Daily Archives: April 9, 2009

Bodily Presence

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“Jesus’ community with his disciples was all-encompassing, extending to all areas of life. The individual’s entire life was lived within this community of the disciples. And this community is a living witness to the bodily humanity of the Son of God. The bodily presence of the Son of God demands bodily commitment to him and with him throughout one’s daily life. With all our bodily living, existence, we belong to him who took on a human body for our sake. In following him, the disciple is inseparably linked to the body of Jesus.”

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship (DBW4), 232.

The Time of Grace

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“The time of grace is the final time in the sense that one can never reckon with a further, future word beyond the word of God that confronts me now. There is a time of God’s permission, waiting, and preparation; and there is an ultimate time that judges and breaks off the penultimate. In order to hear the ultimate word, Luther had to go through the monastery; Paul had to go through his piety toward the law; even the thief ‘had’ to go through conviction and the cross. They had to travel a road, to walk the full length of the way through penultimate things; they had to sink to their knees under the burden of these things. And yet the ultimate word was not a crowning but a complete break with the penultimate.”

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethic (DBW6), 151.

Love and Community

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“Love finds community without seeking it, or precisely because it does not seek it. Those who want to lose their lives will save them. Those who want to lose their lives will save them. This is the only way in which surrendering myself to what God wills for my neighbor really leads to the community of the sanctorum communio established by God; to realize each person serves as an instrument of God.  Thus we find that the Christian community of love has a unique sociological structure: the mutual love of the saints does indeed constitute ‘community’ as an end in itself, that is, community in the strict sense of the word.”

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio (DBW1), 176.

Day of Bonhoeffer

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Today, April 9 marks the sixty-fourth anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom at the hands of the Nazi authorities in the closing years of World War II. Bonhoeffer has become, in the decades since his death, an iconic figure both within and outside the ecumenical Christian community. His writings and life have marked modern Christianity in an indelible way.

In recognition of Bonhoeffer’s own witness and his massive contribution to the task of Christian theology, today will be dedicated solely to quotes from, and comments on Bonhoeffer’s writings. He is a saint who is always worthy of memory, no matter what avenue draws us to reflect upon him.

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