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A man destined to fail, hanged as a 39-year-old, has now deeply influenced—perhaps troubled—Christianity for half a century.

The career in theology for which Dietrich Bonhoeffer was prepared opened with highly specialized works (The Communion of Saints and Act and Being). But then came books addressed to insiders of the church, who, like he, were fighting on the losing side in Germany (The Cost of Discipleship). Later, the Nazis prohibited Dietrich from speaking, printing, and writing. During this time only fragments of manuscripts, sometimes hardly decipherable, emerged (Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison).

Forty-five years ago, the author of the Ethics fragments was prematurely torn away from his work by the Nazis. As one of Bonhoeffer’s closest surviving friends, I fulfilled an obligation to make the Ethics fragments readable and communicable.

This led to mediating the entire Bonhoeffer literary inheritance. The work almost became the primary occupation of the second half of my life.

Today about forty people are working to edit all of his writings into sixteen volumes. Already six volumes are on the market (at a price too high for most people’s pocketbooks), and the English edition is in the works. Introductions, commentaries, and painfully precise evidences by experts!

This scholarly output means that today’s readers of Bonhoeffer face a new challenge: they must examine their interpretation of him in light of firm sources. Some explorers of the religious Bonhoeffer must see if they have overlooked the political Bonhoeffer. Others, explorers of the worldly Bonhoeffer, must see if they have not devalued his spirituality.

Now a new generation, with firm source material, examines the assertive strength of Bonhoeffer’s work, life, and death.

This man has forever become a monument—glorified, risen to the unreal as thinker, prayer, and doer. There seems to be a new tendency to bring him back to earth. Some seek to dismantle his possible overvalue, to tone down his significance.

Why? From my observation, two factors may contribute to this tendency.

The first comes from responsible theological teachers. Their students may show hasty enthusiasm for Bonhoeffer as a “doer” among theologians, someone who will release them from hard theological thinking and learning. Thus, teachers defend themselves against someone like Bonhoeffer who too quickly and too easily makes students into critics of old traditions.

Another contributing factor: Protestants have lacked for centuries the tradition, conception, and teaching about “martyrs.” Without this understanding, the phenomenon of Dietrich Bonhoeffer can be downplayed. We lack convincing works about the place and function of modern martyrs—and martyrs have been multiplied over all the earth in this century! Studies of contemporary martyrdom may shed light on the fragmented work of Bonhoeffer.

I must now state, however, that the language, concepts, and thought paradigms of this man are a half century old and older. Their environment, motivations, and challenges are long past. Bonhoeffer was not even familiar with entire fields of language and experience that occupy our thinking today. We find in him no answers to many of our most pressing questions.

For example, he did not yet know the problems that nuclear physics has brought us. He was murdered before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ecology, ozone holes, climate shifts, and dying forests had not yet entered his mind. Genetic technology in agriculture and the breeding of humans touched no one then. Vietnam, the Gulf, and modern Israel all came afterward. Feminism did not disturb any level of his life and thought.

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