. Then we can pray that his will may be done.

Jesus does not tell us what we ought to do but cannot; he tells us what God has given us and promises still to give.

The fact that he was ashamed when he was discovered praying was for Kant an argument against prayer. He failed to see that prayer by its very nature is a matter for the strictest privacy, and he failed to perceive the fundamental significance of shame for human existence.

Spiritual love will speak to Christ about a brother more than to a brother about Christ. It knows that the most direct way to others is always through prayer to Christ and that love of others is wholly dependent upon the truth in Christ.

It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: "ye were bought at a price," and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.