Bonhoeffer: On Life and Death

Here are some more thoughts along the theme of "Life and Death" that struck me during my Bonhoeffer reading of the past week.

Understanding Christ means taking Christ seriously. Understanding this claim means taking seriously his absolute claim on our commitment. And it is now of importance for us to clarify the seriousness of this matter and to extricate Christ from the secularization process in which he has been incorporated since the Enlightenment (83).

There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared, it is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God's commandment, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of Almighty God, not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won when the way leads to the cross (241).

In a world where success is the measure and justification of all things the figure of him who was sentenced and crucified remains a stranger and is at best the object of pity. The world will allow itself to be seduced only by success.... The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for it standard (361).

Death reveals that the world is not as it should be but that is stands in need of redemption. Christ alone is the conquering of death.... Only in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ has death been drawn into God's power, and it must now serve God's own aims (384).

Time belongs to death, or, still more so, to the devil. We must buy it from him and return it to God, to whom it must really belong (411).

And then, after a lifetime of intense devotion and focused faith, it is no wonder that Bonhoeffer's life ended with these words. When informed that it was his time to go to the scaffold, he replied, "This is the end. For me, the beginning of life."