Randall Bonhoeffer

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

Loc. 1636-37 | Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is; there is never loneliness.==========Loc. 1877 | the essence of Christianity is not about religion at all, but about the person of Christ.==========Loc. 1909-10 | He identified “the Greek spirit” or “humanism” as “the most severe enemy” that Christianity ever had.==========Loc. 1919-20 | he believed communicating what he knew theologically—whether to indifferent businessmen, teenagers, or younger children—was as important as the theology itself.==========Loc. 1979-80 | God is free not from human beings but for them. Christ is the word of God’s freedom.==========Loc. 2230 | They seemed to know what the answer was supposed to be and weren’t much concerned with how to get there.==========Loc. 2240-44 | No one remains alone in the dormitory. The unreservedness of life together makes one person open to another; in the conflict between determination for truth with all of its consequences and the will for community, the latter prevails. This is characteristic of all American thought, particularly as I have observed it in theology and the church; they do not see the radical claim of truth on the shaping of their lives. Community is therefore founded less on truth than on the spirit of “fairness.”==========Loc. 2247-51 | Not only quietness is lacking, but also the characteristic impulse towards the development of individual thought which is brought about in German universities by the more secluded life of the individual. Thus there is little intellectual competition and little intellectual ambition. This gives work in seminar lecture or discussion a very innocuous character. It cripples any radical, pertinent criticism. It is more a friendly exchange of opinion than a study in comprehension.==========Loc. 2284-88 | One big question continually attracting my attention in view of these facts is whether one here really can still speak about Christianity, . . . There’s no sense to expect the fruits where the Word really is no longer being preached. But then what becomes of Christianity per se? The enlightened American, rather than viewing all this with skepticism, instead welcomes it as an example of progress.==========Loc. 2297-99 | 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.==========Loc. 2969-70 | According to Bonhoeffer, the God of the Bible stood behind true authority and benevolent leadership, but opposed the Führer Principle and its advocate Adolf Hitler.==========

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Loc. 3001-2 | The Führer was no mere man or mere politician. He was something terrifying and authoritarian, self-contained and self-justifying, his own father and his own god. He was a symbol who symbolized himself, who had traded his soul for the zeitgeist.==========Loc. 3116-17 | Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too.==========Loc. 3133-38 | Some church leaders felt the church should make peace with the Nazis, who were strongly opposed to communism and “godlessness.” They believed the church should conform to the Nazi racial laws and the Führer Principle. They thought that by wedding the church to the state, they would restore the church and Germany to her former glory, before the Treaty of Versailles and the chaos and humiliation of the last twenty years. The moral degeneration of Weimar Germany was self-evident. Hadn’t Hitler spoken of restoring moral order to the nation? They didn’t agree with him on everything, but they believed that if the church’s prestige were restored, they might be able to influence him in the right direction.==========Loc. 3145-46 | the willingness of mainstream Protestant Christian leaders to consider adopting the Aryan Paragraph. They reasoned that Jews who were baptized Christians could form their own church==========Loc. 3212-14 | Bonhoeffer’s three conclusions—that the church must question the state, help the state’s victims, and work against the state, if necessary—were too much for almost everyone. But for him they were inescapable. In time, he would do all three.==========Loc. 3221-23 | Bonhoeffer knew that a church that did not stand with the Jews was not the church of Jesus Christ, and to evangelize people into a church that was not the church of Jesus Christ was foolishness and heresy.==========Loc. 3392-95 | It’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness? —ADOLF HITLER==========Loc. 3801-2 | He had become convinced that a church that was not willing to stand up for the Jews in its midst was not the real church of Jesus Christ.==========Loc. 3907-18 | after Niemöller had been imprisoned for eight years in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler, he penned these infamous words: First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Jew. And then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me.==========Loc. 4299-4302 | Pfaffen was a combination of the German words Pfarrer (pastor) and Affen (apes). Hitler, too, was known to use the term Pfaffen to refer to the Protestant pastors. ==========Loc. 4428-29 | Nat[ional] Socialism has brought about the end of the church in Germany and has pursued it single-mindedly. We can be grateful to them, in the way the Jews had to be grateful to Sennacherib.==========Loc. 4749-51 | What made him stand out, to some as an inspiration, to others as an oddity, and to others as an offense, was that he did not hope that God heard his prayers, but knew it. When

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he said they needed to humble themselves and listen to God’s commands and obey them, he was not posturing.==========Loc. 4827-31 | There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared, it is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God’s commandment, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of Almighty God, not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won when the way leads to the cross.==========Loc. 4940-42 | He felt that what was especially missing from the life of Christians in Germany was the day-to-day reality of dying to self, of following Christ with every ounce of one’s being in every moment, in every part of one’s life.==========Loc. 4944-45 | Christ must be brought into every square inch of the world and the culture, but one’s faith must be shining and bright and pure and robust.==========Loc. 4946-47 | Bonhoeffer advocated a Christianity that seemed too worldly for traditional Lutheran conservatives and too pietistic for theological liberals.==========Loc. 4957-58 | Christianity did in fact come from the East originally, but it has become so westernized and so permeated by civilized thought that, as we can now see, it is almost lost to us.==========Loc. 5166-67 | I only worry about being so afraid of what other people will think as to get bogged down instead of going forward.==========Loc. 5168-69 | the Sermon on the Mount seriously. Here alone lies the force that can blow all of this idiocy sky-high—like fireworks,==========Loc. 5169-71 | The restoration of the church must surely depend on a new kind of monasticism, which has nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising discipleship, following Christ according to the Sermon on the Mount. I believe the time has come to gather people together and do this.==========Loc. 5766-67 | deliver the Word of God as purely as possible, without feeling the need to help it along or to dress it up. It alone had the power to touch the human heart.==========Loc. 5768 | Let this power [God’s Word] speak for itself, unhindered.==========Loc. 5835-36 | “We live in strange times, but we should be eternally thankful that poor, oppressed Christianity is acquiring greater vitality than I have ever known in the course of my seventy years. What testimony to its real existence!”==========Loc. 5922-24 | Bonhoeffer was an eternal optimist because he believed what God said through the Scriptures. He knew that whatever befell him or the faithful brethren would open new opportunities in which God would operate, in which his provision would become clear.==========Loc. 6098-99 | the messianic attitude toward Hitler was widespread, and few dared to stand against it.==========

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Loc. 6115-16 | Idolatry and cowardice confront us on all sides, but the direst foe does not confront us, he is within us.==========Loc. 6176-78 | Hitler publicly maintained that the German-speaking populations of Europe belonged to Germany. The Austrian Anschluss had been portrayed not as an act of aggression, but as a benevolent father welcoming his children home.==========Loc. 6181-84 | Karl Barth wrote a letter to a friend that included the following sentence: “Every Czech soldier who fights and suffers will be doing so for us too, and I say this without reservation—he will also be doing it for the church of Jesus, which in the atmosphere of Hitler and Mussolini must become the victim of either ridicule or extermination.”==========Loc. 6278-79 | prayer was the display of the strongest possible activity.”==========Loc. 6393-96 | the Godesberg Declaration, signed by Dr. Werner. It declared that National Socialism was a natural continuation of “the work of Martin Luther” and stated that the “Christian faith is the unbridgeable religious opposite to Judaism.” It also said: “Supra-national and international church structure of a Roman Catholic or world-Protestant character is a political degeneration of Christianity.”==========Loc. 6420-21 | The figure of the Führer has brought a new obligation for the church too.”==========Loc. 6766 | Only the Word makes a true community.==========Loc. 6764-65 | Freedom for the church comes from the necessity of the Word of God.==========Loc. 6875-76 | Where God tears great gaps we should not try to fill them with human words. They should remain open.==========Loc. 7123-27 | Hitler and Germany had waited twenty-three years for this triumphant moment, and if ever Adolf Hitler became the Savior of the German nation, this was it. Many Germans who had reservations and misgivings about Hitler now changed their opinions. He had healed the unhealable wound of the First War and Versailles. He had restored a broken Germany to her former greatness. The old had passed way, and behold, he had made all things new. In many people’s eyes he was suddenly something like a god, the messiah for whom they had waited and prayed, and whose reign would last a thousand years.==========Loc. 7114-16 | Hitler, to whom mercy was a sign of subhuman weakness, arranged for the French to sign the terms of their surrender in the forest of Compiegne on the very spot where they had the Germans sign the armistice in 1918.==========Loc. 7710 | What shall I say when I am asked: And what did you do during that time?”==========Loc. 8732-33 | Bonhoeffer’s crucial role in the conspiracy, that of its theologian and moral compass. He helped them see precisely why they had to do what they were doing; why it was not expedient, but right; why it was God’s will.==========Loc. 8743-51 | “Who stands fast?” he asked. “Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God—the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call

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of God.” This was how Bonhoeffer saw what he was doing. He had theologically redefined the Christian life as something active, not reactive. It had nothing to do with avoiding sin or with merely talking or teaching or believing theological notions or principles or rules or tenets. It had everything to do with living one’s whole life in obedience to God’s call through action. It did not merely require a mind, but a body too. It was God’s call to be fully human, to live as human beings obedient to the one who had made us, which was the fulfillment of our destiny. It was not a cramped, compromised, circumspect life, but a life lived in a kind of wild, joyful, full-throated freedom—that was what it was to obey God.==========Loc. 8754 | German penchant for self-sacrifice and submission to authority had been used for evil ends by the Nazis; - Note | Your greatest strength, without balance in the Spirit, will become your greatest weakness.==========Loc. 8760-63 | If we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ’s large-heartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes, and by showing a real sympathy that springs, not from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behaviour. The Christian is called to sympathy and action, not in the first place by his own sufferings, but by the sufferings of his brethren, for whose sake Christ suffered.==========Loc. 8767-68 | Fundamentally we feel that we really belong to death already, and that every new day is a miracle.==========Loc. 8772-73 | It is we ourselves, and not outward circumstances, who make death what it can be, a death freely and voluntarily accepted.==========Loc. 8979-82 | As God today adds his “Yes” to your “Yes,” as he confirms your will with his will, and as he allows you, and approves of, your triumph and rejoicing and pride, he makes you at the same time instruments of his will and purpose both for yourselves and for others. In his unfathomable condescension God does add his “Yes” to yours; but by doing so, he creates out of your love something quite new—the holy estate of matrimony.==========Loc. 8986 | “It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”==========Loc. 9726-27 | “Pain is a holy angel, who shows treasures to men which otherwise remain forever hidden; through him men have become greater than through all joys of the world.”==========Loc. 10453-57 | Why are we so afraid when we think about death? . . . 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.==========Loc. 10460-61 | Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith.==========Loc. 10626 | “only the believer is obedient, and only he who obeys believes.”==========

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