Quotes about Death

The message of grace," he said," pronounces upon the death of people and nations its eternal: I have loved you from eternity; stay with me, and you will live.

belongs to death, or, still more so, to the devil. We must buy it from him and return it to God, to whom it must really belong."—"If we inquire the will of God, free from all doubt and all mistrust, we shall discover it."—"Always give thanks for all things."—"Everything we cannot thank God for, we reproach him for.

Bonhoeffer was simply saying that if we wished truly to live, we must be prepared to die. And this was not bad news at all, but rather was the very best of good news imaginable. In fact it is called the good news or the gospel, and it is simply that Jesus has purchased for us a passage to eternal life, something so outrageous and unbelievable that most people really don't believe it and therefore ignore it.

No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existence... Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.

Indeed, when Luther's school-yard chum Hans Reinecke wrote to him of his father's death, Luther wrote, "Seldom if ever have I despised death as much as I do now." He said that it "has plunged me into deep sadness not only because he was my father but also because he loved me very much." Even more, he says, "through him my creator has given me all that I am and have.

What madness is the course I am pursuing. I believe all the great truths of the Christian religion, but I am not acting as though I did. Should I die in this state I must go into a place of misery.

How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether in our human fear and anguish, we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly blessed event in the world? Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.

Only in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ has death been drawn into God's power, and it must now serve God's own aims. It is not some fatalistic surrender but rather a living faith in Jesus Christ, who died and rose for us, that is able to cope profoundly with death.

Nor are they the merits of Christ and the saints, for, even without the pope, the latter always work grace for the inner man, and the cross, death, and hell for the outer man.

Death tends to change people's focus and priorities—at least for a time. After the war deaths of several Bonhoeffer cousins, the younger members of the family would often lie in bed at night and talk about death and eternity. Do you spend much time thinking about eternity? Should a person concentrate on life after death, or is it better to keep one's focus solely on this life and what can be accomplished now?

Fundamentally we feel that we really belong to death already, and that every new day is a miracle.

Bonhoeffer thought of death as the last station on the road to freedom.