Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Deitrich Bonhoeffer was not an ordinary Christian. He grew up in an era of unspeakable World War horrors. He wrestled with those horrors and ultimately died because of them. He didn’t die fearing these horrors. He died in spite of them. Fighting them. And while he succumbed to the powers that be, some of the darkest powers the history of mankind has ever seen, his death was actually the death of a conqueror.


“This is the end,” he said. “For me the beginning of life.”


Ever since at a young age he broke the news to his highly cultured and academically gifted family that he would become a theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer applied his theological giftedness to thoroughly think through what it meant to be a disciple of Christ on earth, what it meant to take up one’s cross and follow him exploring the deepest implications of such an act.


Bonhoeffer was an Incarnational Christian who believed and understood that Christ was God’s Yes to humanity and that the Sermon on the Mount signifies the greatest challenge and calling for us as followers of God’s Word made flesh. In the last 15 years of his young life, we see Bonhoeffer as a flower blooming slowly into a theological giant, but his theological prowess would only be subservient to the practical outworking of the Gospel in every aspect of daily life. Does the Gospel call us to take up our cross and follow Jesus no matter were the following may lead us? Yes! says Bonhoeffer. That following may even lead us to our very death. This is what makes up the biographical narrative of Eric Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer.


If there is a definitive and recent biography for the Christ follower today it is Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer. No other comes in close second. Metaxas careful and beautiful depiction of an uncompromising Christian life is nothing short of breathtaking in allowing us to see the weakness and vulnerability of a man who is by no less measure extraordinary. In his embrace of life as the full experience for which God created us we behold someone who processed life through the prism of the Cross.


Bonhoeffer was a prolific letter writer. His letters are one refreshing window through which we get to know the inner man he was. His sense of humor, his love of music, his passion for Christian formation and discipleship, the heights to which he ascends in his theological thought, his serious regard for friendship, his love for God’s wide earth, his ecumenical spirit, his love for the Church and his suffering after he was imprisoned, all come forth from the page by reading the vast selections of his epistolary writings quoted in Bonhoeffer. That alone should be enough to make you want to read the book, but that’s not all. Eric Metaxas, the author, is a gifted writer himself. The book is a gem as much for Bonhoeffer’s own writings quoted throughout as for Metaxas carefully constructed narrative pieced together from the selected letters and other sources.


Bonfoeffer will encourage you, will make you mad, will make you laugh and will make you cry bringing you to the range of experiences that a Christian is called to live even if we have not experienced the ultimate consequence of that call as Dietrich Bonhoeffer did.


Read this book. Once you’re done with it you’ll want to read it again and then again. A book for our time.





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