"The blood of the martyrs
is the seed of the Church."
--Tertullian
These quotes are from the Introduction
to Life Together.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "life and death and his writings, which throb with the simple, downright faith of one who has met Jesus Christ and accepted the ultimate consequences of that." p 7.
Everything that Bonhoeffer wrote was "characterized" by "an instant realism, a 'turning away from the phraseological to the real.' For him Christianity could never be merely intellectual theory, doctrine divorced from life... but always it must be... action." p 8.
"The sin of respectable people reveals itself in flight from responsibility. He [Bonhoeffer] saw that sin falling upon him and he took his stand." p 11.
"Bonhoeffer always seemed to me to spread an atmosphere of happiness and joy over the least incident and profound gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive... He was the one of the very few persons I have ever met for whom God was real and always near... On Sunday, April 8, 1945, Pastor Bonhoeffer conducted a little service of worship and spoke to us in a way that went to the heart of all of us. He found just the right words to express the spirit of our imprisonment, the thoughts and the resolutions it had brought us. He had hardly ended his prayer when the door opened and two civilians entered. They said, 'Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us.' That had only one meaning for all prisoners--the gallows. We said good-by to him. He took me aside: 'This is the end, but for me it is the beginning of life.' The next day he was hanged in Flossenburg.
The text on which he spoke on that last day was 'With his stripes are we healed.'" p 13.
Bonhoeffer died as a martyr during WWII.
No comments:
Post a Comment