Sublime

sends us into the world to proclaim the Word.

anyone who thinks love of God can be done without love of neighbor is deluded. We demonstrate that we love God only when we are loving others.

Pastor Martin Luther King Jr. may have understood American Protestantism better than anyone. By staging resistance at the center of ordinary life (again on buses and at diners), he revealed an overwhelming lack of flourishing.

when the revolt began, Luther nevertheless exhorted the peasants to desist from rebellion; and when they did not, he wrote a scorching tract – ‘Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants’ – in which he encouraged the legal authorities to slaughter the rebels without pity.

Wer sich für den Menschen einsetzt, tritt auch gegen die Mächtigen der Erde an. Für sie ist ein hoffnungsvolles Menschenbild rundherum bedrohlich. Staatsgefährdend. Autoritätsuntergrabend. Schließlich bedeutet es immer, dass wir keine egoistischen Tiere sind, die von oben herab kontrolliert, reguliert und dressiert werden müssen. Es könnte außerdem

The church loses community when its relationships become instruments. When it loses community, it loses the resonance of revelation itself. It is no longer a living community (a life-community, a phrase Bonhoeffer uses that I’ll unpack below) but is alienated from the world and therefore from the living God, who moves in the world as the minister o

In the Prussian Upper House, to which he belonged ex officio as lord mayor of Cologne, he voted against the Enabling Act. He refused an invitation to welcome Hitler at Cologne airport during the election campaign. And in the week before the election he ordered the removal of Nazi flags from bridges and other public monuments. Adenauer was dismissed

“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,”

He would openly insist that saving lives was more important than anything else. He would repeat over and over that it was better to save one Jew than to kill twenty Germans.