Quotes about Unity
The purity of unison singing, unaffected by alien motives of musical techniques, the clarity, unspoiled by the attempt to give musical art an autonomy of its own apart from the words, the simplicity and frugality, the humaneness and warmth of this way of singing is the essence of all congregational singing.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Singing together [das gemeinsame Lied] joins the praying of the Psalms and the reading of the Scriptures. In this, the voice of the church is heard in praise, thanksgiving, and intercession.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Scriptures speak of three kinds of community at the table that Jesus keeps with his own: the daily breaking of bread together at meals, the breaking of bread together at the Lord's Supper, and the final breaking of bread together in the reign of God.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The believer need not feel any shame when yearning for the physical presence of other Christians, as if one were still living too much in the flesh. A human being is created as a body; the Son of God appeared on earth in the body for our sake and was raised in the body.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
From this it follows that the Body of Christ is the place of acceptance, the place of atonement and peace between God and man. God finds man in the Body of Christ, and man finds himself accepted by God in that same body.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Holy Scripture is more than a watchword. It is also more than 'light for today'. It is God's revealed Word for all men, for all times. Holy Scripture does not consist of individual passages; it is a unit and is intended to be used as such.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Every attempt to save the West that excludes one of the Western peoples [Völker] is condemned to failure.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Roman church's unmistakable claim is that there is only one church and only one faith and that Christendom needs a visible head, a chief shepherd, to guide the church and to care for the faithful with fatherly care. The longing for a lost Western empire, longing for the corpus christianum in which emperor and pope together are guardians of the unity of the Christian West, cannot fade away as long as there is a papacy.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
He who holds his tongue in check controls both mind and body. Thus it must be a decisive rule of every Christian fellowship that each individual is prohibited from saying much that occurs to him.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
There is only one church, the church of faith ruled by the word of Jesus Christ alone. This is the true catholic church that has never disappeared and is still concealed in the church of Rome. It is the body of Christ—corpus Christi. It is the true unity of the West.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Even the most personal prayer no longer belongs to the individual, but to the church that gave birth to this person and through which this individual lives.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer