In the summer of 2009, my father had just turned eighty and was battling the last stage of the cancer that would end his days on earth. That July 21, days before my dad died, my brother asked him if he wanted to be baptized, and he answered yes. Dad had always acknowledged the existence of God, but he had his own theories about who, or more precisely what, God was and how human beings benefited from faith. For all the years we discussed religion, for Dad, Jesus Christ was one of those advanced humans in contact with higher dimensions of consciousness but emphatically not the promised Jewish messiah. The rest of the family—our mother and sisters—all came to Christian faith at various points of their lives, not because Paul and I set out to convert them, but through their own unique experiences surrounding the work we did. But Dad had held out until nearly the end. His baptism came not really as a result of an earnest pursuit of Christian conversion, but more as an accession to my brother’s gentle cajoling. Dad was, ironically, highly risk averse. He liked to have a plan B for everything: he had had that Reform rabbi in the wings to take Mom through a quick and easy Jewish conversion to make peace with the family; he had carried a penknife in his pocket so he could cut himself from a seat belt if he crashed and there was a fire in the car; he had slept with a flashlight by his side in case he needed to lead an emergency evacuation of the family in the middle of the night. Paul proposed baptism in the same way. Why not be safe? If it was meaningless, there would be no harm done; but if it was not, what joy awaited him. Dad agreed and ritually affirmed his belief in the saving grace of Jesus Christ.
I believe Dad’s baptism brought him a measure of peace in his final hours, but I cannot know for sure. He was never verbal after that moment. Only my sister Kathy and I were present in Mom and Dad’s room at the nursing home when he took his last breath. He may have just been baptized, but we knew he would have wanted to be buried as a Jew. We all agreed, and Paul arranged for an Orthodox rabbi to conduct a traditional Jewish graveside service. I could never have predicted just how much I’d miss him and our lifelong conversation on every subject imaginable.
A few weeks later, Cheryl and I packed up the contents of our house and set out on a momentous road trip from Manassas to Seattle in our Toyota SUV, which was packed to the ceiling. We had to get Cheryl settled before classes began at what would become the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology but was known then as Mars Hill Graduate School. In three years she would emerge with a counseling degree and be qualified to provide others the help we had so benefited from ourselves. We hauled boxes of cookware and books up to the fourth floor of the apartment building overlooking Elliott Bay, a stunning stretch of Puget Sound and one of the most spectacular inland bodies of water in the United States. On a clear day her view was of a framed cerulean plain flecked with brilliant white sails and in the distance the snowcapped Olympic Mountains.
I had known Cheryl for thirty-six years and had rarely seen her this happy, a fact that brought me great joy. As a fifty-one-year-old graduate student, in her jeans and New Balance sneakers, with her backpack filled with books and a laptop, she was radiant. For her, every day at Mars Hill that first year would be a bounty of revelations, insights, moments of self-discovery, and intellectual, emotional, and spiritual stimulation. She would share them with me in long nightly phone conversations.
At first it was her exploration of “mystery,” that place of uncertainty and unknowing that makes room for God. Then I heard about how the divine can be seen and experienced through human emotion, sexuality, the body, and community. These were strange and even uncomfortable concepts for me. Oddly, for all our evangelical denunciations of modernity and secular science, we were amazingly formulaic and demanding of empirical evidence for anything in the spiritual realm. This ethereal stuff Cheryl was talking about was far from where fundamentalist-leaning—even charismatic—Christians parked our faith.
By the time we got to the really big subject in our conversations, I was somewhat prepared. That came one night when Cheryl told me about a fellow student of hers, an openly “gay evangelical”—until then, an oxymoron in our lexicon—and how he was beginning to change her mind not only about gay people but about how to read Bible passages we had always seen as nonnegotiable condemnations of homosexuality. It was scary to venture out with her on such a dangerous exploration of new ideas, but by that point I knew this was a journey we would take together.
As if telling me about gay Christians weren’t enough, there was more. She had begun reading the controversial early-twentieth-century “neo-orthodox” theologian Karl Barth—persona non grata in our world, because he refused to say the Bible was infallible—and she was beginning to see there was a large and accepting strain of evangelicalism outside our hyper-conservative community. Would we venture toward that world? I wasn’t sure, but again could feel more open to the possibility than I had ever imagined possible.
Meanwhile, I was living in a tiny basement apartment in one of our ministry buildings across the street from the Supreme Court. For thirty years Cheryl and I had lived in two thousand square feet or more. Now, together, our new residences—mine in D.C., hers in Seattle—were less than half of that. Capitol Hill was a beehive of activity during weekdays, but at night and on weekends it could be a ghost town. As I settled into my little hovel, I felt seriously lonely and even depressed. Cheryl had been my constant companion for thirty-five of my fifty-one years. I had moved from my parents’ home, where I shared a bedroom with my twin brother, to the Teen Challenge center and its cadre of residents and staff, to homes with Cheryl. I had never lived alone.
Slowly, I got used to my new routine, my melancholy eased and gave way to a kind of contentedness as I grew accustomed to my living situation, and I even began to like the newfound freedom of not having to report back to anyone. I came to accept and even to enjoy my solitude, but Cheryl, a born introvert, was way ahead of me in finding her contentment. Paradoxically, living the twenty-something life in our early fifties would help us both mature: in the therapeutic language that Cheryl was mastering, we were both separating and individuating so that we would return to each other as much more complete human beings.
We cobbled together a modus vivendi in which I would go west at least once a month, staying for two or three days, often including preaching engagements along the West Coast. When Cheryl could, she came back east. A few major donors complained about this unconventional arrangement, and some suspected we were concealing our path to divorce. One went to the bother of flying from Chicago to Seattle for a fatherly talk with me, telling me that Cheryl needed to withdraw from school and get back home where she belonged. He insisted our arrangement was not God’s will. I thanked him for his good advice and told him, as I knew I would have to, that I’d take it under prayerful advisement. But the fact was that Cheryl’s happiness and our new separate and joint discoveries were proof enough that we were exactly where we both belonged.
On one trip to Seattle, I drove south to Tacoma to visit my alma mater, Faith Evangelical Seminary, a small graduate school where I had completed my master’s degree a dozen years earlier. When I poked my head in the administration building, I was delighted to discover that Dr. Michael J. Adams, the dean who had been so helpful to me in the past, had become the seminary’s president. He asked why I wasn’t in their doctoral program. When I told him I couldn’t afford it, he responded, feigning offense, “Who said anything about money?” Part of my envy of Cheryl’s earlier educational pursuits had been my sense of longing to advance my own intellectual life. A secret dream had been to complete a doctorate and join some of my ministerial colleagues as someone with the precious “Doctor” instead of just “Reverend” preceding my name. Dr. Adams was giving me that chance.
I felt a bit past my academic prime, but with Cheryl’s encouragement I signed up and started immediately. The program would be a “Doctor of Ministry in Strategic Leadership,” a professional degree that stressed concrete implementation of research conclusions. It was an opportunity to consolidate what I had lived and learned in real-life Washington about the intersection between church and state. The program required thirty-six credits of course work and a dissertation, a total of about three years—coincidentally, or providentially, the same length of time of Cheryl’s program.
The arrangement was propitious, but on a practical level I had to figure out how to make it work with my day job at Faith and Action, remaining fully engaged with my ministry on Capitol Hill while devoting the time I needed to successfully complete such a demanding program. I sandwiched in the weeklong intensive courses, which ran from morning until night, over five-day periods. I enrolled in classes on “Integrity, Communication, and Decision Making” and “Missional Thought and Theology,” and luxuriated in reading, studying, and talking about all of it with Cheryl. For the first time in our marriage, our professional worlds were intersecting and complementing one another. She was studying psychology from a theologically progressive evangelical perspective, while I was studying theology from an evangelically conservative perspective. It made for very interesting and mutually enriching exchanges.
My faculty advisor was Gary Waldron, a smart, well-traveled, easygoing guy about my age with a PhD from the University of South Carolina. His field was applied theology and missions, and he had worked for years in China with Billy Graham’s son Ned. When it came time to pick my dissertation topic, Gary began the conversation in a surprising way by asking me who I wanted to be most like. (Jesus was not an option.) Without hesitating, I responded: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian most famous for his description of the gospel as “costly grace.”
I knew only the basics about the man behind that seemingly contradictory phrase: he bravely stood up to Nazis and boldly challenged Adolf Hitler. He had written a book that was a rare classic for both liberal and conservative Christians, The Cost of Discipleship, a guidebook for living according to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. I had devoured it as a young believer. I admired Bonhoeffer’s courage—to challenge the zeitgeist and suffer martyrdom. Initially, evangelicals had embraced Bonhoeffer’s call to serious Christian commitment, but they soon grew wary of a liberally trained German intellectual, and he fell out of favor for nearly half a century. Then evangelical intellectual Eric Metaxas, a kind of twenty-first-century successor to Francis Schaeffer, published a new biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, essentially claiming the great figure as one of us. After that, Bonhoeffer was brought back into the evangelical fold.
The German martyr who had first caught my attention soon after I became a Christian was again present in my consciousness. Shortly after my experience with the Amish, I reread the first sentences of that seminal work, recently retitled simply Discipleship: “Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our Church. Our struggle today is for costly grace.” Even without knowing the full context, those words defined my early Christian life. In the first days of my faith journey, Bonhoeffer had reinforced what I was already learning: that I needed to be devoted singularly to God and live by virtuous practices based in the Beatitudes. This was the message that first drew me and was the motivation for my work with the junkies at Teen Challenge, with the pepenadores in the Mexican dumps, and with Hearts for the Homeless in Buffalo. This was the essence, for me, of what it meant to be a Christian. Or at least it had been.
I would need considerable help gaining mastery over the works of this genius, a man who had completed his second dissertation by age twenty-four. His brilliance was often impenetrable, but I found my guide in Peter Frick, a lanky, bearded Canadian academic from St. Paul’s University College at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. Peter was one of only a few to work on translating the complete collection of Bonhoeffer’s books, correspondence, lecture notes, and sermons. In email correspondence, he agreed to oversee my work. Soon after, when I was reading the newsletter from the International Bonhoeffer Society, a scholarly organization that preserves his legacy, I saw an announcement for a study tour of Bonhoeffer’s life and ministry, hosted by Professor Frick himself. When I told Cheryl about it, she urged me to go.
My trip to Germany was scheduled for May 2010, but in late March that year a crisis erupted in Morocco. Twenty Christian workers, mostly German but including a few Americans, were accused of trying to convert Muslim children to Christianity. Under Moroccan law, Christians could worship without restriction, but it was illegal to teach, proselytize, or in any way encourage citizens from the Muslim majority to change their religion. These Christian missionaries had been quickly deported, but the outrage among evangelicals in the U.S. was swift and their complaints to Congress threatened newly signed trade agreements that stood to benefit the Moroccan economy.
The Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission—established in memory of this U.S. congressman from California who was also a Holocaust survivor—reached out to me in my role as the president of the National Clergy Council and as someone who had developed deep ties to Morocco. We decided our best option would be to send a delegation of evangelical ministers to work with the Moroccan government to defuse the situation. Inflammatory words and statements could jeopardize the thousands of Christians who lived and worked peacefully in the kingdom. It took some time to convince players on both sides of the Atlantic to agree to negotiations, but by late April, I had put together a group of four other council members and we flew to Rabat.
Bellicose rhetoric from some members of Congress who welcomed a good brawl over religious liberty—especially with a Muslim majority country—didn’t make things easy. When I suggested the best way to resolve the expulsion of the Christian workers was to sit down quietly with Moroccan authorities and work out a compromise, I was defying the approach my conservative friends favored when dealing with such assaults on religious freedom. As always, they wanted blood. There was talk of sanctions and other punitive measures. Republican congressman Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania, with whom I had shared many a speaking platform, practically declared war on me for fraternizing with the enemy. Things didn’t get any better when we reached a fragile agreement after endless haggling with representatives from the Moroccan ministry of foreign affairs, allowing some of those expelled workers to return to the country.
The delegation headed back to the U.S., but I went on to Berlin for my Bonhoeffer tour. When I landed, I was already exhausted by what I had been through in Morocco. I was about to embark on a study of one of the greatest religious figures of the last century, but I was reeling from the intensity of the negotiations. I wondered if it had been a mistake to try to tackle two demanding experiences back-to-back. But then one of the other participants on the tour reminded me that Bonhoeffer had taken a study tour of his own across North Africa and that we would see his photographs from Morocco during our visit to the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the largest research library in Germany. Suddenly the timing of a trip to Morocco before plunging into Bonhoeffer’s life seemed not to be a separate event at all but an important part of a complex man’s complicated life.
Bonhoeffer presented a formidable challenge to German liberal theology, but he was far from the theological conservative American evangelicals had initially embraced when they first learned of his martyrdom in the late forties. Over the subsequent decades, they came to reject him because he did not embrace biblical inerrancy or individual salvation, instead favoring the concept of a living, dynamic revelation of God’s will in contrast to something static. He also subscribed to the notion of a communal redemption instead of a singular, individual experience. Worse still, he tended toward a universalism that suggested all people go to heaven, whether they believed in Jesus or not—something evangelicals could not abide. Despite my great admiration for Bonhoeffer himself, now that I was in Germany, about to spend the next ten days fully focused on him alone, I became acutely aware of the ideological differences I had with him. I began wondering why I had wanted to go on this trip at all. What was my purpose?
Bonhoeffer was championed by the left-liberal side of Christianity, and that was evident in the Mennonite, or Anabaptist, religious orientation of our two hosts. Anabaptists represent a pacifist wing of Protestantism and generally eschew violence in all forms and on all levels, including the prosecution of war. Most Mennonites would be conscientious objectors, something many of my evangelical colleagues would consider cowardly. Peter and his colleague Professor A. James Reimer, of Conrad Grebel University College and the Toronto School of Theology, teamed up for this project. Peter had been born in Germany and studied at Tübingen, where Bonhoeffer had lectured. Jim grew up in a German-speaking Mennonite community in Canada’s prairie province of Manitoba. For those ten days, these two “peaceniks” would be my spiritual directors. For many of my supporters back home, I was consorting with the enemy.
Notwithstanding all my internal conflicts, everywhere we visited, I found another reason to admire Bonhoeffer more, and began to note the dramatic contrast between his actions and the choices I had made in my own life and work. Although Bonhoeffer never had a family of his own, he was devoted to his parents and siblings. I could identify with the special bond he had with his twin sister, Sabina. He cherished the frequent family recitals held in the Bonhoeffer family home in the Grunewald neighborhood of Berlin. On those occasions, nearly every member either played an instrument or sang. Even during the direst periods of the war, he would joyfully direct the family ensemble, and did so until his imprisonment made it impossible. He corresponded regularly with his mother and father and stopped only when he was prohibited from doing so by his Nazi captors. When we visited the family estate at Marienburger Allee 43, the intimacy of the civilized surroundings evoked a place where a loving and united family had lived. If Bonhoeffer had maintained his family as a top priority while contending with Nazis, what was my excuse for not doing so for so long? During those years that had slipped by when my children were growing up, my attention had been turned elsewhere. Why didn’t I realize then what Bonhoeffer intuitively understood?
As we drove through the grounds where Bonhoeffer had been imprisoned, Jim talked about the extraordinary deference and even kindness this unusual prisoner had shown to the guards, a quality that so touched them, they became Bonhoeffer’s advocates by sneaking out letters and other communiqués to family members and church officials. Bonhoeffer’s treatment of his mortal enemies was in stark, almost embarrassing contrast to my community’s approach to our ideological foes: our unwillingness to even consider compromise. How was it that I had bought into the idea that the only way to be with your opponents is in conflict? What had I missed in my ministry formation that this long-dead German theologian had learned himself and later taught to the young seminarians under his charge? I’d been on the trip for only a few days, but already these questions I was asking of myself portended a huge change on the horizon.
When we reached Zingst, on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea, we sat in the sand on the beach where Bonhoeffer brought his seminary students for lessons. I could almost see his bespectacled form, cross-legged, a forearm and hand articulated, motioning his listeners through the Beatitudes. I thought about how he helped his students become consummate shepherds of souls who loved their charges, even when those charges raised their arms in the Hitler salute.
Each day we would read, listen, and talk about the life and work of this admittedly imperfect, brilliant, but sometimes obtuse young man who dared to take the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount literally and then apply them to a period of unprecedented evil in human history. As we walked through the yards at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, I could barely remain standing. We were there for all the obvious reasons, but also because Bonhoeffer had learned of these places of horror before most Germans knew of them as a result of his work as a spy for the Allies. I could hear the echo of my father’s observation, as Paul and I looked at his scrapbook, that the Nazi treatment of Jews was the ultimate example of “man’s inhumanity to man.” This was where some of the emaciated bodies were photographed. This was where numbers were tattooed on the arms of my distant family members. All the while, Bonhoeffer was in the background, praying, preaching, helping, plotting. He continued as a faithful Christ-follower when I probably would have given up.
On the last night that our study group was together, as we gathered to reflect on our experience, Peter read to us from a collection of Bonhoeffer’s poems and other writings that he had curated and translated. “Every Christian needs spiritual direction,” he said, and began to read:
Costly grace
is the hidden treasure in the field,
is the costly pearl,
is Christ’s sovereignty, is the call of Jesus Christ.
Costly grace
is the gospel that must be sought again and again,
the gift which has to be asked for,
the door at which one has to knock.
It is costly because it calls to discipleship;
It is grace because it calls to follow Jesus Christ.
It is costly because it costs people their lives;
it is grace because it thereby makes them live.
It is costly because it condemns sin;
It is grace because it justifies the sinner.
Above all,
grace is costly,
because it was costly to God,
because it cost God
the life of God’s Son.
Peter closed the book; we sat in silence. I have made many pilgrimages in my life. I have walked through Jerusalem in the steps of Jesus. My two-thousand-mile FaithWalk to Mexico in 1988 was a pilgrimage focused on works of mercy. At Easter, every year for the last decade, I had carried a large cross around Capitol Hill, marking the stations in the Passion Week of Christ. And yet nothing I’d done had affected me like this. During that quiet moment, thinking of Bonhoeffer’s costly grace, to quote Wesley, the father of modern evangelicalism, “My heart was strangely warmed.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer became my posthumous mentor. As the apostle Paul adjured the Christians at Corinth, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ,” I would follow this martyred German pastor as he followed Christ, as he understood Christ, as he communicated Christ.
It was like being born again—again.