Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

by Eric Metaxas

So yes, to live forever we must enter into Jesus’ death on the cross by faith, and by trading our own silly pseudo-lives, must kick away the death-tainted ghost of this life—that cannot take us anywhere but to the grave forever—and embrace the true life he offers, which can never die, because it is not only true life, but is Truth and Life itself.

Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is; there is never loneliness.

Anything good must come from God, so even in a sermon that was poorly written and delivered, God might manifest himself and touch the congregation. Conversely in a sermon wonderfully written and delivered, God might refuse to manifest himself. The “success” of the sermon is utterly dependent on the God who breaks through and “grasps” us, or we cannot be “grasped.”

religion was a dead, man-made thing, and at the heart of Christianity was something else entirely—God himself, alive.

So the German people clamored for order and leadership. But it was as though in the babble of their clamoring, they had summoned the devil himself, for there now rose up from the deep wound in the national psyche something strange and terrible and compelling. The Führer was no mere man or mere politician. He was something terrifying and authoritarian, self-contained and self-justifying, his own father and his own god. He was a symbol who symbolized himself, who had traded his soul for the zeitgeist.