Distinction between person and office is wholly alien to the teaching of Jesus. He says nothing about that. He addresses his disciples as men who hav… - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Cross is not the terrible end of a pious happy life. Instead, it stands at the beginning of community with Jesus Christ. Whenever Christ calls us, his call leads us to death.

The antithesis between the Christian life and the life of bourgeois respectability is at an end. The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different from the world, in fact, in being prohibited from being different from the world for the sake of grace. The upshot of it all is that my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven. I need no longer try to follow Christ, for cheap grace, the bitterest foe of discipleship, which true discipleship must loathe and detest, has freed me from that.

In the New Testament our enemies are those who harbor hostility against us, not those against whom we cherish hostility. For Jesus refuses to reckon with such a possibility.