Bonhoeffer – Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas

This is a large volume telling the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor executed on Hitler’s orders a few days before the end of WWII. This book annoyed me. Although written in a style that leads the reader on, there are a number of simple errors, from the tonnage of a ship, to assigning Matthew 10 to the Sermon on the Mount. There are stupid colloquial American asides.
Metaxas tries to parallels the debate between neo-orthodox Barthians and the historic-critical liberals with the more contemporary, mostly American debate, between strict Darwinian evolutionists and those advocating Intelligent Design. This seems to me to quite misunderstand the depth of the debate in Germany at the time, which was about the much more fundamental question of what we could know about God, rather than just about Genesis 1.
There is little attempt to analyse Bonhoeffer’s theology, and certainly very little understanding of how a historical context informs and drives a theological response. There are a lot of long quotations. This book needs a serious editor to remove 100 pages, and tighten up on accuracy. If a cursory reading can pick up errors, what about the ones I don’t know about. This is a breach of trust between reader and author
I think too there is a tendency to appropriate him to the author’s conservative theology (which I don’t think is unique). Bonhoeffer cannot simply be a conservative evangelical – he looks to Ghandi, there is little attempt at ‘conversion’, and the emphasis he puts on the bible is very much based on the Sermon on the Mount and the ethics that can be derived from it. Perhaps he is more of a Biblicist – Barth had a profound effect on him, even though he didn’t always agree with him.
Bonhoeffer’s first really big fight was over the exclusion of racial Jews from ministry in 1933, his feeling very strongly that to exclude racial Jews is a denial of the gospel. This struggle ultimately led to the formation of the Confessing Church, as a church opposed to the Nazis. I feel that some readers would immediately equate the more current controversy over homosexuals in ministry as a test of the gospel. Yet one is about exclusion, the other inclusion. One is about the state’s interference in the life of a church, the other about internal divisions within the church. One is about opposition to a tyrannical regime, the other about biblical point scoring.
At the heart of this story is a man who thinks and acts, but I don’t think this author really gets to grips with that. He seems to struggle with the ambivalence of Bonhoeffer’s apparent working for the Abwehr. However, the story of how a pacifist became convinced that Hitler needed to be assassinated is a compelling one. This was a man who was prepared not only to die for what he believed in, but act on those beliefs even if it cost him his life. He embodied the idea that grace was costly, not cheap, and so our discipleship should be our whole lives.
I left this book not really knowing its subject, and now will have to read the Schlingensiepen biography (published around the same time), and some of Bonhoeffer’s work.