Here was the rub: one must be more zealous to please God than to avoid sin. One must sacrifice oneself utterly to God's purposes, even to the point of possibly making moral mistakes. One's obedience to God must be forward-oriented and zealous and free, and to be a mere moralist or pietist would make such a life impossible.

We've gone all the way from foolishly accepting authority to foolishly rejecting all authority.

They (theological liberals)seemed to know what the answer was supposed to be and weren't much concerned with how to get there. They knew only that whatever answers the Fundamentalists came up with must be wrong.

Ideas have far-reaching consequences, and one must be ever so careful about what one allows to lodge in one's brain.

Bonhoeffer thought of death as the last station on the road to freedom.

It was not apathy or passiveness. For him, prayer was a display of the strongest possible activity.

It's so easy to become a grumbler, someone who condemns and carps at everything on principle and sees an ulterior motive behind it.