The cost of discipleship
Bonhoeffer's book published
Grace turned cheap, Bonhoeffer warned, is the church's most lethal foe.
This is how he opens The Cost of Discipleship, and the argument that follows defines the theological stakes of the Confessing Church's resistance.
Cheap grace, he argues, is the grace that is dispensed without repentance, forgiveness without changed life, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. It is the grace that tells people they are forgiven without requiring that the forgiveness produce anything — grace as a doctrine, grace as a system, grace as a comfort that costs the recipient nothing.
The German church's accommodation to National Socialism is, in Bonhoeffer's analysis, the logical fruit of cheap grace: a church that has traded the demanding call of Christ for a religion of affirmation has nothing left with which to resist when the state asks it to affirm one more thing.
Real grace, by contrast, must be searched out over and over, requested as a gift, knocked for like a closed door. Its cost is steep: it lays claim to a person's whole life. Yet that is exactly where its mercy lies, because in laying claim to a life it hands back the only one worth having.
The book is published in 1937 as the Gestapo is closing the Confessing Church's seminaries. Bonhoeffer has been running an illegal underground seminary at Finkenwalde.
He is not writing theory. He is writing from inside the cost.
“When grace is made cheap, costing no repentance, no cross, no real following of Christ, it stops saving the church and begins to destroy it.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on cheap grace, The Cost of Discipleship, 1937 — paraphrased
“Whoever doesn't bear his own cross, and come after me, can't be my disciple.”
Cheap grace is grace that costs nothing and changes nothing.
Bonhoeffer is not attacking grace. He is attacking the counterfeit — the version that has been severed from the cross, from the living Christ, from the actual call to follow.
The church that preaches cheap grace is not the church of the New Testament. It is a religious institution that has found a way to offer comfort without transformation, forgiveness without repentance, belonging without the cross.
The German church's failure under Hitler is Bonhoeffer's exhibit A: a church formed on cheap grace has no resources to resist when resistance is required.
What is the grace you are preaching and receiving? Does it have a cross in it? Does it cost anything? Is it changing you?
If it isn't costing anything, it may not be the grace that saves.