Christianity contains within itself a germ hostile to the Church (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
This was one of the casualties of war, that trust itself seemed to die a thousand deaths.
With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made “legal.” Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.
Each era has the fatal hubris to believe that it has once and for all climbed to the top of the mountain and can see everything as it is, from the highest and most objective vantage point possible.
the battle for our culture must be waged at the level of the imagination.
It was not apathy or passiveness. For him, prayer was a display of the strongest possible activity.
Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic. Do not defend God’s word, but testify to it. Trust to the Word. It is a ship loaded to the very limits of its capacity. -Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Atheism tells him what he isn’t, and like all of us he yearns to know what he is.
Religion is the most fragile of all freedoms. And that’s because it is the most threatening to those in power.
Bonhoeffer thought of death as the last station on the road to freedom.
He well knew his mind’s natural tendency to be endlessly on a thousand subjects at once, to flit from this to that and to the next thing to no particular purpose–indeed, he called it his “butterfly mind.
(Bonhoeffer’s) change was not an ungainly, embarrassing leap from which he would have to retreat slightly when he gained more maturity and perspective. It was by all accounts a deepening consistent with what had gone before.
There was only one reality, and Christ was Lord over all of it, or none.
To some extent a life of celibacy is a picture of how all of us are to live, containing our passions for God’s purposes.
They (theological liberals)seemed to know what the answer was supposed to be and weren’t much concerned with how to get there. They knew only that whatever answers the Fundamentalists came up with must be wrong.