Bonhoeffer

Eric Metaxas's biography follows Dietrich Bonhoeffer from a comfortable career in German theology into the resistance against Hitler, ending with his execution at Flossenbürg on April 9, 1945 — a month before the war in Europe ended. The book became a bestseller and a Christian Book of the Year winner, and it made Bonhoeffer's life legible to a wide audience that had mostly known him, if at all, as a name behind a handful of quotes about costly grace.

That popularity is what drew the pushback. Bonhoeffer scholars — Richard Weikart, Victoria Barnett, and Clifford Green among them — have argued that Metaxas reshapes Bonhoeffer's theology to fit a modern American evangelical framework, and that the book is weaker as history and as theology than its readability suggests.

This is a live, ongoing dispute among people who have spent their careers on Bonhoeffer, not a matter of taste. The story itself — a pastor moving from pacifism toward a plot against Hitler's life — is worth reading. Whether Metaxas's Bonhoeffer is the real one is a separate question, and it's the one to ask before treating this as the last word on him.