Greg Rattin > Recent Status Updates

"One feels such a tremendous longing for real peace, in which all the misery and injustice, the lying and cowardice will come to an end." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"The Nazis were anti-Christian, but they would pretend to be Christians as long as it served their purposes of getting theologically ignorant Germans on their side against the Jews."


Hmmm... sub Nazis with the trump administration, Germans with Americans and Jews with Muslims... maybe a bit of a stretch but hard not to draw those comparisons...

"The Nazi's were anti-Christian, but they would pretend to be Christians as long as it served their purposes of getting theologically ignorant Germans on their side against the Jews..."

hmmm... sounds a little familiar.

"God wants to see human beings, not ghosts who shun the world. In the whole of world history there is always only one really significant hour -- the present... if you want to find eternity, you must serve the times..." "I fear that Christians who venture to stand on earth on only one leg will stand in heaven on only one leg too..."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

What is the church? --- Bonhoeffer would identify the church as neither a historical entity nor an institution, but as "Christ existing as church-community."

There is scarcely indeed a more naturally disgusting object than a beardless old man... (compared by the Turks to a "plucked pigeon")

....the other, that of Margaret of Parma, the celebrated regent of the Netherlands, who conceived that her Beard imparted such dignity to her appearance, that she would never allow a hair of it to be touched.

Two curious exceptional cases of bearded women must not be passed over; one, that of a female soldier in the army of Charles XII, who was taken at the battle of Pultowa, where she had fought with a courage worthy of her Beard...

Vide Hassell's Microscopic Anatomy. Gallery says "Withof calculated that the hair of the Beard grows at the rate of 1 1/2 line in the week, which is 6 1/2 inches in the year, and by the time a man reaches eighty, 27ft will have fallen under the edge of the razor..."

"Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord. On the contrary:

If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. -- Romans 12:19-21"

- the presidents devotional, Jan 30

Faith without works is not faith at all, but a simple lack of obedience to God. During the rise of the Nazis, Paula Bonhoeffer respectfully but firmly prodded her son to make the church live out what it claimed to believe by speaking publicly against Hitler and the Nazis, and taking actions against them. ~ excerpt, pg14 "Bonhoeffer"

"Both of these impulses (formalism & legalism) made it possible for Hitler to come to power. The formalists in Germany may have seen things that bothered them, but saw no need to sacrifice their safety to stand up to them. Legalists responded by having pharisaical attitudes toward other nations and races that approved of Hitler's policies."

- Timothy J Keller, excerpt from the Foreword to "Bonhoeffer"