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The Cost of Moral Leadership: The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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I am writing as a layman, interested in Bonhoeffer's story ever since discovering his "Letters and Papers From Prison," which moved me deeply when I first read it more than a decade ago. I spent much of a year attempting to translate that book into a full-length play, and in the process became more familiar with it, eventually concluding that for a lay audience, his story is too ineffably sad. After a couple of readings, I put it away. I understand that there has been a growing outpouring of scholarship devoted to Bonhoeffer in the years since then, and this book has been my first encounter with it. Having said all that, I'd like to express my appreciation to the authors for their effort to shed a new, welcome light on Bonhoeffer's life and work.

In a world and at a time when movie stars and new age advocates speak easily of "spirituality," it was brave for the authors to characterize their perspective on Bonhoeffer with this word. While admitting in the introduction that they could not settle on a definition of the term themselves, they proceed to discuss the various aspects of Bonhoeffer's life, actions, and faith in terms of his devotion to Jesus Christ. In exploring the evidence of his living faith, in word and deed, they represent Bonhoeffer as an example of moral leadership in a specific time and place in human history. And the result is to make this somewhat enigmatic man and his ideas more accessible for us today.

What comes across for me most strongly in the book is how much Bonhoeffer's writings and actions were a direct response to the Nazi government and the acquiesence of the German Lutheran Church. The issues that drive what he has to say reflect specific actions and policies of the government and the inaction of the church, which allowed its authority to be coopted by Hitler and the rising tide of German nationalism. The concept of "cheap grace" in "The Cost of Discipleship" is not an abstraction but a direct reference to the church's real lack of moral leadership at a time when resistance to the Nazi regime was most needed.

The book portrays the personal drama of a man who kept his personal life very private (one cannot imagine him on a talk show discussing his "spirituality"). The authors give us glimpses of his private world in reports of those who remember him, but nowhere is the private man seen so openly as in his intimate letters to Bethge and in the prison poems, which the authors devote the last chapter to. Here we find both the tentativeness behind his outward courage and the depth of his devotion to his chief source of strength. I have found this book very readable and recommend it to anyone with a basic knowledge of Bonhoeffer and a curiosity about how this man lived out his faith and remained steadfast to the end.

I have to say that this is a really great introduction to Bonhoeffer's life and his work, and the authors are both renowned scholars in the subject. Their understanding of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is beyond doubt, especially the chapter on "the Holy Spirit and Christian Discipleship", which developed Bonhoeffer's pneumatology nobody else is able to do.

The problem is the title: "moral leadership". This concept does not belong to Dietrich Bonhoeffer but the author(s), and throughout the book I can see the author(s) took great effort to link almost every piece of Bonhoeffer's work with "moral leadership". While I think Bonhoeffer himself would prefer identifying himself as a FOLLOWER of Jesus Christ rather than a moral LEADER, the book simply lacks a definition or even general description of the phrase "moral leadership" (well, it does describe the term "spirituality" in its Preface so I expect the same treatment to the phrase "moral leadership" also).

Maybe this is only a very minor problem I found with this book, and I still think that this is a great introductory book among many others.