Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quote

The Christian is not a homo religiosus but simply a man as Jesus (in distinction from John the Baptist) was a man…Not the flat and banal ‘This-sidedness’ of the Enlightened, of the deep ‘This-sidedness’ which is full of discipline and in which the knowledge of the Death and Resurrection is always present, this is what I mean. When a man really gives up trying to make something of himself–a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called clerical somebody), a righteous or unrighteous man,…when in the fullness of tasks, questions, success or ill-hap, experiences and perplexities, a man throws him into the arms of God…then he awakes with Christ in Gethsemane. That is faith, that is metanoia and it is thus that he becomes a man and a Christian. How can a man wax arrogant if in a this-sided life he shares the suffering of God?

–Dietrich Bonhoeffer