Dietrich Bonhoeffer Community Quotations

Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to each of us.

Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.

It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren.

The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and His work become the one and only thing that is vital between us.

Nothing can be more cruel than the leniency which abandons others to their sin. Nothing can be more compassionate than the severe reprimand which calls another Christian in one’s community back from the path of sin.

He who loves community destroys community; he who loves the brethren builds community.

The church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.

The person who’s in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community everywhere they go.

Intercessory prayer is the purifying bath into which the individual and the community must enter every day.

Jesus' call to bear the cross places all who follow him in the community of the forgiveness of sins. Forgiving sins is the Christ-suffering required of his disciples. It is required of all Christians.

The mark of solitude is silence, as speech is the mark of community. Silence and speech have the same inner correspondence and difference as do solitude and community. One does not exist without the other. Right speech comes out of silence, and right silence comes out of speech.

A community of Jesus which seeks to hide itself has ceased to follow him.

One who loves his community destroys community; one who loves its members builds community.

A person who loves community tends to destroy it. But a person who loves people creates community wherever he goes.

Every Christian community must realize that not only do the weak need the strong, but also that the strong cannot exist without the weak. The elimination of the weak is the death of fellowship.

How would you expect to find community while you intentionally withdraw from it at some point? The disobedient cannot believe; only the obedient believe.