A pastor posing as a spy posing as a pastor. A triple agent perhaps?

Caught up in the horrors of Nazi Germany, internationally acclaimed pastor-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer took life under God in this world seriously and did his duty to his God, the Church, his country, and his family.

Caught up in the internecine conflicts in the Nazi regime between the Abwehr (German military intelligence) and the Gestapo, this towering figure of integrity and humility put himself in harm’s way to act against the forces of deep evil arrayed against the church and the German nation.

Eric Metaxas tells this story in Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy published this year by Thomas Nelson. He tells this story in an almost novel-like style and the stuff of the intense collaboration feels like a piece of espionage fiction. There’s never a dull moment.

Since Bonhoeffer’s name is seared into our consciousnesses because of the backdrop of his life, Metaxas does an excellent job of painting this picture clearly. Bonhoeffer was born in pre-WWI Germany. He had an idyllic childhood in easy circumstances. Determined against his family’s wishes on the life of a pastor-theologian, he quickly showed promise and his inherited obstinance that would later become major themes of his life.

Like his father before him, who stood against Freud, Bonhoeffer stood against the tide of the growing disconnect between the Bible and real life. Arid answers were never enough. He loved people. He loved life. And he enjoyed both. Abortion was murder for Bonhoeffer.

It’s hard to put this book down as he leads us from one event to the next. Early an internationally acclaimed theological scholar who studied and pastored in the U.S. and the U.K. before the WWII came. He was always hungering for and working for the essential unity of the church of Christ. Back to the Bible he came with simple, but sophisticated faith: He knew that we can only know God through the revelation he gives us in the Bible and supremely in the person of Christ.

Bonoeffer was first and foremost a pastor, caring for his flock, whether that flock were a theological class or in a church. He acutely felt the need to teach children. He met people where they were. The church mattered to him. Not the church of the lofty and cold places of liberalism, but churches where the gospel was preached with great power and intensity.

The American churches of the great liberals were to him cold, barren, and lifeless. They did not preach the Christ of the Bible. There was no fervor, no sermons just arid lectures. It was in the black churches of America where he found true passion for Christ. There is where he found that Christ was preached with power, intensity, and belief.

International fame and safety was there for the taking, but the church, his home believing Lutheran churches were what mattered. Constantly he dodged in the early Nazi days to bring the gospel to people, to seminaries socked away from the cities to learn, to children as he catechized them. To young couples as he preached their wedding, and then to the sad duty of preaching funerals.

The Nazis could not abide a true believing church and quickly and with growing intensity moved to savage and emasculate the true church, attempting to replace it with their “national” church. Bonhoeffer struggled mightily against the attacks on the church of the Lord Jesus.

Encouraged to flee as his sister and her Jewish husband had to do, Bonhoeffer dared to believe and stay. Unlike most of the others in Valkyrie, the aristocratic generals and elite, Bonhoeffer was motivated by love for Christ and his church. Many others were affronted by the Nazi cruelty out of sentiment, but not Bonhoeffer. He was driven by the manifest God-hating scourge of Nazism.

Drawn into the plots to eliminate the heads of Nazi Germany, Bonhoeffer was recruited by the head of German military intelligence, the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, to pose as a spy for German military intelligence, all the while plotting to overthrow the government by violence. His “cover” as a pastor enabled Bonhoeffer to travel widely in Europe even during the war.

Plots failed and were tried again. Finally the Valkyrie plot failed resulting in the capture of many of the conspirators, though not initially including Bonhoeff

Throughout all this he became engaged to be married. Finally he was arrested on a fairly minor charge and jailed. Hopes were high that he would be released since there was little evidence to hold him on a serious charge. Ultimately all this failed and as part of his final paroxysm of vindictive murdering, Bonhoeffer was ordered executed, apparently by Hitler himself, with the audible sounds of American gunfire in the distance. He was hanged on a Sunday morning at the age of thirty-nine, having just led his last service for his fellow condemned men and women.

What is there for us to learn from this man? As more sophisticated forces surround the church and as so many of us unknowingly egg it on, retreating into our safe middle class conclaves, far away from the struggles, we should look more carefully at the life that Eric Metaxas unfolds for us. “Do we,” as the childhood Sunday School song went, “love each other?”

Do we love the church of Christ? Do we cherish her? Will we stand against anything or will we retreat further and farther into our save havens? Does the church, as the church, matter anymore? Has it effectively become a nice social gathering, where as Frank Schaeffer once observed we recite the creed of “nice.” A comfortable place to visit, but not where you’d want to live.

Metaxas tells us that for Bonhoeffer, “That ‘religious’ God was merely the ‘God of the gaps,’ the God who concerned himself with our ‘secret sins’ and hidden thoughts. But Bonhoeffer rejected this abbreviated God. The God of the Bible was Lord over everything, over every scientific discovery……Bonhoeffer was wondering if it wasn’t time to bring God into the whole world and stop pretending he wanted only to live those religious corners that we reserved for him.”

It always seemed to me that we are trying anxiously in this way to reserve some space for God; I should like to speak of God not on the boundaries but at the centre, not in weaknesses but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness . . . . The church stands not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village.”

Bonhoeffer loved his lord and life in this world too much to stand by. He worked carefully in lethally dangerous situations, but always in a demonstratable attitude and posture of love for all men and women, especially those of us in the household of faith.

What else is there to say? Details of Bonhoeffer’s theology, alas, remain elusive.

Metaxas engages in too many petty little jibes about the Nazis. They were too bad to need that—it has the effect of reducing their vileness. To be true, the Nazis were caricatures of themselves. Goering, an anti-vivisectionist, acquiesced in the murder of millions of people. Hitler was a vegetarian who neither smoked nor drank. Himmler, a failed chicken farmer.

There is a gratuitous section in the last chapter reciting the horror of the Nazi medical experiments. We know—or at least I hope we do—of those tragedies, but the direct connection to Bonhoeff is not clear.

All of us owe Eric Metaxas a debt for bringing forcefully and clearly before us a Christian man of courage and conviction for whom principle and the right meant more than life.

The last book my good friend Steve Yoder read before his recent death was this one. Well, done Steve.

Marvin Padgett is Vice President for Editorial and Acquisitions at P&R Publications. He is a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America. Having just sold their Wheaton home, he and his wife, Jean, live outside of Nashville and Marvin spends as little time as necessary in a small motel near his office in Phillipsburg, NJ. They are both L’Abri alums and are marvelous dinner companions. They have three grown children: daughter Heather is married to PCA TE Ewan Kennedy. (Marvin’s real first name is Elmer, but don’t tell him you know that!)