Christian martyrdom may involve dying for the faith, this heroic ideal misses the point that martyrdom is the calling of every Christian. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”73 For Hovey, martyrdom is less about being burned at the stake on some foreign mission field than it is about the small daily acts of self-expenditure and self-donation that we make in order to love and serve others. Martyrdom, according to Hovey, is best displayed in small acts of asceticism, moments of self-denial in which I say no to the self in order to say yes to
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