Eric Metaxas argues earnestly that Bonhoeffer matters to believers today. “He is a model for living the authentic Christian life. Bonhoeffer is the ultimate example of someone who is discerning and obedient to Jesus in the deepest way. I believe that God gives us illustrations from history, and the life of Bonhoeffer is one of those. He is an example to believers of what it looks like to negotiate the difficulties of life, to deal with evil as a serious, devout, mature Christian.”

One of the major influences on Bonhoeffer’s ideas about the church came during his 1930 sojourn to America. He visited Union Seminary in New York and found it singularly unappealing. “He was not impressed at all with the school or students, considering them immature, baseless and liberal,” says Metaxas. But one weekend he accompanied a student to Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and there he discovered a different kind of worship. “He saw people who knew Jesus in a very personal way, something he had not experienced before. This was a transformative experience, and he went back to Germany in 1931 changed. He was theologically straight before that, but this time in Harlem affected his heart. His whole being turned toward Jesus in a personal way where it had not been so before.”

“Anyone who’s a truly mature Christian, who has their eyes on Jesus, will recognize Bonhoeffer as a brother in Christ. Attempts by mostly liberal theologians to portray him as humanist or post-Christian are really off the mark,” the author asserts. “One of the reasons I’m glad my book has been published is to set that record straight. We need to see Bonhoeffer for who he was and not try to make him in our own image. Bonhoeffer was a robust, devoted servant of Jesus Christ. Whether you want to call him ‘evangelical’—that’s kind of like saying St. Paul or Augustine was evangelical. Anyone who devoted his whole life to Jesus, worshiping the living God, transcends categories. I was surprised by how ‘evangelical’ he was, and how obscured that has been by previous works about him.”

Greg Thornbury, dean of Christian theology at Union Seminary, calls Bonhoeffer “a church father for the postmodern era.” Metaxas wholeheartedly agrees. “There’s something about Bonhoeffer’s depth of faith, his witness and his theology, that speaks to us unlike no one else. You see a deeply Christian human trying to live out his obedience to Christ in the midst of incredibly difficult circumstances. I would argue that no one else speaks to us like Bonhoeffer does for his impatience with religiosity and dead religion. He was zealously looking for God and stripping away fig leaves, saying in essence ‘I want God, no religious covering. The only covering I want is the blood of Jesus Christ, only Jesus can suffice in the face of evil, only Jesus can defeat evil and death.’ Bonhoeffer understood that early on, but he lived it out year after year. As the evil encroached, he grew closer and closer to Jesus.”

Read more about Bonhoeffer on Wikipedia here.

Read more about Eric Metaxas and buy his biography of Bonhoeffer here.

Click here to find out more about Bonhoeffer’s writings.

Click here for some of Bonhoeffer’s most famous quotations.