This week I finished:

The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Two podcast guests created works on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Eric Metaxas wrote a book on him. Martin Doblmeier created a documentary. I confess (no pun intended) to have learned about him only recently, but everyone who knew about him valued his influence on their lives. Learning about him as a Lutheran helped me understand things about my mom, who was raised Lutheran. At least I think it did. People are complex.

It was time to go to the source: his words. I’d never read anything like this book. He analyzed and assembled an understanding of the Bible to a degree and with thoroughness I’d never seen.

I couldn’t help reading it knowing he would within a few years struggle and succeed in working from many points in the book, especially from the Sermon on the Mount, to participating in a plot to assassinate a human being. That person was Hitler, whom we all know about, but assassination isn’t turning the other cheek or loving him as himself.

Still, at this point of his life and in history (1937), Hitler wasn’t yet the Hitler of the 1940s, so there’s much more to learn from Bonhoeffer’s thinking.

I tried to read it mostly with a beginner’s mind perspective, though also did from a sustainability leadership perspective. I was pleasantly surprised at how much of his views sounded directly and critically relevant to sustainability. You can tell he’s influenced my thought with my recent post on loving your neighbor as yourself and sustainability: What is the opposite of pollution? Loving your neighbor as yourself. Also on Nazis: Would you propose changing Nazi culture by making it more efficient?

I’m glad I read the book. I’ll have to follow up with his Letters and Papers from Prison collected by his friend Eberhard Bethge, whom I also posted about recently: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sustainability, Difficult Choices, and Right Choices.

I didn’t realize how much Bonhoeffer had been on my mind and in my posts until now. Though he wasn’t writing about sustainability, and much of it doesn’t relate to it, if you view sustainability as I do, as a problem about how humans treat other humans, starting with that we aren’t loving our neighbors as ourselves, much of his views would help sustainability a lot. I’d say I can’t believe Christians aren’t acting more on sustainability except that our culture has so allowed its values to be compromised and corrupted, that nearly everyone defends themselves from facing that they’re acting against their values more than facing their emotional conflict. Compromising one’s values plays havoc with one’s soul.

By contrast, to take up that struggle to restore a culture of loving our neighbors as ourselves, the yoke is light and the burden easy. As I read him, I think Bonhoeffer would agree and would know why.

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