LETTERS & PAPERS FROM PRISON

THE FOLLOWING QUOTATIONS ARE TAKEN FROM DIETRICH BONHOEFFER'S LETTERS & PAPERS FROM PRISON (Fontana Books, February 1969 ed.), unless stated otherwise.

LIFE IN PRISON
Bonhoeffer speaks of coping with life in prison, his love for the Psalms and longs to be with others: "I am not a born Trappist!" (Letter to his parents, 15.5.1943)
" You really must not worry about me, for I'm getting on uncommonly well, and you would be astonished if you came to see me. They keep on telling me that I am 'radiating so much peace around me', and that I am 'ever so cheerful'. Very flattering, no doubt, but I'm afraid I don't always feel like that myself " (30.4.1944)

HERE AND NOW
"Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable" (134)
"Surely there has never been a generation in the course of human history with so little ground under its feet as our own. Every conceivable alternative seems equally intolerable. We try to escape from the present by looking entirely to the past or the future for our inspiration" (134)
"Something which puzzles me and seems to puzzle many others as well is, how quickly we forget about a night's bombing. Even a few minutes after the all clear, everything we were thinking about while the raid was on seems to vanish into thin air. With Luther a flash of lightning was enough to alter the whole course of his life for years to come ... Nothing holds us, nothing is firm. Everything is here to-day and gone to-morrow ... You put it very well in a recent letter of yours: people feel at home so quickly and so shamelessly! I am going to pinch that sentence from you and make use of it myself!" (1.2.1944)
THE UNEDUCATED MASSES
" ... have you noticed how difficult it is for the uneducated to make up their minds about things, and how they let themselves be influenced by the most trifling considerations?e I think it is most extraordinary. The difference between thinking about things and about persons is something that has to be learnt, and many never learn it" (1.2.1944)
ETHICS
"The great masquerade of evil has wrought havoc with all our ethical preconceptions. This appearance of evil in the guise of light, beneficence and historical necessity is utterly bewildering to anyone nurtured in our traditional ethical systems. But for the Christian who frames his life on the Bible it simply confirms the radical evilness of evil." (135)
GOD OF THE GAPS
"Religious people speak of God when human perception is (often just from laziness) at an end, or human resources fail: it is really always the Deus ex machina they call to their aid, either for the so-called solving of insoluble problems or as support in human failure always, that is to say, helping out human weakness or on the borders of human existence. Of necessity, that can only go on until men can, by their own strength, push those borders a little further, so that God becomes superfluous as a Deus ex machina" (30.4.1944)
ETHICAL FAILURE
D Bonhoeffer warns against an ethics based on one's reason, principles, conscience, freedom or virtue and bemoans the lack of civil courage
"The failure of rationalism is evident. With the best of intentions, but with a naive lack of realism, the rationalist imagines that a small dose of reason will be enough to put the world right... Disappointed by the irrationality of the world, he realises at last his futility, retires from the fray, and weakly surrenders to the winning side" (135)
"The fanatic imagines that his moral purity will prove a match for the power of evil, but like a bull he goes for the red rag instead of the man who carries it, grows weary and succumbs. He becomes entangled with non-essentials and falls into the trap set by the superior ingenuity of his adversary" (135)
"the man of freedom...must beware lest his freedom should become his own undoing. For in choosing the lesser of two evils he may fail to see that the greater evil he seeks to avoid may prove the lesser. Here we have the raw material of tragedy" (136)
"it is easier by far to act on abstract principle than from concrete responsibility"

ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY
"We must be determined not to be outraged critics or mere opportunists. We must take our full share of responsibility for the moulding of history, whether it be as victors or vanquished" (138)
"The ultimate question the man of responsibility asks is not, How can I extricate myself heroically from the affair? but, How is the coming generation to live?" (138f.)
LISTENING
"Those bombed out the previous night came to me next morning for a little comfort. I am afraid however I make a bad comforter: I can listen all right, but hardly ever find anything to say" (1.2.1944)
A NEW PERSPECTIVE
"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 reviled – in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.” (gleaned from Faith in Politics by Kevin Rudd)
REFLECTING ON HIMSELF
"I cannot imagine myself ever having lived up in the mountains or by the sea; it just does not fit my nature. It is the hills of central Germany, the Harz Mountains, the Thuringian forest, the Weserberge, which belong to me and have made me what I am" (12.2.1944)

THE WORLD HAS COME OF AGE AND SO MUST THE CHURCH
"I have come to be doubtful even about talking of 'borders of human existence'. Is even death today, since men are scarcely afraid of it any more, and sin, which they scarcely understand any more, still a genuine borderline? It always seems to me that in talking thus we are only seeking frantically to make room for God. I should like to speak of God not on the borders of life but at its centre, not in weakness but in strength, not, therefore, in man's suffering and death but in his life and prosperity. On the borders it seems to me better to hold our peace and leave the problem unsolved. Belief in the Resurrection is not the solution of the problem of death. The 'beyond' of God is not the beyond of our perceptive faculties. The transcendence of theory based on perception has nothing to do with the transcendence of God. God is the 'beyond' in the midst of our life. The Church stands not where human powers give out, on the borders, but in the centre of the village. That is the way it is in the Old Testament, and in this sense we still read the New Testament far too little on the basis of the Old" (30.4.1944)