The cost of discipleship
Bonhoeffer's book published
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church.
Bonhoeffer opens The Cost of Discipleship with this sentence 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.
Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.
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.
“Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. Cheap grace means grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 1937 AD
“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 separated 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.