A pastor once told me that every church leader should adopt a dead Christian to learn from. Mine is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I first picked up Life Together on a college retreat after a speaker had mentioned it during a breakout session. The book is only about 100 pages, but it took me the entire summer to read it. I would find myself reading two sentences, having my mind completely blown, then spend the next 20 minutes contemplating what Bonhoeffer was saying. I used the book to model how I wanted Christian community to look like in my college ministry, and have continued using those practices after graduation. It is, in my opinion, THE book on Christian community. I don’t know if there’s a book that has influenced my philosophy of ministry more.
During my senior year, I read The Cost of Discipleship and was deeply convicted by the level of commitment Bonhoeffer wrote about the Christian life; and the thing is, Bonhoeffer was not just talk. He lived what he wrote about. He created Christian community, and he died trying to do defend the helpless. He was a modern martyr. So when I saw Eric Metaxas’ biography, called Bonhoeffer, I knew I had to read it.
The biography is a great read. Metaxas weaves Bonhoeffer’s story into a compelling narrative about a theological rebel who fought against the liberalism and fascism of his day. I did find it a little odd that Metaxas did not go into depth about Bonhoeffer’s time in prison. I have his collection of letters he wrote from prison and found some of the things Bonhoeffer wrote interesting, and I was hoping to see it be addressed in the biography. Overall though, I found it to be enjoyable. I sat it in my bookshelf, went about my life feeling more inspired by such a Christian witness, and never researched any more into it.
The next time I thought about the biography was four years later when I was taking a theology class at Southeastern Seminary. We were learning about different theological movements and neo-orthodoxy came up. This perked my ears because Bonhoeffer was neo-orthodox. Neo-orthodox theology is a little confusing to explain, but a rough definition is that it is a theological framework that does not focus on the historicity of the Bible. Basically, it claims that only God can reveal the source of Christian doctrine, and those doctrines are not bound by actual events. The lead theologian in this school was Karl Barth, and he would say claim that it would not matter if the resurrection of Christ actually happened because what is important is our faith. What one believes is what’s important.
Karl Barth was Bonhoeffer’s mentor and greatest influence. Scholars to this day debate if he believed in a historical resurrection or not. What is clear is that Bonhoeffer did not think it mattered, nor was he an inerrantist. He believed scripture to be fallible in a historical sense but perfect in a spiritual sense. To put it plainly, he was not an evangelical, and my seminary professor was not a fan of neo-orthodox theology. This was surprising to me because evangelicals had been raving about Bonhoeffer and Metaxas’ biography a few years ago. I didn’t understand why there had been so much support and admiration for a man whose theology was detested by evangelicals. Why did evangelicals hold up Bonhoeffer as a modern day hero but hate his theology?
The answer is because Eric Metaxas tried to co-opt Bonhoeffer as an evangelical. As I stated, after I finished the biography I put it away and didn’t think much of it. I had read through the lens of a person who had read some of Bonhoeffer’s work and viewed him as a neo-orthodox Christian. Because of that lens, I think I failed to grasp the evangelical implications Metaxas was trying to make.
Metaxas tried to turn Bonhoeffer into a conservative hero. Eric is a conservative personality and is in the middle of a complete meltdown over Trump’s election loss. He didn’t view Bonhoeffer as someone standing up to fascism and doing what is morally right, he saw Bonhoeffer as an example for American Christians to fight for religious freedom against the Obama administration. Basically, he turned a neo-orthodox freedom fighter into a conservative, right-wing pundit.
When I finally discovered this, it did answer the issues I had with the biography, and while I was initially furious that Metaxas had done this, after some thought I don’t know why I was surprised. Evangelicals have been co-opting theologians for years. Reformed guys love Augustine in Confessions, but they don’t really want to talk about City of God. We love to talk about Luther’s Solas, but don’t really get into his view on baptism. Now, most evangelicals will admit when pressed that theologians of the past did not have the exact same theology as evangelicals today, and a lot of evangelical scholars are doing work to bring back those traditions and show the good in them. That’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is when men like Metaxas hold up theologians like Bonhoeffer in such high esteem, yet if Bonhoeffer was alive today they would label him a heretic and figuratively crucify him.
It’s strange that conservative evangelicals are so quick to admire dead theologians they would demonize if they were alive today. To many evangelical voices, to be a Christian means to be defined in a very narrow term. If your theology does not fit those terms exactly, then you are cast out as Satan’s minion. It leaves little room for theological exploration. And I know Metaxas and others would do this to Bonhoeffer because they have done it to N.T. Wright, Tim Keller, and most recently and surprisingly John Piper, all because they would not follow the evangelical script to the letter. In Piper’s case, it isn’t even his theology that is the issue but the fact that he refused to endorse Trump as a candidate.
Politics is what is most important to evangelical voices like Metaxas, and his comments make it seem like he was only drawn to Bonhoeffer’s story because of its political spin. That, to me, is what is really sinister about Metaxas; he used a man who fought against a powerful political party and for Christ’s kingdom and turned him into a figure that fights for a political party. He not only misunderstands Bonhoeffer’s message, he somehow twisted his message into its exact opposite.
The irony in all this is that Metaxas is right; Bonhoeffer’s story is one that Christians need right now, but not in the way he interpreted it. Christians do not need to ban together to fight for religious freedom against the ghastly democrats, they need to reclaim their religion from a group of radical nationalists. Bonhoeffer criticized the German church for becoming a propaganda machine for the Nazis. It abandoned Christ and upheld nationalism, and that is the danger that evangelicals face in America today. Many churches in America have replaced Christ with the American flag and have given their allegiance to a party instead of Christ. Bonhoeffer serves as a reminder that we obey Christ above country and party, and it is sinful when the church stops obeying Christ to serve the needs of a political party. Bonhoeffer’s story should cause us to reflect on our own worship. Have we given our allegiance to Christ or to a party? Because if we aren’t careful, we might find ourselves trying to warp someone else’s story to fit our own.
In the Thicket 