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This is one of those times I curse my own ignorance. This was my first introduction to Bonhoeffer and I regret not meeting him some other way. Because this book has some freaking problems.

They're not Bonhoeffer's problems though; they're the author's.

Let me start with the easiest. It's the last thing in the book, but it confirmed a lot of what I'd been suspecting. The About the Author section, which for most writers runs a paragraph or two, and even for the likes of Dostoevsky or Faulkner runs a page at most, in Metaxas's case runs for THREE GUSHING PAGES. It's the most shameless self-promotion I've seen by an author, a cataract of celebrity namedropping and self-congratulation. It boasts of his "upstaging Dick Cavett" and being complimented by Woody Allen, and lists everything he's ever done from the 1980s to yesterday evening. There's even mention of receiving praise from the actress who played Alice on The Brady Bunch. It's the kind of resumé that starts employers howling.

But so the book. First, it's boring. Oh good lord is it boring. In attempting thoroughness, Metaxas bogs down the project with incidental details and bland, unilluminating anecdotes. It takes a millennium to get to the first interesting material.

Second, Metaxas adores his subject too much. There's absolutely no questioning of Bonhoeffer here: everything he does is right and true and good. It feels nearly sacrilegious to ask, but are we allowed no consideration of his doubts and depressions, are we not allowed to challenge him just a little? Here, the golden is all we get; there's precious little of B's internal struggles, only the occasional wandering or clouding of doubt, a fleeting mention of his depressions. Otherwise he's depicted as stalwartly, cheerfully marching ever forward. The reader is meant not to connect with Bonhoeffer the human, but to admire from a distance Bonhoeffer the saint.

When Bonhoeffer is unsaintly, Metaxas glosses right over it. B gets engaged to a woman, Maria, barely more than a girl, an engagement that pretty rightly troubles the girl's mother because Maria is half B's age and has recently lost both father and brother in war. She's as vulnerable as it gets. Plus she barely knows Bonhoeffer. Yet in Metaxas's account, B feels no qualms about it. While he's in prison, she's every bit as jailed by the relationship. Maria, for lack of experience and any real face-to-face interaction with B, has to devote herself to imagining a brilliant wedded future with a man she barely knows. He encourages this with promises of the great good to come. After many months, she expresses her misery and her doubts about maintaining the engagement; shouldn't compassion and honor compel him to let her go if she wishes, to release her from this hellish waiting? On the contrary, he stresses the bond between them, claiming to want only the best for her but insisting that the best for her is to remain absolutely, irrevocably bound to him. While comfort and hope and the promise of love is to be expected of someone languishing in prison, I found that particular letter of his -- quoted at length in the book -- to be particularly disturbing, packed with manipulations masquerading as love. Any remark on this from Metaxas? Nosiree, it's all cool and godly and preordained, a love for the ages. And maybe again it's my ignorance speaking -- perhaps Maria and Bonhoeffer's love was the solid gold deal -- but some evidence of this would be reassuring.

Third, there's a tone of smugness permeating this book. Emanating not from Bonhoeffer, but from the author. It's that sort of cheerful condescension that is one of Christianity's more irritating faces. The kind that smiles pityingly upon the poor naïfs who through stubbornness or bad luck remain blind to what the believer so surely sees is The Truth. (To be clear, I'm not blasting believers; my complaint is only with this particular attitude.) This makes Metaxas oblivious to some obvious points. Take just one e.g.: he notes as an example of evil that Goebbels invoked Germanic pagan imagery in the torchlit midnight book burnings. The pagan aspect itself, distinct from the Nazi horror, Metaxas considers evil because it's decidedly unchristian. There's a hint of criticism for the Germans who didn't recognize this, who simply responded viscerally, stupidly to it. Yet surely he's aware of Christianity's own pagan underpinnings, no? The uncanny coincidence of Christmas falling near the winter solstice, Easter's tie to ancient fertility rites? I know that when I've stood in a southern Methodist church on Christmas Eve, singing carols in the tender dark of a candlelit vigil, no one's ever interrupted the service with, "Wait just a minute! Just what the hell does that pine tree have to do with all this anyway?"

Metaxas seems to take for granted that God, his own personal Big Guy, is the only correct and proper God, and that his readers are with him on this -- or should be. Less than a quarter of the way into the book, you realize he's not an unbiased biographer, that the scholarliness obscures his truer project: he's not reporting on a real, fallible human or exploring the evolution of a humble pastor to revolutionary thinker and anti-Nazi collaborator, but rather erecting an icon in the image of his own beliefs.

It's the same problem I have with depictions of Jesus as essentially untroubled. I understand the yearning for a placid soul moving unflinchingly forward through the worst of horrors: it represents security, stability, the power of faith in the face of crisis. But when the temptations of the desert are blown past -- "Oh, but he wasn't really that tempted, he was never fooled" -- it leaves me cold. You don't get credit for resisting something that holds no appeal. "Would you like mayonnaise on your sandwich?" "I don't like mayonnaise." "GOOD FOR YOU! I WISH I HAD YOUR RESTRAINT!"

No, give me a savior who overcomes the most insidious temptations, who wages that battle of living one minute after the next, who's intimately acquainted with fear and doubt and weakness and pain, who in spite of all that finds a way to deal with it healthily, with empathy and optimism and grace. Otherwise you end up with a statue of a savior, as magnificent and unfeeling as bronze. In my experience, I-Thou relationships rarely end well.

Maybe I'm making it sound worse than it is. Ultimately, the book made me quite interested in Bonhoeffer. I just wish I could shake the feeling that Metaxas is somehow using Bonhoeffer to his own ends. I can already see it listed in his next book's About the Author section, given a hearty thumbs-up from Kirk "Enough Already" Cameron from Growing Pains.