Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes

278 Sourced Quotes

It is God's earth out of which man is taken. From it he has his body. His body belongs to his essential being. Man's body is not his prison, his shell his exterior, but man himself. Man does not "have" a body; he does not "have" a soul; rather he "is" body and soul. Man in the beginning is really his body. He is one. He is his body, as Christ is completely his body, as the Church is the body of Christ

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
To everyone God is the kind of God he believes in.

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The will of God, to which the law gives expression, is that men should defeat their enemies by loving them.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There God dealt with us, and there he still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and grace.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Reformation theology … pretends to prefer to Pharasaic ostentation a modest invisibility, which in practice means conformity to the world. When that happens, the hallmark of the Church becomes justitia civilis instead of extraordinary visibility. The very failure of the light to shine becomes the touchstone of our Christianity.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In a world where success is the measure and justification of all things, the figure of him who was sentenced and crucified remains a stranger.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Will not the very moment of great disillusionment with my brother or sister be incomparably wholesome for me because it so thoroughly teaches me that both of us can never live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and deed that really binds us together, the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The fact that we do not speak it but sing it only expresses the fact that our spoken words are inadequate to express what we want to say, that the burden of our song goes far beyond all human words.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The outcome of the Reformation was the victory, not of Luther's perception of grace in all its purity and costliness, but of the vigilant religious instinct of man for the place where grace is to be obtained at the cheapest price.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
When we come to a clearer and more sober estimate of our own limitations and responsibilities, that makes it possible more genuinely to love our neighbor.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
And we simply cannot be constant with the fact that God's cause is not always the successful one, that we really could be unsuccessful ; and yet be on the right road. But this is where we find out whether we have begun in faith or in a burst of enthusiasm.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Earthly goods are given to be used, not to be collected.... Hoarding is idolatry.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
By his willingly renouncing self-defence, the Christian affirms his absolute adherence to Jesus, and his freedom from the tyranny of his own ego. The exclusiveness of this adherence is the only power which can overcome evil.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
When people are deeply affected by the Word, they tell it to other people.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds: we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remoreseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Who stands firm? Only the one for whom the final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all these, when in faith and sole allegiance to God he is called to obedient and responsible action: the responsible person, whose life will be nothing but an answer to God's question and call.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Time is the most valuable thing that we have, because it is the most irrevocable.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Any honours that come our way are only stolen from him to whom alone they really belong, the Lord who sent us.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The first call which every Christian experiences is the call to abandon the attachments of this world.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In the gospels the very first step a man must take is an act which radically affects his whole existence.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Then fear will grow pale and fade away, and you will be free, through your faith in our strong and living Savior, Jesus Christ.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from a Christian community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; in the poor brother Christ is knocking at the door.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The essence of optimism is not its view of the present, but the fact that it is the inspiration of life and hope when others give in; it enables a man to hold his head high when everything seems to be going wrong; it gives him strength to sustain reverses and yet to claim the future for himself instead of abandoning it to his opponent.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The word of cheap grace has been the ruin of more Christians than any commandment of works.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I have come to the conclusion that I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I shall have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If we are to pray aright, perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to our own heart. Not what we want to pray is important, but what God wants us to pray. The richness of the Word of God ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
So long as we eat our bread together, we shall have sufficient even for the least. Not until one person desires to keep his own bread for himself does hunger ensue.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer