Though some of the Bonhoeffer intelligentsia rushed to criticize Eric Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Thomas Nelson, 2010), few can argue whether any book has more broadly brought Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s name to the fore. Though American readers have long read Discipleship, Life Together, and Letters and Papers from Prison, Metaxas’s biographical behemoth reintroduced Bonhoeffer with unprecedented reach.
Many of Metaxas’s readers were surprised to discover details of Bonhoeffer’s life they never knew. Having been made available years before in the English translation of Eberhard Bethge’s unrivaled masterpiece (on which Metaxas based much of his own work), Bonhoeffer’s personal journey was veiled in relative obscurity, left to the Bonhoeffer scholars and historians until Metaxas popularized it for an American audience. We are truly in his debt.
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