John A. Moses has undertaken a seemingly monumental task: that of explaining in one concise volume the special path that Dietrich Bonhoeffer pursued. His work is not a biography of Bonhoeffer per se, nor is it an attempt to define Bonhoeffer as a churchman-resister. Rather, it is an attempt to reveal how Bonhoeffer's thought became revolutionary both politically and theologically, allowing him to make a break with his social and cultural upbringing. To that end, Moses must combine the disciplines of both theology and history to highlight successfully just how revolutionary Bonhoeffer became.

Chapter one sets the scene by exploring the “Sonderweg” or “peculiarity” of the relationship between the educated German middle classes (Bildungsbürgertum) and their Prussian state government. This special relationship meant extreme deference to authority, near-absolute trust in governmental authority, and the belief that the state was the guarantor of order. Under the teachings of Martin Luther, the state assumed the position of protector of Christians, and Protestant princes held final jurisdiction over church affairs. The “doctrine of the two kingdoms” meant that Protestant pastors became, in many respects, civil servants of the state, committed to obeying princely authority while the state emerged as a reflection of divine will. The addition of the Hegelian concept of the state as a spiritual entity, enacting God's will on earth, competing with other states for power, allowed for violent expansion at the expense of weaker states (p. 9). Under the combined teachings of Luther and Hegel, the notion of a preventive war, domination over weaker states, and the promise of a God-appointed German nation was generally accepted by most of the educated German middle class. Underlying all of these notions was the overarching idea that endless peace was nonsense, that God had created a universe filled with struggle and destruction, and that Prussia/Germany was going to play the role of “God's Hammer” (p.15).

Chapter two details the world into which Bonhoeffer was born and the intellectual leaders who influenced his developing mind. What emerges in this chapter is how so many of the young man's mentors were completely in support of The Great War, as they perceived German patriotism and expansion of German power as part of God's larger plan for humanity. Here, Moses reveals just how revolutionary Bonhoeffer would become, removing himself from the dominant “war theology” of his youth. Throughout this chapter, Moses presents convincing evidence of how a brilliant young man was groping his way toward an ethic of a universal, peace-loving church (rather than a Prussian Protestant warring one) and, despite a few blips of ultra-nationalism along the way, Bonhoeffer was on the road to striking out on his own path.

Moses argues that truly to understand Bonhoeffer's radical break with traditional Lutheran theology (and consequently German political culture as well), one must examine Bonhoeffer's opinion of the Jewish Question. At this point in the book (chapter three), Moses provides readers with an extensive history of various types of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, revealing just how deeply ingrained anti-Semitism was in European culture. His discussion of Bonhoeffer's opinion on Jews comes in chapter seven where he shows Bonhoeffer to be both a political and a theological breakaway who was able to throw off centuries of anti-Semitic thought and teachings. Throughout the persecutions and discriminations of Germany's Jewish population, Bonhoeffer came to stress, especially in his work, ethics, that Jews and Christians were indissolubly bound together. Rejecting the supercessionist idea, Bonhoeffer argued that Israel and Christianity were interdependent; the God of Abraham was also the God of the New Testament. Bonhoeffer's theology of the 1930s and 1940s embraced the concept of responsibility and that of the suffering servant. For Moses, it is the Nazi Jewish policies that drove Bonhoeffer into the position of anti-Hitler conspirator. To Bonhoeffer, the Nazi government had launched an illegal war against its own citizens, violating the true meaning of state authority. He also came to reject the traditional anti-Semitic teachings of many Lutheran theologians. “Bonhoeffer opposed the Holocaust on both theological and cultural-historical grounds. He was able to transcend his cultural conditioning as a Bildungsbürger and oppose not only Hitler and National Socialism but also his unreconstructed coreligionists” (p. 169).

Chapters four and six can be grouped together in that Moses reveals Bonhoeffer's exposure to the ecumenical movement, the initial faith Bonhoeffer placed in this movement's ability to bring about peace among nations, and his ultimate sense that ecumenism would not be triumphant in resolving Germany's Church Struggle. After two trips to America, Bonhoeffer resolved to return to his country, and he further resolved to move from passive conspiracy to active conspiracy against what he believed to be a criminal regime. He struggled with his decision, as Moses clearly shows, and finally arrived at the conclusion that his concept of conscience was tied in with notions of personal responsibility and also of guilt. By this time, Bonhoeffer had broken with the traditional teachings of “the two kingdoms,” recognizing that Hitler's regime was not a secular legal system expressing the will of God. After this recognition, Bonhoeffer was able to accept the notion of tyrannicide, and he hoped for the forgiveness of his guilt in the plotting of assassination.

Chapter eight is perhaps the most important chapter in Moses's work. Here, the reader experiences Bonhoeffer fighting against his cultural milieu, standing increasingly on the outside looking in at his own people. Bonhoeffer felt compelled by circumstances to examine why members of his educated upper-middle class had seemingly embraced the National Socialist regime and why they did not seem to have impaired consciences in so doing. Why, Bonhoeffer asked, did these people feel that their personal integrity and honor were untouched despite their awareness of brutality and abuses of power? Bonhoeffer's answer was to return to the Lutheran-Hegelian tradition of individual subservience to the state. He explained that virtuous, well-meaning citizens had “misjudged the world; they simply did not realize that submissiveness and self-sacrifice could be exploited for evil ends” (p. 177). Realizing that what had once been hailed as an outstanding virtue (i.e., obedience to state authority), the theologian now recognized the need for Germans to learn how to think independently. Once Bonhoeffer was imprisoned, his writings reflected his overwhelming desire to bring about a spiritual renewal of his own educated class. Bonhoeffer wanted his Bildungsbürgertum, as elites in German society, to be not only intellectual leaders of the nation, but also the spiritual leaders. His lament, however, “We need a genuine upper class again, but where are we going to find one?” (p. 189), revealed Bonhoeffer's acknowledgment that there would be a need to “reteach” Germans to be responsible engaged citizens once the war was over.

Moses has successfully done what he set out to do: he has revealed Bonhoeffer's reluctance to engage in revolutionary behavior and thought due to the limits of his cultural surroundings. Despite all the obstacles that should have kept Bonhoeffer from engaging in challenging both his church's teaching and the demands of his state, he overcame those obstacles and in so doing, he created a lasting legacy that both historians and theologians struggle with even today. By focusing on Bonhoeffer as a reluctant revolutionary, Moses allows the theologian to emerge as a radical thinker who was able to see how decades of “the two kingdoms” could contribute to the downfall of German society when it was in the hands of the Nazis. This is a book that places Bonhoeffer into a much larger universe, where he did indeed collide with elements of Prusso-German history. I would highly recommend this book for historians and theologians alike for it certainly brings interdisciplinary studies to a new level.