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.
The most general formulation of rights given with the natural is, in the words of Roman law, suum cuique, to each his own.
There is only one church, the church of faith ruled by the word of Jesus Christ alone. This is the true catholic church that has never disappeared and is still concealed in the church of Rome. It is the body of Christ – corpus Christi. It is the true unity of the West.
The Christian community is not a spiritual sanatorium. Those who take refuge in community while fleeing from themselves are misusing it to indulge in empty talk and distraction, no matter how spiritual this idle talk and distraction may appear.
Without God, all seeing and perceiving of things and laws become abstraction, a separation from both origin and goal.
If we want to participate in this Advent and Christmas event, we cannot simply sit there like spectators in a theater and enjoy all the friendly pictures. Rather, we must join in the action that is taking place and be drawn into this reversal of all things ourselves. Here we too must act on the stage, for here the spectator is always a person acting in the drama. We cannot remove ourselves from the action.
Just as Christians should not be constantly feeling the pulse of their spiritual life, so too the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be continually taking its temperature.
There is no fulfilment of the law apart from communion with God, and no communion with God apart from fulfilment of the law.
The whole of the past is embraced by the word “forgiveness”; the whole of the future is preserved in the faithfulness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:20: So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
When a preacher opens the Bible and interprets the word of God, a mystery takes place, a miracle: the grace of God, who comes down from heaven into our midst and speaks to us, knocks on our door, asks questions, warns us, puts pressure on us, alarms us, threatens us, and makes us joyful again and free and sure.
Talk about one’s own guilt can be just as far from the Word of God as talk about one’s innocence.
But what is the finest book, or picture, or house, or estate, to me, compared to my wife, my parents, or my friend?
Herein lies the serpent’s deceit. Man knows good and evil, but because he is not the origin, because he acquires this knowledge only at the price of estrangement from the origin, the good and evil that he knows are not the good and evil of God but good and evil against God. They are good and evil of man’s own choosing, in opposition to the eternal election of God. In becoming like God man has become a god against God.
The wise man is the one who sees reality as it is, and who sees into the depths of things. That is why only that man is wise who sees reality in God. To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest.
We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what He does give us daily.
What is love?” Love is the reconciliation of man with God in Jesus Christ.
We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know; God wants us to realize his presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved.
The wish to have everything by one’s own power is false pride. Even what one owes to others belongs nevertheless to oneself and is a piece of one’s own life, and the desire to calculate what one has ‘earned’ on one’s own and what one owes to others is surely not Christian and is a futile undertaking besides. With what one is in oneself and what one receives, a person is a whole.
Jesus does not want to be the only perfect human being at the expense of humankind. He does not want, as the only guiltless one, to ignore a humanity that is being destroyed by its guilt; he does not want some kind of human ideal to triumph over the ruins of a wrecked humanity.
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.