This is also one of the gifts of this book, though. You can’t study Bonhoeffer’s life and thought separate from the historical context, and WWII Germany is not an easy historical period to study. The difficulty lies in the subject matter.
The difficulty lies not in the writing style…Metaxas avoids being overly academic and I found his style to be very approachable, although he is given to a strange change of voices at times. Let me say up front, if you haven’t assumed this already: this is not an easy read. Of course, a lot of us have more free time than usual on our hands due to world events lately, so I decided that it was time. That alone is compelling reason to read the book, but, as I said, just hefting it from the shelf in the bookstore is enough to give one pause unless you have a magnitude of free time on your hands. There was some controversy, as I recall, when this biography was initially published, because Metaxas was said to have asserted, against traditional perspective, that Bonhoeffer was not a pacifist. I’m not sure I’ve read something that long and that dense sense (ironically) reading Barth’s Church Dogmatics in seminary (the running joke was that not even Barth had read all of those volumes).Īnd that comparison is not altogether trivial, because Metaxas does his share of theology in this book. To be honest, the sheer weight of the volume is off-putting. I’ve always wanted to read it, as it’s recognized as the authoritative biography on Bonhoeffer’s life. I had always avoided Metaxas’ biography, though. After a few years, I’ve read almost all of his work, as well as a good deal of work about Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer remains one of the most influential theologians to my thought and spiritual life, and, as most know, the story of his life and martyrdom is compelling and powerful. Ever since seminary, I generally read something either by or about Dietrich Bonhoeffer at least once annually.
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