Quotations from Deidrich Bonhoeffer:

"Cheap grace is grace without the cross, grace without the living, incarnate Jesus Christ. Costly grace is the gospel. It costs people their lives. It cost the life of God's son, and nothing can be cheap to us which is costly to God." ----Discipleship, 1935

"Christ is really present only in the community. The Church is the presence of Christ, just as Christ is the presence of God. But our church today is bourgeois. The best proof is that the poor working classes have turned away from the church, whereas the bourgeois--the petty officials, the artisans and the merchants--have remained. When the community is split, is Christ himself divided?" -----"Sanctorum Communio", 1927

"The church is the church only when it exists for others. The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not by dominating but by helping and serving." ----Outline for a book, 1944

"We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled, in short, from the perspective of those who suffer. Mere waiting and looking is not Christian behavior. Christians are called to compassion and action." ----"After Ten Years: A letter to family and conspirators", 1942

"I discovered later, and am still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes, failures. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own suffering but those of God in the world. That, I think, is faith." ----"Letter to Eberhard Bethge", 1944

"Who am I? I have been told that i suffer the days of misfortune with serenity, smiles and pride, as someone accustomed to victory. Am I really what others say about me? Or am I only what I know of myself?...Bedeviled by anxiety, awaiting great events that might never occur, fearfully powerless and worried for friends far away, weary and empty in prayer, in thinking, in doing, weak and ready to take leave of it all. Who am I? They mock me these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, you know me, Oh God, you know I am yours." ----"Who Am I?", 1944