Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a great realist. He was one of the few who quickly understood, even before Hitler came to power, that National Socialism was a brutal attempt to make history without God and to found it on the strength of man alone.
In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin.
But it is the grace of the Gospel, which is so hard for the pious to understand, that it confronts us with the truth and says: You are a sinner, a great, desperate sinner; now come, as the sinner that you are, to God who loves you. He wants you as you are; He does not want anything from you, a sacrifice, a work; He wants you alone.
The cross is the sign that stands in judgment on all the false security in our lives and restores faith in God alone.
Yet neither father nor mother, neither wife nor child, neither nationality nor tradition, can protect a man at the moment of his call. It is Christ’s will that he should be thus isolated, and that he should fix his eyes solely upon him.
Easter? Our attention falls more on dying than on death. How we deal with dying is more important to us than how we conquer death. Socrates overcame dying; Christ overcame death.
Holy Scripture is more than a watchword. It is also more than ‘light for today’. It is God’s revealed Word for all men, for all times. Holy Scripture does not consist of individual passages; it is a unit and is intended to be used as such.
The Psalter occupies a unique place in the Holy Scriptures. It is God’s Word and, with few exceptions, the prayer of men as well. How are we to understand this? How can God’s Word be at the same time prayer to God?
Thus this spiritual love will speak to Christ about a brother more than to a brother about Christ.
Perception, knowledge, and truth without love are nothing. They are not truth, for truth is God, and God is love. Therefore, truth without love is a lie.
The cross of Christ is the death which we undergo once and for all in our baptism, and it is a death full of grace.
The gospel belongs to all people because it belongs to sinners.
God alone judges, and God’s judgment is helpful and healing. After all, we can only serve other Christians; we can never place ourselves above them.
The Roman church’s unmistakable claim is that there is only one church and only one faith and that Christendom needs a visible head, a chief shepherd, to guide the church and to care for the faithful with fatherly care. The longing for a lost Western empire, longing for the corpus christianum in which emperor and pope together are guardians of the unity of the Christian West, cannot fade away as long as there is a papacy.
Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God. Cheap.
It is solely the form of Christ that matters, not any form besides Christ’s own. The church is the human being who has become human, has been judged, and has been awakened to new life in Christ.
Work is only an instrument in the hand of God for the purification of Christians from all self-centeredness and self-seeking. The work of the world can be done only where a person forgets himself, where he loses himself in a cause...
Often we are so burdened and overwhelmed with other thoughts, images, and concerns that it may take a long time before God’s Word has cleared all that away and gets through to us.
That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs.
No, God and the world, God and its goods are incompatible, because the world and its goods make a bid for our hearts, and only when they have won them do they become what they really are. That is how they thrive, and that is why they are incompatible with allegiance to God. Our hearts have room only for one all-embracing devotion, and we can only cleave to one Lord.