Home > Work > Ethics (Works, # 6)
61 " But because Christ is both the incarnate and the crucified, and wills to be recognized as both equally, the proper reception of the historical heritage of antiquity is still an open task for the West. "
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Ethics (Works, # 6)
62 " Every attempt to save the West that excludes one of the Western peoples [Völker] is condemned to failure.[46] "
63 " The Roman church’s unmistakable claim is that there is only one church and only one faith and that Christendom needs a visible head, a chief shepherd, to guide the church and to care for the faithful with fatherly care. The longing for a lost Western empire, longing for the corpus christianum in which emperor and pope together are guardians of the unity of the Christian West, cannot fade away as long as there is a papacy. "
64 " It is solely the form of Christ that matters, not any form besides Christ’s own. The church is the human being who has become human, has been judged, and has been awakened to new life in Christ. "
65 " The most general formulation of rights given with the natural is, in the words of Roman law, suum cuique, to each his own. "
66 " There is only one church, the church of faith ruled by the word of Jesus Christ alone. This is the true catholic church that has never disappeared and is still concealed in the church of Rome. It is the body of Christ—corpus Christi. It is the true unity of the West. "
67 " Without God, all seeing and perceiving of things and laws become abstraction, a separation from both origin and goal. "
68 " The Reformation biblical faith in God[50] had radically desacralized [entgöttert] the world. Thus the ground was prepared in which rational and empirical science could blossom; and even though the natural scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were believing Christians, the disappearance of faith in God left behind only a rationalized and mechanized world.[51] "
69 " The whole of the past is embraced by the word “forgiveness”; the whole of the future is preserved in the faithfulness of God. "
70 " The failure of reasonable people is appalling; they cannot manage to see either the abyss of evil or the abyss of holiness. With the best intentions they believe that, with a little reason, they can pull back together a structure that has come apart at the joints. In their defective vision they want to be fair to both sides, and so they are crushed between the colliding forces without having accomplished anything at all. Bitterly disappointed that the world is so unreasonable, they see themselves condemned to ineffectiveness. They withdraw in resignation or fall helplessly captive to the stronger party. "
71 " world. The mandate of the church embraces all people as they live within all the other mandates. Since a person is at the same time worker, spouse, and citizen, since one mandate overlaps with the others, and since all the mandates need to be fulfilled at the same time, so the church mandate reaches into all the other mandates. "
72 " He opposed the militaristic nationalism of the new Germany, rooted in “blood and soil,” even as the German Evangelical Church and most of its leaders succumbed to the new ideology. By the early period of the war, the embrace of Nazi ideology at all levels of society had led to the complete corruption of social and personal ethical behavior among most Germans. "
73 " The fact that he was ashamed when he was discovered praying was for Kant an argument against prayer. He failed to see that prayer by its very nature is a matter for the strictest privacy, and he failed to perceive the fundamental significance of shame for human existence. "
74 " The hungry person needs bread, the homeless person needs shelter, the one deprived of rights needs justice, the lonely person needs community, the undisciplined one needs order, and the slave needs freedom” (p. 97). Treating human beings as things, commodities, and machines is a special hindrance to receiving Christ "