Frases de Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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“O teste de moralidade de uma sociedade é o que ela faz com suas crianças.”

“O próprio Jesus não tentou converter os dois ladrões na cruz; Ele esperou até que um deles se virasse para ele.”

“Se você tomar o trem errado, de nada adiantará andar pelo corredor no sentido contrário.”

“Não somos Cristo, mas se quisermos ser cristãos, tal importaria que participássemos da amplitude do coração de Cristo em ação responsável, que em liberdade apanha a hora exata e enfrenta o perigo e se dispõe a um comparecer autêntico, que não é ditado pelo medo, mas brota do amor libertador e redentor de Cristo para com todos os que sofrem.”

“Creio que nem mesmo nossas faltas e erros são em vão e que para Deus não será mais difícil arranjar-se com eles do que arranjar-se com nossas supostas obras boas.”

“É a natureza, e a vantagem, das pessoas fortes levantarem as questões cruciais e formar uma opinião clara sobre elas. Os fracos sempre têm que decidir entre alternativas que não são suas.”

“Creio que Deus não é um mero fato independente de todos os tempos, mas que ele espera por oração sinceras e ações responsáveis e as responde.”

“A acção não surge do pensamento, mas de uma disposição para assumir responsabilidades.”

“Pior que fazer o mal é o ser mal.”

“A essência do otimismo é que não leva em conta o presente, sendo uma fonte da inspiração, da vitalidade e da esperança que os outros abdicaram. O otimimo permite que uma pessoa mantenha sua cabeça erguida, para reivindicar o futuro pra si mesma e não abandoná-lo.”

“Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.”

“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God. God will be constantly crossing our paths and canceling our plans by sending us people with claims and petitions.”

“The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ.”

“So many people come to church with a genuine desire to hear what we have to say, yet they are always going back home with the uncomfortable feeling that we are making it too difficult for them to come to Jesus.”

“Being free means "being free for the other," because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free”

“If my sinfulness appears to me in any way smaller or less detestable in comparison with the sins of others, I am still not recognizing my sinfulness at all.”

“Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.”

“No sacrifice which a lover would make for his beloved is too great for us to make for our enemy.”

“The early morning belongs to the Church of the risen Christ. At the break of light it remembers the morning on which death and sin lay prostrate in defeat and new life and salvation were given to mankind”

“Anything I cannot thank God for for the sake of Christ, I may not thank God for at all; to do so would be sin…. We cannot rightly acknowledge the gifts of God unless we acknowledge the Mediator for whose sake alone they are given to us.”

“A pastor should never complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men.”

“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.”

“Beside the staff of life,
taken and fashioned from the heavy earth,
beside our marriage, work, and war
the free man, too, will live and grow towards the sun.
Not the ripe fruit alone —
blossom is lovely, too.
Does blossom only serve the fruit,
or does fruit only serve the blossom —
who knows?
But both are given to us.”

“The outcome of the Reformation was the victory, not of Luther's perception of grace in all its purity and costliness, but of the vigilant religious instinct of man for the place where grace is to be obtained at the cheapest price.”

“When we judge other people we confront them in a spirit of detachment, observing and reflecting as it were from the outside. But love has neither time nor opportunity for this. If we love, we can never observe the other person with detachment, for he is always and at every moment a living claim to our love and service.”

“The call to the cloister demanded of Luther the complete surrender of his life. But God shattered all his hopes. He showed him through the Scriptures that the following of Christ is not the achievement or merit of a select few, but the divine command to all Christians without distinction. Monasticism had transformed the humble work of discipleship into the meritorious activity of the saints, and the self-renunciation of discipleship into the flagrant spiritual self-assertion of the "religious."”

“Cheap grace means justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything they say, and so everything can remain as it was before. … Well, then, let the Christian live like the rest of the world, let him model himself on the world’s standards in every sphere of life, and not presumptuously aspire to live a different life under grace from his old life under sin. That was the heresy of the enthusiasts, the Anabaptists and their kind. … Let him live like the rest of the world! Of course he would like to go and do something extraordinary, and it does demand a good deal of self-restraint to refrain from the attempt and content himself with living as the world lives. Yet it is imperative for the Christian to achieve renunciation, to practice self-effacement.”

“Distant or near,
in joy or in sorrow,
each in the other
sees his true helper
to brotherly freedom.”

“Distinction between person and office is wholly alien to the teaching of Jesus. He says nothing about that. He addresses his disciples as men who have left all to follow him, and the precept of non-violence applies equally to private life and official duty. He is the Lord of all life, and demands undivided allegiance.”

“The activity will prove to be "peculiar" by leading the active person into Christ's own passion. This activity itself is perpetual suffering and enduring. In it, Christ is suffered by his disciple. If this is not the case, it is not the activity Jesus intended. In this way, the "extraordinary" is the fulfilling of the law, the keeping of the commandments.”

“Jesus offers his disciples a simple rule of thumb which will enable even the least sophisticated of them to tell whether his intercourse with others is on the right lines or not. All he need do is to say “I” instead of “Thou,” and put himself in the other man’s place.”

“To everyone God is the kind of God he believes in.”

“As Christianity spread, and the Church became more secularized, this realization of the costliness of grace gradually faded. The world was Christianized, and grace became its common property. It was to be had at low cost. Yet the Church of Rome did not altogether lose the earlier vision. It is highly significant that the Church was astute enough to find room for the monastic movement … Thus monasticism became a living protest against the secularization of Christianity and the cheapening of grace. … Monasticism was represented as an individual achievement which the mass of the laity could not be expected to emulate. By thus limiting the application of the commandments of Jesus to a restricted group of specialists, the Church evolved the fatal conception of the double standard.”

“Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all he has. It is the pearl of great price to by which the merchant will sell all his goods.”

“By our enemies Jesus means those who are quite intractable and utterly unresponsive to our love.”

““Reformation theology” … pretends to prefer to Pharasaic ostentation a modest invisibility, which in practice means conformity to the world. When that happens, the hallmark of the Church becomes justitia civilis instead of extraordinary visibility. The very failure of the light to shine becomes the touchstone of our Christianity.”

“Christian love draws no distinction between one enemy and another, except that the more bitter our enemy’s hatred, the greater his need of love. Be his enmity political or religious, he has nothing to expect from a follower of Jesus but unqualified love. In such love there is no inner discord between private person and official capacity. In both we are disciples of Christ, or we are not Christians at all.”

“If when we judged others, our real motive was to destroy evil, we should look for evil where it is certain to be found, and that is in our own hearts. But if we are on the look-out for evil in others, our real motive is obviously to justify ourselves.”

“The πξρισσον [extraordinary] never merges into the το αυτο [merely personal]. That was the fatal mistake of the false Protestant ethic which diluted Christian love into patriotism, loyalty to friends, and industriousness, which in short, perverted the better righteousness into justitia civilis.”