If you're looking for a couple of books that take you to the heart of Bonhoeffer's theology, then here's two I've learned a lot from, and which are good theology in their own right:
G. B. Kelly and F. B. Nelson, The Cost of Moral Leadership. The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003)
Sabine Dramm, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. An Introduction to His Thought, (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2007)
There's a huge and growing body of secondary material on Bonhoeffer, much of it stimulated over the past decade with the publishing of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Works now being translated into English. I have a friend who may well know more history than, as the Scripture says, "all we can ever imagine or think", who scoffs at the purists who say don't read secondary works first, read the primary texts. His advice was much more sympathetic, and I've followed it for many a year. Applied to Bonhoeffer it means: Get a hold of two or three books on Bonhoeffer written by trusted guides and read them, then when you read Bonhoeffer you will have a sense of who he was, what he was saying and why, the central themes of his thought, and an appreciation of him as a human being engaged in the life of his time. My friend is the kind of friend you disagree with only if you can provide securely nailed down footnotes.
In any case I agree with him, and have relied on that simple common sense trustfulness of the scholarship of others, as a way of being introduced to the great minds of Christian thought and philosophy. Bauckham did it for me with Moltmann: Hunsinger and Webster for Barth; several unforgettable conversations with Donald Mackinnon for Von Balthasar; Robert Jenson and Perry Miller for Jonathan Edwards; and for Bonhoeffer, apart from Bethge's huge biography a number of others, but the two above are now amongst the most engaged and engaging guides.
But after a guided tour by a couple of experts, it's time to start hearing the original voice, reading Bonhoeffer and allowing him to speak for himself.
To read Bonhoeffer is like engaging in a theological detox programme. The toxic build-up of lazy assumptions, intellectual evasions, ethical cost-cutting exercises and spiritual suppressants don't easily survive regular dozes of Christocentric reality checks!
To read Bonhoeffer is good for the soul - astringent, purifying, unsettling, demanding, not recommended for the timid who don't want to ask questions, or the comfortably sure who don't want to hear answers that might contradict their certainties.
Here's two extracts, one is Kelly and Nelson's commentary, and one is unadulterated Bonhoeffer:
Hence Bonhoeffer's injunction, "Only the believers obey, and only the obedient believe"...Faith and obedience are linked together in a dialectical and indissoluble unity in which the willingness to serve God by obeying the Gospel mandates is the natural and spontaneous note of Christian life governbed by the person and mission of Jesus Christ.
Christianity without the living Jesus Christ remains necessarily a Christianity without discipleship, and a Christianity without discipleship is always a Christianity without Jesus Christ.
Both quotations are on pages 134-5 of The Cost of Moral leadership.
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