“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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