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The concept of cheap grace that Dietrich would later make so famous might have had its origins in his mother; perhaps not the term, but the idea behind it, that faith without works is not faith at all, but a simple lack of obedience to God.
Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is; there is never loneliness.
“Of course,” he said, “we build him a temple, but we live in our own houses.” Religion had been exiled to Sunday morning, to a place “into which one gladly withdraws for a couple of hours, but only to get back to one’s place of work immediately afterward.” He said that one cannot give him only a “small compartment in our spiritual life,” but must give him everything or nothing. “The religion of Christ,” he said, “is not a tidbit after one’s bread; on the contrary, it is the bread or it is nothing. People should at least understand and concede this if they call themselves Christian.”
Once one saw clearly what the Word of God said, one would have to act on it and its implications, such as they were.
wise words
Theology must lead to the practical aspects of how to live as a Christian.
Karding was surprised when Bonhoeffer asked his students whether they sang Christmas carols. Their answer was noncommittal, so he said, “If you want to be pastors, then you must sing Christmas carols!” For him, music was not an optional part of Christian ministry, but de rigeur.
The state which endangers the Christian proclamation negates itself.”
“A state which includes within itself a terrorized church has lost its most faithful servant.”
Bonhoeffer knew that a church that did not stand with the Jews was not the church of Jesus Christ, and to evangelize people into a church that was not the church of Jesus Christ was foolishness and heresy.
Heine was a German Jew who converted to Christianity, and his words were a grim prophecy, meaning, “Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too.”
It is simply incomprehensible how anybody can consider the Christian doctrine of redemption as a guide for the difficult life of today.
For Hitler, ruthlessness was a great virtue, and mercy, a great sin. This was Christianity’s chief difficulty, that it advocated meekness.
“If you board the wrong train,” he said, “it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.”
good words
Many years later, after Niemöller had been imprisoned for eight years in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler, he penned these infamous words: First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Jew. And then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me.
The triumphal procession of truth and justice, the triumphal procession of God and his Scriptures through the world, drags in the wake of the chariot of victory a train of prisoners in chains. May he at the last bind us to his triumphal carriage so that, although in bonds oppressed, we may participate in his victory!
We must shake off our fear of this world—the cause of Christ is at stake, and are we to be found sleeping? . . . Christ is looking down at us and asking whether there is anyone left who confesses faith in him.
And after Hindenburg’s death, the Reichskirche, drunk on the blood of the Röhm purge, held a synod where they ratified all of Müller’s previous edicts. Perhaps most ominous of all, the synod declared that henceforth every new pastor was required upon his ordination to swear an oath “of service” to Adolf Hitler.
Actions must follow what one believed, else one could not claim to believe it.
He was telling them that God had given them the power as his church to be a prophetic voice in the midst of the world, and they must take up their God-given authority and behave like the church that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, was God’s answer to the problems of the world.
* With a big fat cross on a big fat gut, / Who’d fail to feel the breath of God?
Around that time, Bonhoeffer made his famous declaration: “Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.” As far as he was concerned, to dare to sing to God when his chosen people were being beaten and murdered meant that one must also speak out against their suffering. If one was unwilling to do this, God was not interested in one’s worship.
No more are we ready to keep silent at man’s behest when God commands us to speak. For it is, and must remain, the case that we must obey God rather than man.”
God was telling him something through his Word that day, and as he meditated and prayed, Bonhoeffer realized that the synagogues that had been burned in Germany were God’s own. This was when Bonhoeffer most clearly saw the connection: to lift one’s hand against the Jews was to lift one’s hand against God himself. The Nazis were attacking God by attacking his people. The Jews in Germany were not only not God’s enemies; they were his beloved children.
29th June 1939—The separation of church and state does not result in the church continuing to apply itself to its own task; it is no guarantee against secularization. Nowhere is the church more secularized than where it is separated in principle as it is here. This very separation can create an opposition, so that the church engages much more strongly in political and secular things.
Following the letter of the law was the dead “religion” of which Barth, among others, had written. It was man’s attempt to deceive God into thinking one was being obedient, which was a far greater deception.
The German people will be burdened with a guilt the world will not forget in a hundred years. —HENNING VON TRESCKOW Death reveals that the world is not as it should be but that it stands in need of redemption. Christ alone is the conquering of death. —DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
But each person must walk this way alone—or rather, God draws each person onto it individually.
“If any man tries to escape guilt in responsibility he detaches himself from the ultimate reality of human existence, and what is more he cuts himself off from the redeeming mystery of Christ’s bearing guilt without sin, and he has no share in the divine justification which lies upon this event” (Ethics, p. 210).
He had theologically redefined the Christian life as something active, not reactive. It had nothing to do with avoiding sin or with merely talking or teaching or believing theological notions or principles or rules or tenets. It had everything to do with living one’s whole life in obedience to God’s call through action. It did not merely require a mind, but a body too. It was God’s call to be fully human, to live as human beings obedient to the one who had made us, which was the fulfillment of our destiny.
Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behaviour. The Christian is called to sympathy and action, not in the first place by his own sufferings, but by the sufferings of his brethren, for whose sake Christ suffered.
Once again, things went ‘hominum confusione et dei providentia.’”*
“It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”
Bonhoeffer was thinking in a new way about what he had been thinking and saying for two decades: God was bigger than everyone imagined, and he wanted more of his followers and more of the world than was given him.
There are not two realities, but only one reality, and that is God’s reality revealed in Christ in the reality of the world.
Partaking in Christ, we stand at the same time in the reality of God and in the reality of the world. The reality of Christ embraces the reality of the world in itself. The world has no reality of its own independent of God’s revelation in Christ. . . . [T]he theme of two realms, which has dominated the history of the church again and again, is foreign to the New Testament.
Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life.
To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.
