Quotes about Humanity

It is only when he is a burden that another person is really a brother and not merely an object to be manipulated.

All thinking about human beings without Christ is unfruitful abstraction. The counterimage to the human being taken up into the form of Christ is the human being as self-creator, self-judge, and self-renewer; these people bypass their true humanity and therefore, sooner or later, destroy themselves.

To be conformed to the one who has become human—that is what being really human means.

For Jesus what is at stake is not the exhibition and realization of new ethical ideals, and not some kind of goodness of his own, but solely God's love for human beings. Therefore, he can enter into their guilt; he can let himself be burdened with their guilt.

Jesus does not want to be the only perfect human being at the expense of humankind. He does not want, as the only guiltless one, to ignore a humanity that is being destroyed by its guilt; he does not want some kind of human ideal to triumph over the ruins of a wrecked humanity.

The gospel belongs to all people because it belongs to sinners.

If God loved the world, the whole fallen creation, then he gave us no preference over others. He loved my worst enemy no less than he loved me. Jesus Christ died for his and our enemies.

How does Jesus differ from other great persons and heroes? All heroes come from lowliness and want to be great, while Jesus comes from the heights and wants to be humble. All heroes are human beings and want to be like God, while Christ is God and wants to be a human being. All heroes are born of the earth; Christ is born of God.[524] [—] John 3:6; Acts 4:12

When one no longer knows what one owes oneself and others, where the sense for human quality and the strength to respect boundaries cease to exist, chaos is at the door. When for the sake of material comfort one tolerates impudence, one has already surrendered, there the floods of chaos have been permitted to burst the dam at the place where it was to be defended, and one becomes guilty of all that follows.

The hungry person needs bread, the homeless person needs shelter, the one deprived of rights needs justice, the lonely person needs community, the undisciplined one needs order, and the slave needs freedom. Treating human beings as things, commodities, and machines is a special hindrance to receiving Christ.

It is only because he became like us that we can become like him.

Nothing that we despise in other men is inherently absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don't do, and more in light of what they suffer.