Eric Metaxas

“Bonhoeffer's experiences with African American community underscored an idea that was developing in his mind: the only real piety and power that he had seen in the American church seemed to be in the churches where there were a present reality and a past history of suffering.”

“But in a few years, as part of their effort to push Jews out of German public life, the Nazis would attempt to puah them out of the German church too. That these "non-Aryans" had publicly converted to the Christian faith meant nothing, since the lens through which the Nazis saw the world was purely racial. One's genetic makeup and ancestral bloodline were all that mattered; one's most deeply held beliefs counted for nothing.”

“The 'success' of the sermon is utterly dependent on the God who breaks through and 'grasps' us, or we cannot be 'grasped.”

“Jesus was and is the enemy of dead religion.”

“Bonhoeffer thought of death as the last station on the road to freedom.”

“It's so easy to become a grumbler, someone who condemns and carps at everything on principle and sees an ulterior motive behind it.”

“There was only one reality, and Christ was Lord over all of it, or none.”

“Describing Bonhoeffer's demeanor on returning to danger in Germany rather than safety in America, with "with a strong and joyful firmness such as only arises out of realized freedom. ”

“It was not apathy or passiveness. For him, prayer was a display of the strongest possible activity.”

“He did not hope that God heard his prayers; he knew it.”

“A state which which includes within itself a terrorized Church has lost its most faithful servant.”

“The rich world of his ancestors set the standards for Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s own life. It gave him a certainty of judgment and manner that cannot be acquired in a single generation.”

“(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.”

“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.”

“Bonhoeffer himself knew that in all of it, he was being utterly obedient to God. For him, that was the cantus firmus that made the dizzying complexities of it all perfectly coherent.”

“The Americans speak so much about freedom in their sermons. Freedom as a possession is a doubtful thing for a church; freedom must be won under the compulsion of a necessity. 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.”

“So what stands in place of the Christian message? An ethical and social idealism borne by a faith in progress that - who knows how - claims the right to call itself "Christian." And in the place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social corporation." ~Bonhoeffer”

“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”

“Christianity contains within itself a germ hostile to the Church (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)”

“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.”

“This was one of the casualties of war, that trust itself seemed to die a thousand deaths.”

“Future generations would be convinced that nothing good could ever have existed in a country that produced such evil. They would think only of these evils. It would be as if these unleashed dark forces had grotesquely marched like devils on dead horses, backward through the gash in the present, and had destroyed the German past too.”

“Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God's will.”

“...when someone asked Bonhoeffer whether he shouldn't join the German Christians in order to work against them from within, he answered that he couldn't. 'If you board the wrong train,' he said, 'it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.”

“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.”

“Ahoy there, Lord Pegleg!" cried the Fool. "Why are you hopping on one foot?""And what would you have do on one foot?" the man asked. "Pirouette? Besides, if I were to untie my other foot I would move too fast for anyone to see me. Why, I would trip over the equator in one stride.""That's pretty quick," the Fool said."If you think that's quick," the man replied, "you should have seen me before the old arthritis set in.”

“Moujiks. Right. What's a moujik?" the Tsar asked."Peasants, your majesty.""Pheasants?""No! Peasants.”