Love Letters from Cell 92

It is now 50 years since the pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed for his part in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Yet Bonhoeffer's ideas on the costliness of grace, the religionless character of Christianity and the Christocentric nature of the church continue to exert extraordinary influence on contemporary theology. While Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison (Macmillan, 1972) powerfully reveals his struggle to think and to live his religionless Christianity in the face of powerful evil, this newest collection unveils a side of Bonhoeffer seldom seen in the earlier one. Bonhoeffer's humor and compassion, as well as many of his characteristic theological concerns, are certainly here; but in his letters to Maria, and in hers to him, we glimpse the depth of Bonhoeffer's expectations and anxieties, his love of family and his passion for his beloved. A splendid introduction and set of notes provide the context for the letters themselves. Love Letters opens new insights into the life of a theologian whose work, we now know, focused on both the heart and the head. (Apr.)