Quotes about Responsibility

The wish to have everything by one's own power is false pride. Even what one owes to others belongs nevertheless to oneself and is a piece of one's own life, and the desire to calculate what one has 'earned' on one's own and what one owes to others is surely not Christian and is a futile undertaking besides. With what one is in oneself and what one receives, a person is a whole.

I've just come across this in the Imitation of Christ: Custodi diligenter cellam tuam, et custodiet te ('Take good care of your cell, and it will take care of you'). — May God keep us in faith.

As far as infant baptism is concerned, it must be insisted that the sacrament should be administered only where there is a firm faith present which remembers Christ's deed of salvation wrought for us once and for all. That can only happen in a living Christian community. To baptize infants without a Church is not only an abuse of the sacrament, it betokens a disgusting frivolity in dealing with the souls of the children themselves. For baptism can never be repeated.

Every moment and every situation challenges us to action and to obedience. We have literally no time to sit down and ask ourselves whether so-and-so is our neighbour or not. We must get into action and obey — we must behave like a neighbour to him.

That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin.

It is precisely when a person, who is borne down by inner emptiness and weariness or a sense of personal unworthiness, feels that he would like to withdraw from his task, that he should learn what it means to have a duty to perform in the fellowship, and

It is only when he is a burden that another person is really a brother and not merely an object to be manipulated.

We can of course shake off the burden which is laid upon us, but only find that we have a still heavier burden to carry — a yoke of our own choosing, the yoke of our self.

To bear the burden of the other person means involvement with the created reality of the other, to accept and affirm it, and, in bearing with it, to break through to the point where we take joy ink.

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.

Now he felt that it would be for him an illegitimate escape from responsibility if he were to avoid the growing contacts with the political and military resistance movement. Not that everyone ought to act as he did, but in his position he saw no possibility of escape any longer into sinlessness and innocence. The sins of the bourgeoisie became clear in the flight from responsibility.

To finally take up his bourgeois responsibility as a German, he went to the spot where God had placed him through birth and talents. He never considered rejecting his position in life.