Several years ago, I read Eric Metaxas’ biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I absolutely loved that book. It introduced me to the details of the life of one of my favorite authors and theologians.

So when Charles Marsh’s biography, Strange Glory: A Life Of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was released, I was excited to read it, to see what else I could add to my knowledge of Bonhoeffer’s life and times.

Right off the bat, I noticed that Metaxas and Marsh examined Bonhoeffer’s life differently. Where Metaxas looked at the events and circumstances of his life, Marsh dug into the theological and philosophical aspects of Bonhoeffer’s thinking. There were several interesting insights that I gathered from this different perspective.

But that’s the only positive I took from this biography. The more I read it, the more I sensed that Marsh wrote, imposing his twenty-first century views and thoughts on a life and time from nearly a hundred years ago. Marsh is unable to see Bonhoeffer in light of his own era and culture, and he interprets Bonhoeffer’s life in light of current American culture, particularly in light of Bonhoeffer’s sexuality.

Though Marsh never come out and explicitly states that Bonhoeffer experienced same sex attraction, he implies heavily that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was romantically in love with his friend, Eberhard Bethge.

This idea is absolutely ridiculous.

The facts of Bonhoeffer’s life are clear. He was engaged to be married when he was arrested and executed. He even lamented that he wouldn’t be able to experience the benefits of marriage shortly before his death. In fact, no other biography or other work concerning Bonhoeffer’s life suggests anything even remotely approaching such a relationship, male or female.

Bonhoeffer lived in a time and place where male friendships were closer and more intimate than we experience in western culture today. It was not uncommon for men display such indicators of deep friendship as hugs. But we are singularly unable to understand such intimacy, being on the other side of the sexual revolution. We view all of life in terms of sexual identity, and cannot comprehend what it is like not to.

And that is the problem that plagues Strange Glory. Marsh has a difficult time extricating himself from his own culture and identity in attempting to understand another. As such, this biography focuses on issues that aren’t there, slapping at shadows of our own times, and poses distractions in understanding the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Quite simply, Bonhoeffer struggled his entire life with the idea of what it meant to live as a disciple. How does that play out in life, especially in the life of one caught up in one of the darkest periods of modern history? Bonhoeffer was a German, living as a disciple, standing against what he knew to be an immense evil, and died a hero trying to bring about change.

Did he struggle? Absolutely. And Marsh does a good job depicting some of those struggles with how to live as a disciple, standing against the Nazi regime, even when everyone else was following Hitler. He was torn between his nation and his Lord, and his struggles to live faithfully were deeply difficult. But to ignore Bonhoeffer’s search for grace and truth, and instead build a fanciful account based upon his sexuality is to read into the story of his life something that is simply not there.

By the end of Strange Glory, I was ready to put it down, and glad to be done. It doesn’t do justice to the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the slap of insult stings, even after three quarters of a century. I can’t recommend that you read Strange Glory. Read Metaxas’s work instead.

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I received this book free from Waterbrook/Multnomah Media as part of their Blogging For Books blogger review program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.