Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas (2010)

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A Shorter Review

When I first started posting book reviews on this blog about twelve years ago, I was mostly posting reviews I’d written during seminary and for a grade. Thus, my earliest reviews were thousands of words long, well-researched and filled with footnotes and other fancy doodads. I fear now that the only people reading the lengths of those early reviews might be lazy students trying to steal a grade instead of earning it by reading and thinking through the book themselves.

For that reason, I’ve not gone so scholarly with my reviews anymore, hopefully to the benefit of the audience that’s actually interested in reading and not just in grabbing ideas for an essay they’ve got to write. I say this to justify why I’m not reviewing this book at the length that it deserves.

An Incredible, Timely Biography

Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas is an engaging, well-researched, and articulate biography of a hero that the world ought never forget. It’s hard to call any biography “the final word” on a subject, but Metaxas’ tome certainly comes close and will undoubtedly be the English-language authority on the subject for a generation at least. This book is incredible.

It’s also timely, as we live in a world progressively reminiscent of the 1920s and ’30s. Economic tensions, larger-than-life world players, border-skirmishes and all-out wars that are forcing nations to take sides in disputes that would otherwise never concern them—it’s becoming a dark place, and it wouldn’t be all that surprising if some of us soon experience the same fast-paced national dissolution that Germany experienced during the rise of history’s greatest psychotic despot, Adolf Hitler.

What was it like to be German in a nation so quickly overrun by Naziism? This book describes it at length through the eyes of Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man committed to his Christian faith and appalled by the crimes of his Fuhrer.

Through the period of Germany’s shame and recovery following WWI, Bonhoeffer pursued a life of theology, serving as pastor, teacher, author and authority on the practice of theology in private and public life and the roles of both the church and the believer in society. Little did he or other Germans know, though, what lay in store for them when Adolf Hitler took power. Many believers and church leaders like Bonhoeffer were never swayed by his charisma, seeing through the thin veil of public sanity to the monster dwelling inside, and they knew that rebellion was their only option.

This book takes us on Bonhoeffer’s journey through these difficult years, including his role as professor in an underground seminary, his leadership of an international rebellion of German Christians against Naziism, and his role as spy in one of the many plots to assassinate Hitler. It takes us through his arrest, imprisonment, and ultimate execution for the cause of Good against history’s most deplorable Evil. It’s a fascinating read, and I learned a great deal from this giant of history.

Standout Passages

Many passages stood out to me, and I’ll share just a few. I want to begin with this from Chapter 20, describing Kristal Nacht (the night in 1938 when Hitler ordered the wonton murder of Jews and destruction of their property) and Dietrich’s revelation from Psalm 74:8. It’s poignant for our day, of course, because of Palestine’s recent invasion of Israel and the world’s imbalanced response to Israel’s retaliation against the Hamas terrorists.

Bonhoeffer most clearly saw the connection: to lift one’s hand against the Jews was to lift one’s hand against God himself. The Nazis were attacking God by attacking his people. The Jews in Germany were not only not God’s enemies; they were his beloved children. Quite literally, this was a revelation.

Bonhoeffer knew, however, that the solution for himself was not to take up arms either for or against the Nazi’s but rather to fight in his own way for righteousness and for God’s people as a minister of the Word. This was just not a viewpoint that he could force upon other German young men:

Christians cannot be governed by mere principles. Principles could carry one only so far. At some point every person must hear from God, must know what God was calling him to do, apart from others. Bonhoeffer did not believe it was permissible for him to take up arms in this war of aggression, but he also did not feel that he could make an absolute rule out of this, or declare it and put the Confessing Church in a difficult spot. He was looking for a way out that would allow him to obey his conscience, but that would not force others to obey his conscience. (Chapter 21)

After having taken a short deferment from military service, Bonhoeffer traveled to the U.S., where he quickly realized that running from the war and leaving his friends, family, and countrymen behind was no way to fulfill his duty as a man of God. His journal notes about how he felt while overseas, partaking in the mundanity of life-without-war while his own people suffered carries such convicting weight that it ought to stop us in our tracks, forcing us to ask ourselves what we’re doing for the suffering souls in our own world:

“15th June, 1939—Since yesterday evening I haven’t been able to stop thinking of Germany. I would not have thought it possible that at my age, after so many years abroad, one could get so dreadfully homesick. What was in itself a wonderful motor expedition this morning to a female acquaintance in the country, i.e., in the hills, became almost unbearable. We sat for an hour and chattered, not in a silly way, true, but about things which left me completely cold—whether it is possible to get a good musical education in New York, about the education of children, etc., etc., and I thought how usefully I could be spending these hours in Germany. I would gladly have taken the next ship home. This inactivity, or rather activity in unimportant things, is quite intolerable when one thinks of the brethren and of how precious time is. The whole burden of self-reproach because of a wrong decision comes back again and almost overwhelms one. I was in utter despair.” (Chapter 21)

One of my favorite scenes came in Chapter 23 when it was announced that Germany had dominated France. Bonhoeffer shows that there are lengths one must go against one’s enemy, where otherwise vile or sinful behavior must be employed for the greater good. It is in fact an aspect of his book on Ethics that he reveals to us in the moment:

It was a pandemonium of patriotism, and Bonhoeffer and Bethge were pinned like beetles. At least Bethge was. Bonhoeffer, on the other hand, seemed to be a part of it. Bethge was flabbergasted: along with everyone else, his friend stood up and threw out his arm in the “Heil, Hitler!” salute. As Bethge stood there gawking, Bonhoeffer whispered to him: “Are you crazy? Raise your arm! We’ll have to run risks for many different things, but this silly salute is not one of them!” Bethge’s extraordinary friend and mentor had schooled him in many things over the previous five years, but this was something new. It was then, Bethge realized, that Bonhoeffer crossed a line. He was behaving conspiratorially. He didn’t want to be thought of as an objector. He wanted to blend in. He didn’t want to make an anti-Hitler statement; he had bigger fish to fry. He wanted to be left alone to do the things he knew God was calling him to do, and these things required him to remain unnoticed. Bethge said that one cannot fix a date when Bonhoeffer passed into being a part of the conspiracy in any official way. But he knew at that café in Memel, when Bonhoeffer was saluting Hitler, that his friend was already on the other side of the border. He had crossed from “confession” to “resistance.”

Further in that same chapter Metaxas discusses Bonhoeffer’s concept of truth-telling as a conspirator in the presence of one’s murderous Nazi enemies:

To be true to God in the deepest way meant having such a relationship with him that one did not live legalistically by “rules” or “principles.” One could never separate one’s actions from one’s relationship to God. It was a more demanding and more mature level of obedience, and Bonhoeffer had come to see that the evil of Hitler was forcing Christians to go deeper in their obedience, to think harder about what God was asking. Legalistic religion was being shown to be utterly inadequate.

There were so many more great passages and scenes in this book, but these are enough to highlight that Bonhoeffer was a unique man, a theologian with ecumenical leanings and fuzzy gray lines of morality who was exactly what German Christians needed to help navigate their wicked time in history. He behaved the way he did, not because he was careless or ignorant or immoral but because he lived in a time and geography of total depravity and knew that to survive and fight for God and righteousness might sometimes require replacing the smock of clergy with a Nazi uniform, the folded hands of prayer with a Nazi salute, and the pacifist ideals of a pastor with the conspiratorial assassination attempts of a real-deal spy.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and enjoyed it as a heavy meal filled with food for thought. I highly recommend it as a must-read for Christians today and look forward to passing it on to a good friend this week. For a lighter yet equally satisfying Bonhoeffer biography, check oh The Faithful Spy by John Haddix (2018).

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