Eugene: Cascade, 2025. Paperback, 182 pages.
Review by Paul Tyson
Monday, 7 July 2025
Charles Ringma is a heavyweight theological scholar of the primary and secondary Bonhoeffer literature, and – born during World War Two in Holland – he is intimately familiar with the historical context of Bonhoeffer’s work. Yet this book bears its scholarly depth and historical sensitivity very lightly. This is because the point of this book is not scholarship, but contemplative support for Christian renewal and action, now. In what follows I will briefly unpack why Ringma is calling us to renewal and action through Bonhoeffer, look at how Ringma makes that call in this book, and then sum up with the message of cruciform hope that Bonhoeffer leaves us with.
Why Bonhoeffer?
The highly disturbing insight that this book presents to us is that the challenges German Christians faced between the two world wars have a much stronger relation to the challenges Western Christians face today than we have any desire to acknowledge. This is not to say that we face the same challenges; history does not repeat itself. But what we have in common with German Christians in the early twentieth century is a form of faith that is profoundly shaped by the gospel deracinated culture that we live within. Indeed, our faith context, like theirs, is alarmingly bereft of adequate resources to resist the powerful rising tide of apostacy which is now flooding nearly all the ecclesial expressions of our faith. For we have a self-focused, therapeutic, and immanence-fixated culture, which our churches – and we ourselves – have profoundly adapted to. Our communities of faith have been deeply deformed by what the New Testament calls “the world”, and the signs of heavy storms ahead are clearly on the horizon.
Significantly, a key difference between Christians in Germany after World War One and us is that we live in conditions of functional order and prosperity. For the national conditions of economic and political stability were entirely undermined in Germany after the Treaty of Versailles. This lack of basic human security exposed the vacuum of deep and living faith in the leadership and institutional norms of the German church, which had long been eroded, particularly in Protestantism, by Liberal intellectual apostacy in its theologians and clergy. And then (as here) the synthesis of nationalism and a respectable religious status quo was prominent long before 1933. Yet, apostacy, worldliness, and nationalist idolatry in the church was exposed through – rather than created by – the rolling economic and political dysfunction of the Weimar Republic. The manner in which Hitler rapidly produced the most remarkable economic recovery for Germans, and the most ‘healing’ recovery of national pride after their international humiliation, led the church, meekly, like a lamb to the slaughter, to open apostacy. This is a deeply sobering warning to us. Should any of the present fragilities in the collapsing neoliberal, environmental, and geopolitical global order result in economic chaos, war, food insecurity and so forth, would our churches be any more able to resist falling into step with a great problem-solving saviour figure and a new false gospel? Consider what the Gestapo or the Stasi could have done with supercomputers in conjunction with iPhone surveillance and facial recognition technology, with drone technology, with AI, and with an entirely digital financial system. It may be that on a global scale the turmoil, upheaval, and technologically enabled totalitarianism of the late 2020s and the 2030s might well make the 1920s and 30s look regional and easy to by-pass by comparison.
On every page Ringma connects the lessons that Bonhoeffer taught us in the past to the challenges we face in the present and the near future.
How Ringma’s book works
Ringma directs our attention to Bonhoeffer’s spirituality. This is a deeply Christological spirituality of contemplation, intelligent and informed analysis, compassion for the suffering, and costly action. The book is comprised of ten thematically unified chapters with each chapter containing six sub-sections of two to three pages each. These short sections follow a pattern of scripture, thematic reflection, and doxological conclusion. Ringma has structured this book to be read slowly and prayerfully over 70 days.
The Shadow of a Rugged Cross
This is a book about the Christian way of hope. It is the way of a rugged cross, calling us to suffer with Christ, with the suffering, and to go against the flow of the times in the joy of the Spirit and in the hope that is within us. The times are indeed challenging, and ecclesially desperate, but the hope that Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Charles Ringma point us towards is a call to action. This is a call to embracing the struggles of our times as soldiers in the army of the Lamb. This book turns our hearts and our faith towards Jesus as we seek to live out the gospel in the world.
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