Quotes about Man

There are two aspects of man's existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art.

We have seen in this chapter how, in less than half a century, man's view of the universe, formed over millennia, has been transformed.

God desires that man should be. God does not wish to be alone. The meaning of existence is the conquest of loneliness, the acquisition of kinship and nearness.

The Spirit is Love expressed towards man as redeeming love, and the Spirit is truth, and the Spirit is the Holy Spirit. Redemption is inconceivable without truth and holiness.

Charity is the sweet and holy bond which links the soul with its Creator: it binds God with man and man with God.

Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.

In the work of conversion, the Holy Spirit renews the heart by giving it a divine temper, and it is one and the same divine temper thus wrought in the heart, that flows out in love both to God and man.

In order to this there must be something besides a general tendency to action; there must also be a particular tendency to that individual action.—If it should be asked, why the soul of man uses its activity, in such a manner as it does;

As God hath called every man, so let him walke, 1 Cor. 7. 19, 20.

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.

No priest, no theologian stood at the cradle in Bethlehem. And yet, all Christian theology has its origin in the wonder of all wonders that God became man. Alongside the brilliance of holy night there burns the fire of the unfathomable mystery of Christian theology."

Several times Bonhoeffer used Barth's image of the Tower of Babel as a picture of "religion," of man trying to reach heaven through his own efforts, which always failed.