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he vowed to do all he could nonetheless.
his friends back home that because the ship crossed a time zone every day it became more and more confusing and difficult to keep his promise of praying with them at the same hour each day, in order to remain with them in spirit, as it were.
even if it meant becoming involved in killing, although he by no means took such a thing lightly. But David’s killing of Goliath was not something David ever repented of; and those who have valued the teachings of the Bible have never seen that victory
as an act of murder.
As Bonhoeffer saw it, it was the church’s duty to call the state to account for its actions; and in the end, if the state did not do the right thing, it was the duty of the church to oppose the state with action.
But Bonhoeffer knew that if serving God meant doing so outside the church, so be it.
He knew that much of what God had done in history was done without the help of—or sometimes in spite of—those who called themselves God’s people.
And so now Bonhoeffer felt more alone than ever, but he knew that in the end he answered to his audience of One, the only One whose opinion mattered. Bonhoeffer also knew that in the end that was where each of us must find himself.
They had no doubt of that effulgent reality beyond what looks like human death, and they knew that what looks to us like death is in fact a portal to the very antithesis of death.
because they show us with their lives that they know something we too can know but may not yet know; and in the act of their dying they show us that there really is nothing to be feared, that we are fools not to know it and to rejoice in it as they have done. But who can hear such things? Bonhoeffer believed that we could.
“The isolated use and handing down of the famous term ‘religionless Christianity’ has made Bonhoeffer the champion of an undialectical shallow modernism which obscures all that he
wanted to tell us about the living God.”
ERIC METAXAS NEW YORK CITY MARCH 2018
For God had chosen him to perform the highest task a Christian can undertake. He has become a martyr.
“I cannot get away from Jeremiah 45,” wrote Bonhoeffer from the prison cell.
Bonhoeffer stood, we have been told, like a giant before men.
He, a giant before man, was but a child before God.
From his faith the breadth of vision came which enabled him to separate the gold in life from
the dross and to differentiate what was and what was not essential in the life of man.
It is the same call of God which also obliges us only to make use of freedom with a deep feeling of responsibility.
Christian has then no other choice but to act, to suffer and—if it has to be—to die. As
Therefore, wherever it pleases God to put man in this world, the Christian must be ready for martyrdom and death. It is only in this way that man learns faith.
How can a man wax arrogant if in a this-sided life he shares the suffering of God?”
Men go to God when he is sore bested: find him poor and scorned, without shelter and bread, whelmed under weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead.
Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving.XII
“If we claim to be Christians, there is no room for expediency.”
defenceless and powerless as he then was and only fortified by the word of God in his heart, he stood erect and unbroken before his tormentors.
European and Western tradition in Germany, and it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who more than anybody else realized that nothing less than a return to the Christian faith could save Germany.
and this in contradistinction to all the underground movements which appealed to nationalism—to work for the defeat of his own country, since only thus could Germany as a Christian and European country be saved from extinction.
that men can lose their country if it is represented by an anti-Christian régime.
false faith is capable of terrible and monstrous things.
Christian right but a Christian duty towards God to oppose tyranny, that is, a government which is no longer
based on natural law and the law of God.
much in common that the message of the Bible has to be adapted, more or less, to the requirements of a secular world. No wonder, therefore, that the process of debasing Christianity as inaugurated by liberal theology led, in the long run, to a complete perversion and falsification of the essence of Christian teaching by National Socialism.
When someone tell ylu tha the Bible nees to be adatwd t iiit thbew circumstannces inthis world,ghey are from the evil. Gods wor is everlastng,sharper thn a two edge sword
Thus all kinds of secular totalitarianism which force man to cast aside his religious and moral obligations to God and subordinate the laws of justice and morality to the State are incompatible with his conception of life.
Apostles.” His good fight has been a living symbol that the spiritual has the primacy over the material.
“The life of the spirit is not that which shuns death and keeps clear of destruction: rather it endureth death and in death it is sustained. It only achieves its truth in the midst of utter destruction.”
To reproach in a modern tyranny a people as a whole for failing to revolt is as if one would reproach a prisoner for failing to escape from a heavily guarded prison.
The future in modern society depends much more on the quiet heroism of the very few who are inspired by God.
These few perform the law because they “look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are unseen: for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
The real trouble is that the pure Word of Jesus has been overlaid with so much human ballast—burdensome rules and regulations, false hopes and consolations—that
But perhaps it would be just as well to ask ourselves whether we do not in fact often act as obstacles to Jesus and his Word.
Does not our preaching contain too much of our own opinions and convictions, and too little of Jesus Christ?
When the Bible speaks of following Jesus, it is proclaiming a discipleship which will liberate mankind from all man-made dogmas, from every burden and oppression,
from every anxiety and torture which afflicts the conscience. If they follow Jesus, men escape from the hard yoke of their own laws, and submit to the kindly yoke of Jesus Christ.
Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner.
That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.
Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
