Ethics

by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The crown jewel of Bonhoeffer's body of work, EthicsEthics is the culmination of his theological and personal odyssey. Based on careful reconstruction of the manuscripts, freshly and expertly translated and annotated, this new critical edition features an insightful Introduction by Clifford Green and an Afterword from the German edition's editors.

Though caught up in the vortex of momentous forces in the Nazi period, Bonhoeffer systematically envisioned a radically Christocentric, incarnational ethic for a post-war world, purposefully recasting Christians' relation to history, politics, and public life.

This edition allows scholars, theologians, ethicists, and serious Christians to appreciate the cogency and relevance of Bonhoeffer's vision.

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Hardcover, 593 pages

Published November 5th 2004 by Fortress Press (first published September 1st 1955)

tags: theology, spirituality, faith, philosophy, christianity, classics, religion, nonfiction, christian living, christian

Book Quotes

“No abyss of evil can remain hidden from him through whom the world is reconciled to God. But the abyss of the love of God[26.] embraces even the most abysmal godlessness of the world. In an incomprehensible reversal of all righteous and pious thought, God declares himself as guilty toward the world and thereby extinguishes the guilt of the world.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“So also the church of Jesus Christ is the place [Ort]—that is, the space [Raum]—in the world where the reign of Jesus Christ over the whole world is to be demonstrated and proclaimed. This space of the church does not, therefore, exist just for itself, but its existence is already always something that reaches far beyond it. This is because it is not the space of a cult[57] that would have to fight for its own existence in the world. Rather, the space of the church is the place where witness is given to the foundation of all reality in Jesus Christ. The church is the place where it is proclaimed and taken seriously that God has reconciled the world to himself in Christ,[58] that God so loved the world that God gave his Son for it.[59] The space of the church is not there in order to fight with the world for a piece of its territory, but precisely to testify to the world that it is still the world, namely, the world that is loved and reconciled by God. It is not true that the church intends to or must spread its space out over the space of the world. It desires no more space than it needs to serve the world with its witness to Jesus Christ and to the world’sreconciliation to God through Jesus Christ. The church can only defend its own space by fighting, not for space, but for the salvation of the world. Otherwise the church becomes a “religious society”[60] that fights in its own interest and thus has ceased to be the church of God in the world. So the first task given to those who belong to the church of God is not to be something for themselves, for example, by creating a religious organization or leading a pious life, but to be witnesses of Jesus Christto the world. For this the Holy Spirit equips those to whom the Spirit comes. Of course, it is presupposed that such a witness to the world can only happen in the right way when it comes out of sanctified life in God’s church-community.[61] Nevertheless, true sanctified life in the church-community of God is distinguished[62] from any pious imitation by the fact that it leads the believer at the same time into witness to the world. Where that witness has become silent it is a sign of inner decay in the church-community, just as failure to bear fruit is a sign that a tree is dying.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“The weaknesses of human nature appear more clearly in a storm than in the quiet flow of calmer times. Among the overwhelming majority of people, anxiety, greed,[37.] lack of independence, and brutality show themselves to be the mainspring of behavior in the face of unsuspected chance and threats. At such a time the tyrannical despiser of humanity[38.] easily makes use of the meanness of the human heart by nourishing it and giving it other names. Anxiety is called responsibility; greed is called industriousness;[39.] lack of independence becomes solidarity; brutality becomes masterfulness.[40.]”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Everything would be spoiled if we were to reserve Christ for the church while granting the world only some law, Christian though it may be.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Since the appearance of Christ, ethics can be concerned with only one thing: to partake in the reality of the fulfilled will of God.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“The form of the crucified disarms all thinking aimed at success, for it is a denial of judgment. Neither the triumph of the successful, nor bitter hatred of the successful by those who fail, can finally cope with the world. Jesus is certainly no advocate for the successful in history, but neither does he lead the revolt of the failures [gescheiterte Existenzen][58.] against the successful.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Over against the successful, God sanctifies pain, lowliness, failure, poverty, loneliness, and despair in the cross of Christ. Not that all this has value in itself; it is made holy by the love of God, who takes it all and bears it as judgment. The Yes of God to the cross is judgment on the successful. But the unsuccessful must realize that it is not their lack of success, not their place as pariahs[59.] as such, that lets them standbefore God, but only their acceptance of the judgment of divine love.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“One doesn’t cling anxiously to life, but neither does one throw it lightly away. One is content with measured time and does not attribute eternity to earthly things. One leaves to death the limited right that it still has. But one expects the new human being and the new world only frombeyond death, from the power that has conquered death.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“church must bear witness to Jesus Christ as living lord, and it must do so in a world that has turned away from Christ after knowing him.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“all thinking about human beings without Christ is unfruitful abstraction. The counterimage to the human being taken up into the form of Christ is the human being as self-creator, self-judge, and self-renewer; these people bypass their true humanity and therefore, sooner or later, destroy themselves.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“To be conformed to the one who has become human—that is what being really human means.[77.]”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Those who wish even to focus on the problem of a Christian ethic are faced with an outrageous demand—from the outset they must give up, as inappropriate to this topic, the very two questions that led them to deal with the ethical problem: “How can I be good?” and “How can I do something good?”[2] Instead they must ask the wholly other, completely different question: what is the will of God?”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Ethics as formation, then, is the venture of speaking about the form of Christ taking form in our world neither abstractly nor casuistically, neither programmatically nor purely reflectively.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Through the life and death of Jesus Christ, history becomes not the transient bearer of eternal values but, for the first time, thoroughly temporal.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“The proper relation of the Church to the world cannot be deduced from natural law or rational law or from universal human rights, but only from the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

topics: Religion Christianity

“At the same time, however, for antiquity the holiest sign of the presence of God, the cross, is the symbol of utter disgrace and remoteness from God. Antiquity becomes our historical heritage in this twofold relationship to Christ, in its nearness and its opposition to Christ.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Nietzsche could have arisen only from the soil of the German Reformation. Here, the contradiction between the natural and grace is starkly opposed to the reconciliation of nature with grace in the Roman heritage.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“But because Christ is both the incarnate and the crucified, and wills to be recognized as both equally, the proper reception of the historical heritage of antiquity is still an open task for the West.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Every attempt to save the West that excludes one of the Western peoples [Völker] is condemned to failure.[46]”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“The Roman church’s unmistakable claim is that there is only one church and only one faith and that Christendom needs a visible head, a chief shepherd, to guide the church and to care for the faithful with fatherly care. The longing for a lost Western empire, longing for the corpus christianum in which emperor and pope together are guardians of the unity of the Christian West, cannot fade away as long as there is a papacy.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian. He was also a participant in the German Resistance movement against Nazism, a founding member of the Confessing Church. His involvement in plans by members of the Abwehr (the German Military Intelligence Office) to assassinate Adolf Hitler resulted in his arrest in April 1943 and his subsequent execution by hanging in April 1945, shortly before the war's end.

Overshadowed by his life and death, his theology and his view of Christianity's role in the secular world has nevertheless remained very influential.

He seems to have undergone something of a personal conversion from a theologian primarily attracted to the intellectual side of Christianity to a dedicated man of faith, resolved to carry out the teaching of Christ as he found it revealed in the Gospels.
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