German Theologian Quotes

For Christ, both God and man, must lay hold on us in order that there may be a union between Him and us.

Martin Chemnitz

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

Not to return to the old … can be the task of our time, but to clothe the spirit of Christianity, its religious-ethical principle, which lay as a compelling force at the basis of all preceding developments, in the fitting and intelligible form for our age.

Otto Pfleiderer

Love wakes much and sleeps little and, in sleeping, does not sleep. It faints is not weary; it is restricted in its liberty and is great freedom. It sees reasons to fear and does not fear, but, like an ember or a spark of fire, flames always upward, by the fervor of its love, toward God, and through the special help of grace is delivered from all perils and dangers

Thomas à Kempis

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

Myth does not want to be interpreted in cosmological terms but in anthropological terms or, better, in existentialist terms.

Rudolf Bultmann