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The Cost of Discipleship, in detail
The Cost of Discipleship was published in Germany in 1937, four years after Hitler came to power and two years after Bonhoeffer had taken over the underground seminary at Finkenwalde. The book opens with one of the most memorable phrases in twentieth-century Christian writing: the distinction between cheap grace and costly grace. Cheap grace is forgiveness without repentance, doctrine without obedience, sacraments without commitment — the church granting absolution wholesale without requiring anything in return. Costly grace is the call to follow Jesus, which means the cross. Bonhoeffer was writing against a German Protestant church he believed had sold its soul to accommodate the Nazi state, and his readers knew it.
The first part of the book is theological and polemical. Bonhoeffer argues that the Reformation's doctrine of grace by faith alone has been distorted into a license for moral passivity. Luther understood that faith and obedience were inseparable; his heirs had used his language to separate them. The corrective Bonhoeffer offers is not a return to works-righteousness but a recovery of the simplicity of the call: when Jesus says "follow me," the only response is to follow, not to deliberate.
The second part is an extended commentary on the Sermon on the Mount. Bonhoeffer reads the Beatitudes, the Lord's Prayer, and the commands about anger, lust, and nonresistance not as impossible ideals but as concrete descriptions of what life in the discipleship community actually looks like. His readings are often surprising — he resists both literalist and allegorizing interpretations and keeps returning the reader to the person of Jesus rather than to a system.
The book was written under political pressure that its author felt in his body. Bonhoeffer would be arrested in 1943 and executed in 1945, ten days before the end of the war in Europe. Reading The Cost of Discipleship knowing that context changes it. What reads in the abstract as demanding theology reads in light of his biography as a man talking himself into what he knew was coming.
The big ideas
- 1.
Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, forgiveness without repentance, the sacraments administered without requiring change. Costly grace is the gospel that confronts the whole person and calls them to follow.
- 2.
Bonhoeffer argues that Luther's doctrine of grace by faith was never meant to separate faith from obedience. The Reformation's heirs had used its language to license moral passivity.
- 3.
The call to discipleship is simple and direct: when Jesus says 'Follow me,' the response is either obedience or refusal. Deliberation is itself a form of refusal.
