Dietrich Bonhoeffer has become a legendary figure in contemporary Christianity. If a Roman Catholic, Bonhoeffer would most certainly have already joined the ranks of Provost Bernhard Lichtenberg, Father Karl Leisner, and Father Georg Häfner, among others, on the road to sainthood. Yet, the faithful Lutheran Bonhoeffer has left a theological legacy that far surpasses the Christian witness of these courageous Catholic priests who stood firm against National Socialism. For Bonhoeffer was not solely a martyr, but also a gifted theologian whose theological canon was cut short in April 1945 by a hangman's noose at Flossenbürg concentration camp. At the time of his execution, Bonhoeffer was only thirty-nine years old. Despite meeting death at such a young age, Bonhoeffer managed to produce significant written work for scholars to need seventeen volumes to include it all. Among these works, the most influential is his collected letters and papers from Tegel prison, where Bonhoeffer endured twenty-two months of grueling, nearly complete solitary confinement the final years of his life. Martin E. Marty, professor emeritus of religious history at the University of Chicago, recognizes the importance of this collection and has written a thoroughly engaging study that provides an analysis of the book's life and theological impact from its initial publication in Germany in 1951 to the end of the century.

As Marty relates, had it not been for the steadfastness of Bonhoeffer's closest friend and former student, Eberhard Bethge, it is quite possible that Bonhoeffer's final letters and writings might not have been collected and made readily available to so many people. To date, the book has been published in a variety of editions in almost twenty languages. At first, however, the book did not meet such international acclaim. This was especially true in Germany. As Marty explains, “Many of Bonhoeffer's contemporaries did not want to be reminded of the enormities and horrors of the Nazi period, or to work through their own positions of half-guilt and half-innocence with him as a mirror” (186–87). One must also recall that it was not until 1995 that a German court posthumously declared that Bonhoeffer had been innocent of all charges. Many Germans have viewed Bonhoeffer as a political, and not a Christian martyr, whose life and choices were undeserving of remembrance and study. Bethge completely rejected such an interpretation and spent the rest of his life preserving Bonhoeffer's memory. In the mid-1950s, in gatherings in both East and West Germany, Bethge brought together Bonhoeffer's former students along with interested pastors and theologians to discuss Dietrich's writing, especially the collection Letters and Papers from Prison. These gatherings produced the series, The World Come of Age, the collected volumes of papers that propelled the “first wave of interest in Bonhoeffer” (8).

As interest in Bonhoeffer increased, so did the temptation to misappropriate Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison by taking key sentences out of their historical context and applying them to contemporary situations. Marty classifies such offenders longitudinally and, in doing so, identifies them politically. From the east, he selects the Humboldt University Protestant theologian Hanfried Müller, whose Von der Kirche zur Welt? (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1961) exploited Bonhoeffer's theology to support Communism. As Marty explains, “They [Müller and others] were busy finding ways for Christians to think and live with Communism, and some were drawing on rare figures like Bonhoeffer to attempt this” (89). For Müller, the Bonhoeffer in Letters and Papers from Prison was “free of religious concerns and thus could provide an outlook for the Marxist vision and practice” (97). In the west, theologians, grasping at new theologies to express the social and political upheaval of the 1960s, also looked to Bonhoeffer. In Great Britain, this included John A. T. Robinson, Anglican bishop of Woolwich, whose 1963 best seller, Honest to God (London: SCM Press), yearned to capture Bonhoeffer's message of freedom and authenticity as a counterweight to ideas that he perceived were dishonest, inauthentic, or obsolete in contemporary Christianity. The ambiguity of Bonhoeffer's infamous line, “We are proceeding toward a time of no religion at all,” perhaps allowed for such interpretations. Essentially, the presence of such phrases amid an unfinished canon highlights the challenge of interpreting Bonhoeffer. The Bonhoeffer scholar continues to wonder if any of the letters or papers that did not survive would offer further clues for understanding and interpreting the master. Marty believes not, and trusts that Bethge, who was privy to any such documents before having had to destroy them while in prison himself would have shared such insights before his death in 2000.

Interestingly, Marty reveals that one of the “most profound and sensitive interpreters of Bonhoeffer” was not a Protestant, but rather a Catholic professor from Munich, Ernst Fiel, whose 1971 work, The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Munich: Kaiser), transcended the denominational divide by centering upon Bonhoeffer's Christological understanding of the world (152). Yet, Fiel was not the only Catholic who found Bonhoeffer appealing. Others followed. Today Marty believes both Protestants and Catholics alike find Bonhoeffer's Letter and Papers from Prison attractive for three specific reasons: the collection seems to be quite accessible; the collection includes not simply letters, but also poems, prayers, and short treatises; and the collection offers a clear message of liberation. As Marty concludes, “In the century of revolutionary turmoil it was picked up for its message of freedom in struggles in South Africa, the United States, and wherever literate Christians participated in struggles for freedom and justice. ‘Who is Christ today?’ is as enlivening a question in Cape Town as it is in Korea” (182).

In the biography of such a significant book, Marty has produced an important reflective work that traces the reception and impact of a historically profound theological collection by a Lutheran martyr. Toward the end of his study, Marty recalls Bethge's quoting of a camp doctor's recollection of Bonhoeffer, “I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer . . . . In the almost fifty years that worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely subject to the will of God” (246). Bonhoeffer worked earnestly to understand God's will. At the same time, he did this in a concrete historical situation. At times the interpreters of Bonhoeffer have forgotten this key point when approaching Bonhoeffer's writings. Martin Marty's work helps to remind us of this fact as he uncovers the origins of Letters and Papers from Prison.