tothesource: You believe Bonhoeffer can speak wisdom today, sixty five years after his death, because of his emphasis on incarnation—the idea that theology and life are one. In The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer insisted that, "anything short of obedience to God smacked of 'cheap grace.' Actions must follow what is believed, else one could not claim to believe it" (240). How does the legacy of a man whose ideas and actions were unified in obedience to God particularly address us today?

Eric Metaxas: One of the main reasons I'm so excited about the book coming out right now -- in 2010 -- is that I'm convinced Bonhoeffer's life speaks clearly and directly to us on several levels. For one thing, the parallels between Bonhoeffer's battle with Nazi fascism and our current battle with Islamo-fascism are extraordinary. We desperately need a model of how Christians ought to confront this kind of aggressive evil and Bonhoeffer provides it. But he also shows us how to deal with the cultural drift of the church itself. Bonhoeffer faced a church that had bowed its knee to the reigning culture, but we're facing that today as well. The situation that compelled Bonhoeffer and the other Confessing Church leaders to draft the Barmen Declaration in the 1930s is not so terribly different from the current situation that has compelled Christian leaders to draft the Manhattan Declaration. Bonhoeffer spoke boldly to the church in his own day, but his life speaks just as boldly to us today, who face the same issues and who are just as prone as the German church in the 1930s to refuse to act, whether out of inertia, ignorance, or willful disobedience. God help us to heed to cry of Bonhoeffer today, before it's too late.

tts: In your book, you point out that Bonhoeffer's "habit of saying things for effect that could easily be misinterpreted," (364) led to numerous misunderstandings in his own time. One glaring misconception that has snowballed with time paints Bonhoeffer as a post-religious Humanist, and has garnered Bonhoeffer some unlikely fans—notably the colorful anti-theist Christopher Hitchens. The confusion surrounds Bonhoeffer's assertion that "religion was a dead, man-made thing, and at the heart of Christianity was something entirely else—God himself, alive" (83). Can you clarify what Bonhoeffer meant (and did not mean) when he referred to "non-religious Christianity"?

Metaxas: Yes, the "religionless Christianity" comment is the classic example of this. Bonhoeffer meant precisely the opposite of what many people seem to think, and it's led to a terrific misunderstanding about him and what he believed that has endured for literally six decades! I go into details in the book, of course. There's something inescapably funny about people like Hitchens et al. draping themselves in the Bonhoeffer flag. Not only would Bonhoeffer have blasted them as dead wrong in their interpretations -- and as shamefully sloppy -- but even his friend Eberhard Bethge has done the same, and I quote Bethge's comment on this in my book.

But in the course of writing my book I came to understand how this vast misunderstanding actually happened. It began with the tragic choice to publish Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison first. It was the first exposure many people had to Bonhoeffer, and they saw the most private and unedited side of him without much real context for who he actually was and what he believed. You can see how people who wanted to think of him as theologically liberal, or as somehow post-Christian, got badly fooled. And there were many of them. After this first error, one merely had to cherry-pick one's facts to paint a picture of Bonhoeffer vastly different than who he actually was. So the fact that he wanted to visit Gandhi and that he attended Union and was concerned with racial issues led many to believe he was a standard-issue theological liberal, but this is as far from the truth as assuming that Senator Robert Byrd couldn't have been a member of the KKK. The facts are always a bit more complicated. I hope my book can finally establish the facts and show the reality of this man's life with the full context.

What Bonhoeffer meant by "religionless Christianity," in a nutshell, was real Christianity, the kind of deep faith in Jesus Christ that has been the hallmark of the holy remnant of Christian believers since the day of Pentecost. Mere churchgoing and tradition is dead religion, and Bonhoeffer saw that the church in Germany failed utterly to stand up to the demonic evil of the Third Reich. He was looking ahead to a Christian faith that was founded on a personal relationship with the living God, and he knew that that alone could stand up to evil.

But the idea that Hitchens and others have been able to think of Bonhoeffer as one of their own for so long must now come to an end. And yet I believe if they have the intellectual integrity to really look at Bonhoeffer as he was, they may for the first time in their lives see a bona fide and historical Christian faith that is shockingly appealing.

tts: In his book, Souls in Transition; The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, Christian Smith describes my generation as "progressing yet further toward the nearly total submersion of the self into fluidly constructed, private networks of technologically managed intimates and associates…these relationship-oriented activities [blogging, text messaging, tweeting] appear to fill up, however problematically, the void opened by their lack of participation in fostering the shared goods of public life" (74). Far be it for me to disparage the Facebook ilk (especially since I "friended" you and messaged you to request this interview!), but I must note that Bonhoeffer strongly endorsed embodied community and self-sacrifice for the greater good. These values are foreign to my minimally committed, maximally interconnected contemporaries. As you introduce Bonhoeffer to audiences across the country, what responses are you encountering from young adults?

Metaxas: Bonhoeffer for some reasons holds great appeal to the younger generation. Perhaps that's because he was himself always young and will forever be so. But I also think that his authenticity and his courage unto death speak volumes and give him the ability to say things that others cannot so easily say. He makes groundedness and actual community and connection infinitely more appealing than whatever gratification one gets from social networking sites. I actually believe that if young people will read Bonhoeffer's Life Together, for example, it would change the face of modern Christendom. I zealously hope that my book might get people to fall in love with this wonderful man of God, and through him, to fall in love with what he believed and stood for, and most importantly, with the One in Whom he believed. That really would change the world, wouldn't it?

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595551387?ie=UTF8&tag=tothesource-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1595551387"

Video Link - Eric Metaxas at Socrates in the City Forum in New York City introducing, "Bonhoeffer, Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy".
http://www.vimeo.com/11208555

click here to visit Eric Metaxas' website
http://www.ericmetaxas.com/

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's work Ethics was written from 1940-1943. Intended as lectures, this is his most mature work and is considered to be his major contribution to theology

Christian ethics, he says, must be considered with reference to the regenerated man whose chief desire should be to please God, not with the man who is concerned with an airtight philosophical system. Man is not, and cannot, be the final arbitrator of good and evil. This is reserved for God alone. When man tries to decide what is right and wrong his efforts are doomed to failure. Bonhoeffer wrote that "instead of knowing only the God who is good to him and instead of knowing all things in Him, [man] knows only himself as the origin of good and evil." With this statement, Bonhoeffer entered one of the most difficult philosophical and theological problems in the history of the church: the problem of evil.

Leadership University
Probe Ministries

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0800683269?ie=UTF8&tag=tothesource-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0800683269

As acrimony in Germany grew under the Nazi regime Bonhoeffer issued a challenge to the Church to fulfill its radical call to live as a fellowship of Christ centered on Christ

"The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as love to God begins with listening to His Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them. It is God's love for us that He not only gives us His Word but also lends us His ear. So it is His work that we do for our brother when we learn to listen to him. Christians, especially ministers, so often think they must always contribute something when they are in the company of others, that this is the one service they have to render. They forget that listening can be a greater service than speaking.

Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking where they should be listening. But he who can no longer listen to his brother will soon be no longer listening to God either; he will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God too. This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life, and in the end there is nothing left but spiritual chatter and clerical condescension arrayed in pious words. One who cannot listen long and patiently will presently be talking beside the point and be never really speaking to others, albeit he be not conscious of it. Anyone who thinks that his time is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and for his own follies."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060608528?ie=UTF8&tag=tothesource-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0060608528

Bonhoeffer's most famous work, The Cost of Discipleship, counters the cheap grace of the secularized church with a call back to costly grace in obedience to Christ

"Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: "ye were bought at a price," and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.

Costly grace is the sanctuary of God; it has to be protected from the world, and not thrown to the dogs. It is therefore the living word, the Word of God, which he speaks as it pleases him. Costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a world of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. Grace is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: 'My yoke is easy and my burden is light.'"

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684815001?ie=UTF8&tag=tothesource-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0684815001

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