Author

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Portrait of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Portrait of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Source · CC BY-SA 3.0 de
The Cost of Discipleship

1937 · Early 20th Century · Religious Scripture

Published in Munich in 1937 under the one-word title Nachfolge (following, or discipleship), The Cost of Discipleship is Bonhoeffer's attempt to recover the plain command of Jesus to follow him from a Lutheran church that had, he believed, turned grace into a doctrine requiring nothing. Its first chapter sets the terms for the whole book with the contrast between cheap and costly grace.

Letters and Papers from Prison

1943-1945 (published 1951) · Early 20th Century · Collection

Letters and Papers from Prison was assembled after the war by Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer's closest friend, former student and nephew by marriage, and published in 1951 as Widerstand und Ergebung ('Resistance and Submission'). It gathers what Bonhoeffer wrote during two years of imprisonment by the Nazi state, together with the essay 'After Ten Years', composed at Christmas 1942 as a stocktaking for fellow conspirators.