Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Called by God

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Called by God Elizabeth Raum Continuum, $21.95, 184 pp.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45) is one of the most luminous Christians of the twentieth century. He was an academic, pastor, ecumenist, peacemaker, and, most important, an early witness against the Nazi regime of his native Germany. He and his family belonged to a small resistance circle that not only conspired against the government but also tried to assassinate Hitler. Many, including Bonhoeffer himself, paid for their resistance with their lives. Bonhoeffer was executed less than a month before the end of World War II (April 9, 1945).

Bonhoeffer's letters from prison made him famous, even though they were put to tendentious use as arguments for "secular Christianity" by some exponents of the short-lived "Death of God" theologies. His other works have had lasting influence--especially his powerful The Cost of Discipleship. He is perhaps the central figure of that (alas, too small) body of Christian spokespersons and martyrs who stood up to Nazism.

Elizabeth Raum's Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Called by God hits the important moments in Bonhoeffer's life: from his early education, his travels in Europe, his stint at Union Theological Seminary in New York, through his labors with the part of the German Evangelical Church that resisted being co-opted by the Nazi regime. Raum also details Bonhoeffer's early struggles against German anti-Semitism, his contacts with the ecumenical movement, his transition from pacifism to active resistance, and his arrest and imprisonment.

Eberhard Bethge, one of Bonhoeffer's closest collaborators, wrote the definitive biography of his friend, which appeared in English in 1967 and was revised in 2000 under the simple title Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography. It is a thorough study by someone who "was there." Elizabeth Raum's biography, by contrast, is a brief but readable overview that depends on Bethge and other materials. As an introduction, it is a satisfactory first look at Bonhoeffer's life but, without the penetrating analysis of Bonhoeffer as a thinker and a theologian, it remains somewhat incomplete.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.

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