Recently, I went to my local movie theater with my father and younger sister to see the movie “Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.” produced by Angel Studios. I had been looking forward to this movie for quite some time. Although I must admit that I have not fully read any of Bonhoeffer’s books, I do know about him and what he did, and I also have been exposed to many of the things he said through quotations either from Facebook quotes or in other books I have read. The movie, in my opinion, was quite good. Christian films have had a bad reputation of being low-budget productions with bad acting or just an oversaturation of casting David White and Kevin Sorbo. For most Christian movies, nobody likes them, not even Christians. However, Bonhoeffer is another movie in a trend I’m seeing in the reversal of bad Christian content. Since The Chosen started debuting as a seasonal television show, we’ve gotten great movies like Sound Of Freedom, His Only Son, and Bonhoeffer which are all strikingly good content. I often forgot I was watching a “Christian Movie” as I continued to deplete my popcorn bucket. This isn’t because of a lack of faith elements. It is, after all, a movie about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However, what I mean is that the acting, writing, and production were up to the standard of your average well-produced film. It didn’t have that PureFlix Cringe vibe to it a lot of movies do. I don’t know if this and other examples I cited are due to the fact that they are based on true stories or what? But I really appreciated the film. This blog post is simply an anthology of quotes from Bonhoeffer I have come across that I really like. All quotes have been retrieved from AZQuotes.com
“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
“The biggest mistake you can make in your life is to be always afraid of making a mistake.”
“When you read the Bible, you must think that here and now, God is speaking with me.”
“Faith without works is not faith at all, but a simple lack of obedience to God.”
“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God, who will thwart our plans and frustrate our ways time and again, even daily, by sending people across our path with their demands and requests. We can, then, pass them by, preoccupied with our important daily tasks, just as the priest-perhaps reading the Bible-passed by the man who had fallen among robbers. When we do that, we pass by the visible sign of the Cross raised in our lives to show us that God’s way, and not our own, is what counts.”
“It is only because he became like us that we can become like him.”
“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
I do plan to rectify my lack of Bonhoeffer reading in the future. In fact, when I wrap up my studies on the book of Proverbs, I plan on doing a study on the book of Psalms. Bonhoeffer wrote a book called “Psalms: The Prayer Book Of The Bible” which I will put in the “study stack”.
