Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes

Action springs not from thought but from a readiness for responsibility.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Prayer does not mean simply to pour out one's heart. It means rather to find the way to God and to speak with him whether the heart is full or empty.
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
When our will wholeheartedly enters into the prayer of Christ then we pray correctly.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The entire day receives order and discipline when it acquires unity. This unity must be sought and found in morning prayer. The morning prayer determines the day.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Temptations which accompany the working day will be conquered on the basis of the morning breakthrough to God. Decisions demanded by work become easier and simpler where they are made not in the fear of men but only in the sight of God. He wants to give us today the power which we need for our work.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
One's task is not to turn the world upside down but to do what is necessary at the given place and with a due consideration of reality.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Time is lost when we have not lived a full human life time unenriched by experience creative endeavor enjoyment and suffering.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Prayer does not mean simply to pour out one's heart. It means rather to find the way to God and to speak with him whether the heart is full or empty.
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
When our will wholeheartedly enters into the prayer of Christ then we pray correctly.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The entire day receives order and discipline when it acquires unity. This unity must be sought and found in morning prayer. The morning prayer determines the day.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Temptations which accompany the working day will be conquered on the basis of the morning breakthrough to God. Decisions demanded by work become easier and simpler where they are made not in the fear of men but only in the sight of God. He wants to give us today the power which we need for our work.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
One's task is not to turn the world upside down but to do what is necessary at the given place and with a due consideration of reality.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Time is lost when we have not lived a full human life time unenriched by experience creative endeavor enjoyment and suffering.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Action springs not from thought but from a readiness for responsibility.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It is the characteristic excellence of the strong man that he can bring momentous issues to the fore and make a decision about them. The weak are always forced to decide between alternatives they have not chosen themselves.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If you board the wrong train it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In the New Testament our enemies are those who harbour hostility against us, not those against whom we cherish hostility, for Jesus refuses to reckon with such a possibility. The Christian must treat his enemy as a brother, and requite his hostility with love. His behaviour must be determined not by the way others treat him, but by the treatment he himself receives from Jesus; it has only one source, and that is the will of Jesus.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
God has prepared for Himself one great song of praise throughout eternity, and those who enter the community of God join in this song. It is the song that the “morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy” at the creation of the world. (Job 38:7). It is the victory song of the children of Israel after passing through the Red Sea, the Magnificat of Mary after the annunciation, the song of Paul and Silas in the night of prison, the song of the singers on the sea of glass after their rescue, the “song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb” (Rev. 15:3) It is the song of the heavenly fellowship.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Not in the flight of ideas, but only in action is freedom. Make up your mind and come out into the tempest of the living.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Not everyone can wait: neither the sated nor the satisfied nor those without respect can wait. The only ones who can wait are people who carry restlessness around with them.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A love that left people alone in their guilt would not have real people as its object. So, in vicarious responsibility for people, and in His love for real human beings, Jesus becomes the one burdened by guilt.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes - and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Advent creates people, new people.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to each of us.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
God travels wonderful ways with human beings, but he does not comply with the views and opinions of people. God does not go the way that people want to prescribe for him; rather, his way is beyond all comprehension, free and self-determined beyond all proof. Where reason is indignant, where our nature rebels, where our piety anxiously keeps us away: that is precisely where God loves to be. There he confounds the reason of the reasonable; there he aggravates our nature, our piety—that is where he wants to be, and no one can keep him from it. Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that he does wonders where people despair, that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Every cult of personality that emphasizes the distinguished qualities, virtues, and talents of another person, even though these be of an altogether spiritual nature, is worldly and has no place in the Christian community; indeed, it poisons the Christianity community.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Anything I cannot thank God for for the sake of Christ, I may not thank God for at all; to do so would be sin. ... We cannot rightly acknowledge the gifts of God unless we acknowledge the Mediator for whose sake alone they are given to us.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us. This is true not merely at the beginning, as though in the course of time something else were to be added to our community; it remains so for all the future and to all eternity. I have community with others and I shall continue to have it only through Jesus Christ. The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, for eternity.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
[Christ] is the Mediator, not only between God and man, but between man and man, between man and reality.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The temptation of Christ was harder, unspeakably harder, than the temptation of Adam; for Adam carried nothing in himself which could have given the tempter a claim and power over him. But Christ bore in himself the whole burden of the flesh, under the curse, under condemnation; and yet his temptation was henceforth to bring help and salvation to all flesh.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
So many people come to church with a genuine desire to hear what we have to say, yet they are always going back home with the uncomfortable feeling that we are making it too difficult for them to come to Jesus.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If there is no element of asceticism in our lives, if we give free rein to the desires of the flesh (taking care of course to keep within the limits of what seems permissible to the world), we shall find it hard to train for the service of Christ. When the flesh is satisfied it is hard to pray with cheerfulness or to devote oneself to a life of service which calls for much self-renunciation.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The figure of the crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
[God says] Discipleship is not limited to what you can comprehend - it must transcend all comprehension. Plunge into the deep waters beyond your own comprehension, and I will help you to comprehend even as I do. Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge. My comprehension transcends yours.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The desire we so often hear expressed today for “episcopal figures,” “priestly men,” “authoritative personalities” springs frequently enough from a spiritually sick need for the admiration of men, for the establishment of visible human authority, because the genuine authority of service appears to be so unimpressive.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death—we give over our lives to death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
After death something new begins, over which all powers of the world of death have no more might.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It is a wicked sophistry to justify the worldliness of the Church by the cross of Christ.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The limitation of the ethical phenomenon to its place and time does not imply its rejection but, on the contrary, its validation. One does not use canons to shoot sparrows.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It is not at all surprising that the disciples imagined that the law had been abrogated, when Jesus made promises like this. For these promises reversed all popular notions of right and wrong, and pronounced a blessing on all that was accounted worthless.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Just as God's love entered the world, thereby submitting to the misunderstanding and ambiguity that characterize everything worldly, so also Christian love does not exist anywhere but in the worldly, in an infinite variety of concrete worldly action, and subject to misunderstanding and condemnation. Every attempt to portray a Christianity of 'pure' love purged of worldly 'impurities' is a false purism and perfectionism that scorns God's becoming human and falls prey to the fate of all ideologies. God was not too pure to enter the world.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Gideon conquers, the church conquers, we conquer, because faith conquers. But the victory belongs not to Gideon, the church, or ourselves, but to God. And God's victory means our defeat, our humiliation; it means God's derision and wrath at all human pretensions of might, at humans puffing themselves up and thinking they are somebodies themselves. It means the world and its shouting is silenced, that all our ideas and plans are frustrated; it means the cross. The cross over the world -- that means that human beings, even the most noble, go down to dust whether it suits them or not, and with them all the gods and idols and lords of this world. The cross of Jesus Christ --that means God's bitter mockery of all human grandeur and God's bitter suffering in all human misery, God's lordship over all the world.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting today for costly grace.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The mysterious, invisible authority of the divine child over human hearts is more solidly grounded then the visible and resplendent power of earthly rulers. Ultimately all authority on earth must serve only the authority of Jesus Christ over humankind.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The temple of God is the holy people in Jesus Christ. The Body of Christ is the living temple of God and of the new humanity.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Justification is the new creation of the new man, and sanctification his preservation until the day of Jesus Christ.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Christ became our Brother in order to help us. Through him our brother has become Christ for us in the power and authority of the commission Christ has given him. Our brother stands before us the sign of the truth and the grace of God. He has been given to us to help us. He hears the confession of our sins in Christ's stead and he forgives our sins in Christ's name. He keeps the secret of our confession as God keeps it. When I go to my brother to confess, I am going to God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Political action means taking on responsibility. This cannot happen without power. Power is to serve responsibility.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A father acts on behalf of his children by working, providing, intervening, struggling, and suffering for them. In so doing, he really stands in their place. He is not an isolated individual, but incorporates the selves of several people in his own self. Every attempt to live as if he were alone is a denial of the fact that he is actually responsible. He cannot escape the responsibility, which is his because he is a father. This reality refutes the fictitious notion that the isolated individual is the agent of all ethical behavior. It is not the isolated individual but the responsible person who is the proper agent to be considered in ethical reflection.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
God loves his work and therefore wills to preserve it. Creation and preservation are two aspects of the one activity of God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God- the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God. Where are these responsible people?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
But the Christian also knows that he not only cannot and dare not be anxious, but that there is no need for him to be so. Neither anxiety now work can secure his daily bread, for bread is the gift of the Father.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Earthly goods deceive the human heart into believing that they give it security and freedom from worry. But in truth, they are what cause anxiety.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
the world exercises dominion by force and Christ and Christians conquer by service.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I always have the feeling we are merely fearfully trying to save room for God; I would rather speak of God at the center than at the limits, in strength rather than weakness, and thus in human life and goodness rather than in death and guilt.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than they love the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest and sacrificial. God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who dream of this idolized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands set up by their own law, and judge one another and God accordingly. It is not we who build. Christ builds the church. Whoever is mindful to build the church is surely well on the way to destroying it, for he will build a temple to idols without wishing or knowing it. We must confess he builds. We must proclaim, he builds. We must pray to him, and he will build. We do not know his plan. We cannot see whether he is building or pulling down. It may be that the times which by human standards are the times of collapse are for him the great times of construction. It may be that the times which from a human point are great times for the church are times when it's pulled down. It is a great comfort which Jesus gives to his church. You confess, preach, bear witness to me, and I alone will build where it pleases me. Do not meddle in what is not your providence. Do what is given to you, and do it well, and you will have done enough.... Live together in the forgiveness of your sins. Forgive each other every day from the bottom of your hearts.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Church is the Church only when it exists for others...not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men of every calling what it means to live for Christ, to exist for others.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Freedom for the Church comes from the necessity of the Word of God. Otherwise, it becomes arbitrariness and ends in a great many new ties.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer