Quotes about Church
In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin.
— 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
It is solely the form of Christ that matters, not any form besides Christ's own. The church is the human being who has become human, has been judged, and has been awakened to new life in Christ.
— 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
The existence of any Christian communal life essentially depends on whether or not it succeeds at the right time in promoting the ability to distinguish between a human ideal and God's reality, between spiritual and emotional community.
— 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
Since I as a Christian cannot live without the church, since I owe my life to the church and now belong to it, so my merits are now no longer my own, but belong to the church.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The issue can no longer be evaded. It is becoming clearer every day that the most urgent problem besetting our Church is this: How can we live the Christian life in the modern world?
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The mandate of the church embraces all people as they live within all the other mandates. Since a person is at the same time worker, spouse, and citizen, since one mandate overlaps with the others, and since all the mandates need to be fulfilled at the same time, so the church mandate reaches into all the other mandates.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
What is at stake is by no means the question of whether our German members of congregations can still tolerate church fellowship with the Jews. It is rather the risk of Christian preaching to say: here is the church, where Jew and German stand together under the Word of God; here is the proof whether a church is still the church or not.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
He opposed the militaristic nationalism of the new Germany, rooted in "blood and soil," even as the German Evangelical Church and most of its leaders succumbed to the new ideology. By the early period of the war, the embrace of Nazi ideology at all levels of society had led to the complete corruption of social and personal ethical behavior among most Germans.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer