The received image of Bonhoeffer has certainly varied in the course of time. The progressive unfolding and publication of the full range of his writings, the successive studies of him in his historical context, together with the varying perspectives and interests of his readers, have seen to that. In the years immediately after his death it was Bonhoeffer the martyr who first became known in the English-speaking world: the one who had endured two years’ imprisonment and then in the last month of war was executed at Flossenbürg; the one who had refused to bow the knee to the tyrant; the exemplary pastor of the Confessing Church who had lived out and sealed by his own death what in 1937 he had written in his book Nachfolge (Discipleship): ‘When Jesus calls a man, he bids him come and die.’ Significantly, when the first English edition appeared in 1949 the title was enlarged to The Cost of Discipleship. In the early 1950s others of his works began to appear in English, notably his Letters and Papers from Prison (1953), and Ethics (1955). The figure of a serious, exploratory theologian began to emerge, which in the early 1960s morphed into that of the radical, even revolutionary, thinker who in his secret prison writings had declared the need for a ‘Christianity without religion’ in a ‘world come of age’. In Britain it was John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God (1963), which highlighted this version of Bonhoeffer, as did certain of the so-called ‘death of God’ theologies, particularly in the United States. By the 1970s, however, a more complex and contoured picture was arriving with the publication of Bonhoeffer’s earlier works on ecclesiology, biblical theology and Christology, and above all in 1970 with the comprehensive and detailed biography by Bonhoeffer’s close friend Eberhard Bethge.³ It was this latter which decisively revised the simplistic martyr-narrative and brought more fully into light Bonhoeffer the willing participant in the conspiracy to overthrow Hitler, with all the moral ambiguity which complicity in an act of violence entailed for the former advocate of pacifism. Political and liberation theologies found an interlocutor in Bonhoeffer, and much debate still focuses on Bonhoeffer the ethicist and his implications for theology in the public realm.

We can be yet more specific about the continuity in Bonhoeffer. There is one term and concept which, more than any other, runs like a thread throughout his theology, and which is crucially significant for linking the life of the church and the life of society. We meet it f...