Quotes about Belief

Sometimes the curses of the godless sound better than the hallelujahs of the pious."

Nowadays we often ask ourselves whether we still need the Church, whether we still need God. But this question, he said, is wrong. We are the ones who are questioned. The Church exists and God exists, and we are asked whether we are willing to be of service, for God needs us.

Religion was a dead, man-made thing, and at the heart of Christianity was something else entirely—God himself, alive.

Even if you were to knock my head off, God would still exist.

If it turns out that the thing we believed in or wanted to believe in is not true and real, we may experience a momentary letdown, but in the end we will be in a far better place than if we had blindly clung to something that was really just wish-fulfillment.

Religion to other religions. Then he came to his main point: the essence of Christianity is not about religion at all, but about the person of Christ.

Perhaps even more important in the Bonhoeffer family was acting upon what one said one believed. One must not only think clearly but must prove one's thoughts in action. If one was unprepared to live out what one claimed to believe, perhaps one didn't believe what one claimed after all!

There's no sense to expect the fruits where the Word really is no longer being preached.

After his own experience in Oxford, he knew that the Christian faith was not about how one behaved but about what one believed, and if one truly believed one could do nothing to achieve salvation but believe in Jesus, one's behavior would follow.

Jesus's rising from the dead was considered as impossible and staggering as such a thing would be considered today. People in the first century did not rise from the grave any more than they do now, in the twenty-first century.

There was only one reality, and Christ was Lord over all of it, or none.

We've gone all the way from foolishly accepting authority to foolishly rejecting all authority.