The Battle for Bonhoeffer

by Stephen R. Haynes

The death-of-God crowd read Letters and Papers from Prison and avoided the rest; Metaxas read portions of Discipleship and Life Together and not much else.

Kudos for candor, I suppose: Metaxas dismissed the prison writings as an irrelevant distraction; or as he put it, a “few bone fragments . . . set upon by famished kites and less noble birds, many of whose descendants gnaw them still”—despite Bonhoeffer’s own sense that these ponderous thoughts marked profound transformation, a new reckoning with Jesus Christ in the ruins of the German nation.