I first tried reading this in 2024 and kind of stalled out after a while. It’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer, though! The guy who was executed for resisting Nazis! I felt like I really needed to give this another go, and so I did.

I like what the book is going for: The idea of radical devotion to Christ is something that speaks to me on a deep level. However, for me to be fully comfortable with that, I need “devotion to Christ” to be defined (and mapped onto other values) in a clear, specific way, and I don’t know that this book does that.

I occasionally see copies of Eric Metaxas’s biography of Bonhoeffer when browsing religion sections at bookstores, and I feel like that’s a bit indicative of what’s going on here. I don’t know much about Metaxas except that I would surely disagree with his views on Bonhoeffer and his views on what “radical devotion to Christ” mean.

I don’t think it’s necessarily Bonhoeffer’s fault that a right-wing evangelical author would find him as compelling as I hope to, but I didn’t find that The Cost of Discipleship was specific enough to preclude those other readings of Bonhoeffer’s thinking than the one I hoped to find to motivate me in the year of this mess that is 2026.

• The Cost of Discipleship
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• Paul Michael
• Eric Metaxas