Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

"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."

"For Bonhoeffer, the relationship with God ordered everything else around it. A number of times he referred to the relationship with Jesus Christ as being like the cantus firmus of a piece of music. All the other parts of the music referred to it, and it held them together. To be true to God in the deepest way meant having such a relationship with him that one did not live legalistically by "rules" or "principles." One could never separate one's actions from one's relationship to God. It was a more demanding and more mature level of obedience, and Bonhoeffer had come to see that the evil of Hitler was forcing Christians to go deeper in their obedience, to think harder about what God was asking. Legalistic religion was being shown to be utterly inadequate."

"Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God’s Word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in him. Death is mild, death is sweet and gentle; it beckons to us with heavenly power, if only we realize that it is the gateway to our homeland, the tabernacle of joy, the everlasting kingdom of peace. How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether, in our human fear and anguish we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly, blessed event in the world? Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death."

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

"(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."

"Bonhoeffer examined and dismissed a number of approaches to dealing with evil. "Reasonable people," he said, think that "with a little reason, they can pull back together a structure that has come apart at the joints." Then there are the ethical "fanatics" who "believe that they can face the power of evil with the purity of their will and their principles." Men of"conscience" become overwhelmed because the "countless respectable and seductive disguises and masks in which evil approaches them make their conscience anxious and unsure until they finally content themselves with an assuaged conscience instead of a good conscience." They must "deceive their own conscience in order not to despair." Finally there are some who retreat to a "private virtuousness. Such people neither steal, nor murder,nor commit adultery, but do good according to their abilities. but... they must close their eyes and ears to the injustice around them. Only at the cost of self-deception can they keep their private blamelessness clean from the stains of responsible action in the world. In all that they do, what they fail to do will not let them rest."

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

"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"

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

"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."

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