TGC Reviews

Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. Thomas Nelson, 2010, 564 pages.

What is the cost of Christian discipleship? In Luke 14, Jesus said the price of following Him could cost a man his wife, his children and yes, even his own life. Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew well of what our Lord spoke. Bonhoeffer’s life was a living parable of that truth, one he wrote about in his most famous book, The Cost of Discipleship.

Bonhoeffer stood strong for Christ and for His gospel in the face of incalculable evil.

He led a small band of dissidents, many of whom composed Germany’s faithful confessing church, in one of several well-known attempts to assassinate Adolph Hitler, the Third Reich’s leader who is the very paragon of evil in modern history. In his new biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet and Spy—A Righteous Gentile vs. The Third Reich (Thomas Nelson), Eric Metaxas takes readers on an unforgettable journey from Bonhoeffer’s birth in 1906 to his death in 1945 at the hands of the Third Reich at a concentration camp in Flossenbǖrg, mere days before the victory of the Allies and the self-inflicted death of Hitler.

In many ways, Metaxas’s riveting work is a contrast of two leaders: Bonhoeffer, who led the orthodox church and was determined to keep it faithful to God’s will as revealed in the Scriptures, no matter the cost, and Hitler, a wicked and cowardly despot who led by unbridled power and answered to no authority but that of his own demonic will.

Bonhoeffer was keenly insightful regarding leadership. Though Hitler gave lip service in public to the faith to further dupe the people, Bonhoeffer saw through his thinly-veiled guise; for Bonhoeffer, leadership that is truly Christian in character knows that it operates out of a derived authority, one that answers to an ultimate superior. Hitler’s leadership was pure authoritarianism.

“Whereas earlier leadership was expressed in the form of the teacher, the statesman, the father . . . now the Leader has become an independent figure. The Leader is completely divorced from any office; he is essentially and only ‘the Leader.’ A true leader must know the limitations of his authority,” Bonhoeffer wrote in an address on leadership.

Metaxas begins with Bonhoeffer’s birth and early years in Germany as he grew up in an aristocratic family and follows him into his years at seminary, his visits to America and delves into his pastorates in Germany and England. He chronicles Bonhoeffer’s excruciating decision to seek a safe haven in America in 1939 when the Gestapo begins to note and persecute all who oppose Hitler. And he tells of Bonhoeffer’s brave return to his embittered homeland after a few weeks in America to provide leadership for a confessing church that was wavering in the face of the rising tide of darkness that had already held the official German church firmly in its dark tentacles.

Bonhoeffer is the first extensive biography of this giant of a Christian leader in several decades and readers will find themselves riveted as the author employs extended excerpts from Bonhoeffer’s letters from cell No. 92 at Tegel Prison to tell the full story of his passionate romance with his fiancé Maria von Wedemeyer. Metaxas shows that Bonhoeffer never flinched or cowered in fear in the face of the Third Reich’s threats and brutality, even while other so-called Christians were caving. He faced death with calm and uncommon grace, a reality Metaxas shows through the diaries and works written about Bonhoeffer by his fellow sufferers during their final days together. Because of the claim of Christ on his life, Bonhoeffer stood resolute that there was only one option for the genuine follower of Christ: he must oppose Hitler and his regime with every fiber of his being. It was an irreducible part of the cost of discipleship.

The book provides thrilling details about Bonhoeffer’s involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler. A man of deep piety and conviction who wrote a work on ethics while imprisoned, Bonhoeffer nonetheless believed it was God’s will and served the greater good to kill Adolph Hitler. Arrested in the aftermath of the failed attempt on the Fuhrer, Bonhoeffer’s intimate involvement in the plot came to light only after another failed plot, the now-famous Valkyrie operation. Readers also learn of Bonhoeffer’s commitment to conservative theology during a time when few orthodox theologians were to be found in Germany and the book also sheds light on his involvement in smuggling Jews into neutral Switzerland. For Bonhoeffer, the true church was composed of Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, and any church that articulated a gospel of ethnic supremacy had become a false church in league with Satan. And any Christian who would do nothing to oppose the machinations of such wickedness had not rightful claim on the name of Christ.

The work is well-written and impeccably researched. At more than 500 pages, it is densely packed with quotations and source material, but readers will be quickly drawn into the enthralling story that is part biography, part living theology and part spy story. It is most certainly one of the best biographies to come off an evangelical press thus far in 2010.