Dietrich Bonhoeffer does for twentieth-century Christians what Luther did for those of the sixteenth. He presents the Gospel' s enduring message in a form that compels a deep, powerful response from the secular man of our day. Here, in the first volume of his collected works, is the absorbing spiritual journey of a dynamic religious leader. No Rusty Swords describes Bonheoffer's years of academic training, his travels in Spain, his visit to the United States, his work as a pastor and a teacher, and his prompt and powerful opposition to the Nazi regime. In these pages Bonhoeffer's private wrestling with the basic religious concerns of our times is revealed.

Born in 1906, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the son of a professor of psychiatry. He grew up in academic surroundings and in 1930 was appointed lecturer in systematic theology at Berlin University. In 1933 he made his first attack on Hitler's political ideas. Two years later, after a period spent in England, he was forbidden to teach and banned from Berlin by Nazi authorities. At the outbreak of war, against the advice of all his friends, he gave up the security of the U.S.A., where he was on a lecture tour, and returned to Germany to work for the Confessing Church and the political opposition to Hitler. He was arrested in April, 1943, and two years later, after imprisonment in Buchenwald, he was hanged at Flossenburg.

English, German (translation)