
A Humanized Saint
Thank God for Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory. This new biography definitively wrests the legacy of the World War II–era German theologian from the fact-defying clutches of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, the wildly popular 2010 book by evangelical self-promoter extraordinaire Eric Metaxas. As Metaxas’s subtitle suggests, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was killed in 1945 by the Nazis for his work with the resistance, has lately emerged as an all-purpose hero to the evangelical Right, as it harbors outsize fantasies about its own acute cultural persecution in the age of Obama. Marsh, a professor