Formed By Christ

Christ remains the only one who forms.

Christian people do not form the world with their ideas. Rather, Christ forms human beings to a form the same as Christ's own.

However, just as the form of Christ is misperceived where he is understood essentially as the teacher of a pious and good life, so formation of human beings is also wrongly understood where one sees it only as guidance for a pious and good life.

Christ is the one who has become human, who was crucified, and who is risen, as confessed by the Christian faith.... To be conformed to the one who has become human - that is what being really human means....

All super-humanity, all efforts to outgrow one's nature as human, all struggle to be heroic or a demigod, all fall away from a person here, because they are untrue. The real human being is the object neither of contempt nor of deification, but the object of the love of God....

To be conformed with the one who became human means that we may be the human beings that we really are. Pretension, hypocrisy, compulsion, forcing oneself to be something different, better, more ideal than one is - all are abolished.

God loves the real human being. God became a real human being.

- from Ethics, 93-94
A Year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Daily Meditations from His Letters, Writingss, and Sermons.