Saving Dietrich

It's a terrible shame. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's story is such a good one - brave pastor defies Naziism and ends up a martryr. But oh dear, he wrote some hard to understand things that make my bonce ache. Of course, he must have been a nice Evangelical deep down; certainly not a nasty liberal. If he was alive today he'd certainly be one of us, tooting the trumpet for Intelligent Design and sticking it to those depraved Episcopalians and heretical ELCA Lutherans. I know, what we need is a book that reclaims Dietrich for us good guys! Bonhoeffer rebaptised! Then we could get a righteous company like Thomas Nelson to publish it.

Well, as luck has it, such a book exists. Bob Cornwall blogs about it over at Ponderings. When all else fails, it's a time honoured strategy to cherry-pick the facts and ignore the stuff that doesn't fit. It's the godly thing to do. It pains me to say that Bob doesn't seem to realise this.

The problem of course is that most true Christians - people with lots of Thomas Nelson titles on their otherwise sparsely covered bookshelves - have never heard of Bonhoeffer, after all he was hardly in the same league as Billy Graham or Charles Stanley. And those that have wouldn't bother to read his work, and probably shouldn't because it needs someone like Brother Metaxas to explain it all safely. After all, we don't want anyone confusing what was with what should have been, now do we?

Bless you Eric Metaxas. Now, where did I put that Derek Prince tape...