German Theologian Quotes

Martin Luther

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Meister Eckhart

Thomas à Kempis

Jakob Böhme

Martin Niemöller

Karl Rahner

I only ask in all kindness that the man who wishes at this time to have my books will by no means let them be a hindrance to his own study of the Scriptures, but read them as I read the orders and the ordures of the pope and the books of the sophists.

Whatever man uses without the fear of God, whatever he applies to the mere gratifying of his flesh, cannot fail to operate as a poison to the soul, however pleasant and salutary it may appear to be to the body.

Over this period many issues have been clarified. Today we know very much more about these twenty-seven short writings from a little religious sub-culture in the Roman empire than ever before. Nevertheless, they risk being forgotten - partly because the link with the Christian history which they have influenced has been broken, partly because many of our educated contemporaries come from other religious and cultural traditions, and partly because the results of historical-critical research are so complex that many people are deterred from trying to grasp them.

People complain that our generation has no philosophers. They are wrong. They now sit in another faculty. Their names are Max Planck and Albert Einstein.

Adolf von Harnack

Reflection upon the historical place of dogmatic concepts and the related identifying and relative weighting of the essential themes of Christian doctrine are indispensable to an impartial judgment of their fitness and scope in expressing the universal significance of the history and person of Jesus Christ.

Wolfhart Pannenberg

Western civilisation, with its own spirituality, has permeated all corners of the earth. My thesis is that this is the spirituality of money.

The stinking puddle from which usury, thievery and robbery arises is our lords and princes. They make all creatures their property—the fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plant in the earth must all be theirs. Then they proclaim God's commandments among the poor and say, "You shall not steal." They oppress everyone, the poor peasant, the craftsman are skinned and scraped.

Thomas Müntzer

There is a saying in China that the nature of man is found there, in the center, where emotions are not yet manifest. In this center is the potentiality of everything to come.

Richard Wilhelm (sinologist)

The Gospel does not require anything good that man must furnish: not a good heart, not a good disposition, no improvement of his condition, no godliness, no love either of God or men…….. It plants love into his heart and makes him capable of all good works. It demands nothing, but it gives all. Should not this fact make us leap for JOY?

C. F. W. Walther

The grave is a very small hillock, but we can see farther from it, when standing on it, than from the highest mountain in all the world.

Friedrich Tholuck

When God forgives us for hitting Him with a club we should manage to put up with the pin pricks we get from our fellows.

Helmut Thielicke

The stone which Jacob consecrated at Bethel the generation of the living continues to anoint, paying the tithes which of old he vowed to the house of God there.

Julius Wellhausen

Intellectual neutrality is not possible in a historical world of exploitation and oppression.

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

If there be a mind that, not perceiving in the narratives we have compared the fingermarks of tradition, and hence the legendary character of these evangelical anecdotes, still leans to the historical interpretation, whether natural or supernatural; that mind must be alike ignorant of the true character both of legend and of history, of the natural and the supernatural.

But aesthetics is not religion, and the origins of religion lie somewhere completely different. They lie anyway, these roses smell too sweet and the deep roar of the breaking waves is too splendid, to do justice to such weighty matters now.

Religion is immediate self-consciousness. It liberates the individual from the determinative forces of society . ... It is effective only in individuals, where "in-dividuals" means whose who are undivided, that is, who are liberated from the psychological, social, and logical consequences of the division of labor in society and who actually live concretely and historically, unfettered by abstract norms.

Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt

However important it is that love shall precede marriage, it is far more important that it shall continue after marriage.

Samson Raphael Hirsch

The soul will bring forth Person if God laughs into her and she laughs back to him. To speak in parable, the Father laughs into the Son and the Son laughs back to the Father; and this laughter breeds liking and liking breeds joy, and joy begets love, and love begets Person, and Person begets the Holy Ghost.

Meister Eckhart

If you fall seventy times a day, rise seventy times and return to God so that you will not fall too often.

Johannes Tauler

In the cross of Christ God is taking man dead-seriously so that he may open up for him the happy freedom of Easter. God takes upon himself the pain of negation and the God forsakenness of judgement to reconcile himself with his enemies and to give the godless fellowship with himself.

Jürgen Moltmann

The human being of all times prays because he cannot fail to wonder about the meaning of his life, which remains obscure and discomforting of it is not put in relations to the mystery of God and if his plan for the world.

Pope Benedict XVI

We are the archenemy of our own salvation, and the Shepherd must fight first of all with us - for us.

Romano Guardini

It is not necessary that these hypotheses should be true, or even probably; but it is enough if they provide a calculus which fits the observations.

Andreas Osiander

The love for our enemies takes us along the way of the cross and into fellowship with the Crucified. The more we are driven along this road, the more certain is the victory of love over the enemy's hatred. For then it is not the disciple's own love, but the love of Jesus Christ alone, who for the sake of his enemies went to the cross and prayed for them as he hung there.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

O, my God! withhold from me the wealth to which tears and sighs and curses cleave. Better none at all than wealth like that.

Christian Scriver