Bonhoeffer Quotes

Below I will list some quotes from Bonhoeffer that I've gotten from reading his biography. Check 'em out.

Against a political party in Germany that invoked the name of God to win votes:
"We read that a government has proclaimed that a whole nation is to be saved from collapse--by the Christian worldview. So we, individually and as a nation, are escaping from an inconceivable final catastrophe. 'In the name of God, amen,' is again to be the slogan, religion is again to be cultivated, and the Christian view of life is to be spread. How very meager, weak and pitiful it all sounds: do we believe that we will truly let ourselves be taken in by this 'In the name of God, amen'? That all our actions shall be governed by it? That we, rich and pooor, Germans and French, will allow ourselves to be united by the name of God? Or is there not concealed behind our religious trends our ungovernable urge toward...power--in the name of God to do what we want, and in the name of the Christian worldview to stir up and play off one people against another?...Our disobedience is not that we are so irreligious, but that we are so very glad to be religious...very relieved when some government proclaims the Christian worldview...so that the more pious we are, the less we let ourselves be told that God is dangerous, that God will not be mocked."

As he saw the onset of Hitler's rule in Germany and the church's acquiescence to it:
"We should not be surprised if times return for our church, too, when the blood of martyrs will be called for. But this blood, if we really have the courage and the fidelity to shed it, will not be so innocent and clear as that of the first witnesses. On our blood a great guilt would lie: that of the useless servant."

At a celebration of the anniversary of the Reformation:
"It should gradually have become clear to us that we are in the twelfth hour of the life of our Protestant church, so that not much more time remains before it is decided whether everything is over or weather a new day is to begin....The church that is celebrating the Reformation does not let Luther rest in peace, he must be dragged in to justify all the evil that is taking place in the church. The dead man is propped up in our churches, made to strech out his hands and point to this church, and repeat with self-confident pathos: Here I stand, I can do no other....It is simply untrue, or it is unpardonable frivolity and pride, when we hide behind this statement. We can do otherwise!"

At an ecumenical conference:
"We are more fond of our own thougths than of the thoughts of the Bible. We no longer read the Bible seriously; we no longer read it against ourselves, but only for ourselves."

At an ecumenical conference:
"The church must be able to say the Word of God, the word of authority, here and now, in the most concrete way possible, from knowledge of the situation, or else it will say something else, something different and human, the word of impotence."