Some recent Dietrich Bonhoeffer ramblings...

"And we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world estis deus non daretur. And this is just what we do recognize - before God! God [himself] compels us to recognize it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God...Before God and with God we live without God. God lets [himself] be pushed out of the world on the cross. [He] is weak and powerles in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which [he] is with us and helps us." (Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 360.)

"Efforts are made to prove to a world thus come of age that it cannot live without the tutelage of 'God'. Even though there has been surrender on all secular problems, there still remain the so-called 'ultimate questions' - death, guilt - to which only 'God' can give an answer, and because of which we need God and the church and the pastor." (Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 326.)

"We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know; God wants us to realize [his] presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved. (Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 311.)

"To talk of going down fighting like heroes in the face of certain defeat is not really heroic at all, but merely a refusal to face the future. The ultimate quesiton for a responsible [man] to ask is not how [he] is to extricate [himself] from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live." (Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 7)

"God is known by faith to be the ultimate reality, the source of my ethical concern will be that God be known as good [das Gute], even at the risk that I and the world are revealed as not good, but as bad through and through. All things appear as in a distorted mirror if they are not seen and recognized in God." ("Christ, Reality, and Good: Christ, Church and World, in Ethics, p. 48.)

"In Christ we are invited to participate in the reality of God and the reality of the world at the same time, the one not without the other. The reality of God is disclosed only as it places me completely into the reality of the world." ("Christ, Reality, and Good: Christ, Church, and World: in Ethics, p. 55.)

"Radicalism hates time. Compromise hates eternity.
Radicalism hates patience. Compromise hates decision.
Radicalism hates wisdom. Compromise hates simplicity.
Radicalism hates measure. Compromise hates the immeasurable.
Radicalism hates the real. Compromise hates the word."
("Ultimate and Penultimate Things" in Ethics, p. 156.)

"Perhap it was in those very times in which the world seemed to be relatively in order that estrangement from faith was especially deep and alarming." ("Ultimate and Penultimate Things" in Ethics, p. 164.)