Archive for the 'Bonhoeffer' Category

Harpers interviews Metaxas on his Bonhoeffer biography

Published on January 4, 2011 in Bonhoeffer and Recommended Reading. 0 Comments Tags: biography, Bonhoeffer.

If you are looking for a good biography to read, then I recommend Eric Metaxas’ work on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was not only a brilliant theologian. He also stood against Hitler and was eventually executed by the Germans.

Harpers recently posted a fascinating interview of Bonhoeffer which begins with asking Metaxas to explain why he dedicated the book in German:

Eric Metaxas, whose best-selling biography of William Wilberforce, Amazing Grace, provided the framework for an important motion picture, is now out with a thick review of the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and theologian who played a key role in one of the attempts to kill Adolf Hitler. I put six questions to Metaxas about Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy:

1. You dedicate your book, in German no less, to your grandfather. Tell us the significance of that dedication, and how in the course of your own life you were drawn to Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

My grandfather was a genuinely reluctant German soldier who was killed in the war in 1944, at the age of 31. My mother was nine. The tragedy of my mother’s losing her father at that age has been a big part of my life. My grandfather didn’t want to fight in Hitler’s war. My grandmother said that he used to listen to the BBC with his ear literally pressed against the radio speaker, because if you were caught listening to the BBC you could be sent to a concentration camp. The boss in the factory where he worked was a friend of the family–I met him in 1971–and he was able to keep my grandfather from being drafted until 1943. Of course that wasn’t quite long enough.

When I first heard the story of Bonhoeffer in 1988, I was staggered. I was slowly returning to the Christian faith that I had lost as a student at Yale, and Bonhoeffer’s personal story and his magnificent book, The Cost of Discipleship, really spoke to me and helped me as I struggled with my questions.

Read the rest here.

HT: Grateful to the Dead

Can disciples be invisible?

Published on October 24, 2010 in Bonhoeffer. 0 Comments

With Bonhoeffer’s help, Justin Taylor concisely answers the question of whether or not we can be invisible Christians (click here).

Cal Thomas on Mextaxas’ new biography of Bonhoeffer

Published on June 21, 2010 in Bonhoeffer. 1 Comment

Cal Thomas:

June 18, 2010 marked the 70th anniversary of Charles de Gaulle’s historic call to arms for the French to resist the Nazis and also Winston Churchill’s "finest hour" address.

Another anniversary might have gone unnoticed were it not for a brilliant new biography of a man who gave his life in a failed plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. "Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy" by Eric Metaxas, is a major biography of this giant of faith published 65 years after his death.

The rest here.

A Nazi work camp contrasted with the castle at Neuschwanstein

Published on April 17, 2010 in Bonhoeffer and suffering. 4 Comments

Our family may be able to visit both the Neuschwanstein castle and Flossenburg this summer. So, I was interested in this post from that angle. But, more than that, because I have a great appreciation for Bonhoeffer.

Gene Fant writes:

A few years ago, on my 40^th birthday, I spent the day walking silently with my family through the gates of the Nazi work camp at Flossenburg, Germany, wandering among the monuments to the dead.

The camp is almost empty of structures, though a few chapels dot the grounds; its gravel quarry has been transformed into a lush garden spiraling into the earth. The oven building, where corpses were reduced to ash, stands in the lowest level of the pit, with a wooden ramp slanting from the oven to the huge mound of human cinders.

Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote “The Cost of Discipleship,” was the camp’s most famous casualty. I wondered if any of the molecules of his body still resided in the mound. Standing there, I swatted away large black flies that bit at my arms and legs.

As we walked past the oven, my wife Lisa whispered, “What a contrast from Neuschwanstein, eh?”

Two days previously, we had toured the fairy palace that inspired Walt Disney’s Cinderella castle. It was packed with tourists who paid dearly for the price of admission. Words cannot convey the beauty of the structure, so packed with artwork, nor its setting, so high in the Alps on a ridge of rock overlooking a gorgeous lake.

Visitors from around the world gasped with every turn of a corner on our tour, each of us having the same thought in our native languages: “What if I ruled this castle?”

Flossenburg, by contrast, sits on a dead-end road. It has no gift shop. It was not crowded. There were no thoughts of, “What if I were a prisoner in this camp?”