Quotes about God

Bonhoeffer himself knew that in all of it, he was being utterly obedient to God. For him, that was the cantus firmus that made the dizzying complexities of it all perfectly coherent.

Little did these theologically ignorant Nazis know that the man with whom they were dealing had worked out a theological defense of deception against the likes of them. In some ways he was their worst nightmare. He was not a "worldly" or "compromised" pastor, but a pastor whose very devotion to God depended on his deceiving the evil powers ranged against him. He was serving God by taking them all for a long ride.

If we remove the idea of a supernatural God who is free to act in miraculous ways, we fall into the slough of despond inhabited by the scientistic naturalists. We essentially remove God himself from the Bible.

But we know that true grace comes to us by costly sacrifice. And if God was willing to go to the cross and endure such pain and absorb such a cost in order to save us, then we must live sacrificially as we serve others. Anyone who truly understands how God's grace comes to us will have a changed life. That's the gospel, not salvation by law, or by cheap grace, but by costly grace. Costly grace changes you from the inside out. Neither law nor cheap grace can do that.

If someone believes it is our faith that heals us and forgets that it is God who does it, we should ask that person how much faith Lazarus had. Remember, he was decomposing in a tomb when Jesus raised him from death. His faith obviously didn't matter. It was all God. It is God and God's grace that heals, not our prayers and not our "faith." Though we are exhorted by God to pray to him, we cannot compel him to do what we wish.

True faith is not a leap in the dark; it's a leap into the light. We shouldn't be afraid of the facts. If God is God, he is the God of reality and facts and science and history.

The church has only one altar, the altar of the Almighty... before which all creatures must kneel... Whoever seeks something other than this must keep away; he cannot join us in the house of God... The church has only one pulpit, and from that pulpit, faith in God will be preached, and no other faith, and no other will than the will of God, however well-intentioned.

Do not defend God's Word, but testify to it .

belongs to death, or, still more so, to the devil. We must buy it from him and return it to God, to whom it must really belong."—"If we inquire the will of God, free from all doubt and all mistrust, we shall discover it."—"Always give thanks for all things."—"Everything we cannot thank God for, we reproach him for.

He said when you read the Bible, you must think that here and now God is speaking with me... He wasn't as abstract as the Greek teachers and all the others. Rather, from the very beginning, he taught us that we had to read the Bible as it was directed at us, as the word of God directly to us. Not something general, not something generally applicable, but rather with a personal relationship to us.

philosophy was man's search for truth apart from God. It was a type of Barth's "religion," in which man himself tried to reach heaven or truth or God. But theology begins and ends with faith in Christ, who reveals himself to man; apart from such revelation, there could be no such thing as truth.

In his famous Letters and Papers from Prison, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know.