Costly Grace

Chapter 1 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book The Cost Of Discipleship

From time to time, I like to depart from my own sermons to preach someone else’s sermon that has had an impact on me, and this is one of those. The author of this sermon is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who broke away from the Nazi-controlled Lutheran church in Germany during the 1930’s and was hanged for treason at the age of 39, two weeks before the Allies arrived.

On the New Year’s Day before his death, he wrote¹ the following poem from the Gestapo prison in Berlin:

With every power for good to stay and guide me,
'comforted and inspired beyond all fear,
I'll live these days with you in thought beside me,
and pass, with you, into the coming year.

The old year still torments our hearts, unhastening:
the long days of our sorrow still endure.
Father, grant to the soul thou hast been chastening
that thou hast promised – the healing and the cure.

Should it be ours to drain the cup of grieving
even to the dregs of pain, at thy command,
we will not falter, thankfully receiving
all that is given by thy loving hand.

But, should it be thy will once more to release us
to life's enjoyment and its good sunshine,
that we've learned from sorrow shall increase us
and all our life be dedicate as thine.

...boldly we'll face the future, be it what may.
At even, and at morn, God will befriend us,
And oh, most surely on each new year's day!

I find Bonhoeffer interesting because he was a Lutheran pastor living in the middle of the seedbed of postmodern theological ideas which have shaped our world today, and he grappled with many of these ideas – sometimes well, sometimes not-so-well, so I can’t give an unqualified recommendation of Bonhoeffer. He was an intellectual; he studied theology at the prestigious Tubingen University in Germany, but Tubingen was a hotbed of theological liberalism that was beginning to teach that there is no God, no miracles, no second coming of Christ, and that the Bible is merely a collection of make-believe stories by human authors, that people are basically good, therefore, the only value of Christianity is to study how kind Jesus was so that we can be nice people ourselves.

In the Germany of Bonhoeffer’s day, practically every German was considered a Christian, but, since not every German actually trusted and obeyed Jesus, there was a lot of confusion between Biblical Christianity and the religious culture promoted by the government.

Both Christians and non-Christians struggled with this problem. Among the non-Christians, the Communist ideas of Karl Marx were percolating among some, while others were picking up on the German Nationalism of Hitler. Christians were also reacting in various ways: Some just accepted things as they were and went along with it, so, when the Nazi movement gained power, they followed the path of least resistance and called it “Christian.” Bonhoeffer did not follow them. On the opposite side of the spectrum, other German Christians took a separatist approach, believing that the world is intrinsically evil and can’t be improved, so the only thing with which a Christian should concern himself is how to withdraw from the world and find some safe place where he can practice his unique religious views while the world goes to hell in a handbasket. These folks are often called Pietists, and their commendable focus on a personal relationship with Jesus and on the spiritual realities of the kingdom of God made an impact on Bonhoeffer as he considered their response to the nominalism of Christianity in Germany. On the other hand, there was another largely-German “Christian” group that was responding in a different way: they were interested in engaging with the secular and humanistic ideas at the intellectual level in order to preserve Christianity in an academic sense. For this reason they were called Neo-Orthodox, but 20^th Century Christian Philosopher Francis Schaeffer called this group “Irrational” because, as a general rule, they sought to preserve Christianity from the attacks of the Humanistic rationalists by retreating away from logic – and away from absolute truth – and framing Christianity in terms of subjective feelings and experiences. Bonhoeffer was clearly conversant with this group too, for instance, he quotes Kierkegaard in this sermon, and Bonhoeffer’s later writings became so Neo-orthodox that they can’t be considered evangelical.

But at least early on, Bonhoeffer was trying to stay true to the traditional, Bible-based doctrines of his Lutheran faith while also studying all these different streams of thought swirling around him. And I think this is a strategic exercise for us too, a century later, because we are seeing the fruit of every one of these ideologies playing out around us, and we need perspective from God’s word.

This is the first in Bonhoeffer’s series of sermons expounding on Jesus’ early ministry in the Gospels. They were later published as a book entitled The Cost of Discipleship or simply Nachfolge or Discipleship. While I do not agree with everything he wrote, I think he hit the nail on the head in identifying the problem of nominalism within a Christianized culture, and I believe his approach to dealing with the problem is the right one, and that is to call Christians to study the Bible and actually follow Christ as disciples.

[Beginning of Bonhoeffer’s words:] “CHEAP GRACE is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting to-day for costly grace...

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of which a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price which the merchant will sell all his goods to buy. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble. It is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows Him. 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.

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His Son: "ye were bought at a price," and what has cost God much [must not be valued cheaply] by us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.

Costly grace is the sanctuary of God; it has to be protected from the world, and not cast [before swine]. It is therefore the living word, the Word of God, which He speaks as it pleases Him. Costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus; it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. Grace is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: "My yoke is easy and my burden is light."

On two separate occasions Peter received the call, "Follow me." It was the first and last word Jesus spoke to His disciple (Mark 1.17; John 21.22). The first occasion was by the lake of Gennesareth, when Peter left his nets and his craft and followed Jesus at His word. The second occasion is when the Risen Lord finds him back again at his old trade. Once again it is by the lake of Gennesareth, and once again the call is: "Follow me." Between the two calls lay a whole life of discipleship in the following of Christ. Half-way between them comes Peter's confession, when he acknowledged Jesus as the Christ of God... Each time it is the same grace of Christ which calls to him, "Follow me," and which reveals itself to him in his confession of the Son of God. Three times on Peter's way did grace arrest him, the one grace proclaimed in three different ways.

This grace was certainly not self-bestowed. It was the grace of Christ himself, now prevailing upon the disciple to leave all and follow Him, now working in him that confession which to the world must sound like the ultimate blasphemy, now inviting Peter to the supreme fellowship of martyrdom for the Lord he had denied, and forgiving him all his sins. In the life of Peter, grace and discipleship are inseparable. He had received the grace which costs.

As Christianity spread, and the Church became more secularized, this realization of the costliness of grace gradually faded. The world was Christianized, and grace became its common property. It was to be had at low cost. Yet the Church of Rome did not altogether lose the earlier vision. It is highly significant that the Church was astute enough to find room for the monastic movement...

Monasticism was represented as an individual achievement which the mass of the laity could not be expected to emulate. By thus limiting the application of the commandments of Jesus to a restricted group of specialists, the Church evolved the fatal conception of the double standard – a maximum and a minimum standard of Christian obedience. Whenever the Church was accused of being too secularized, it could always point to monasticism as an opportunity of living a higher life within the fold, and thus justify the other possibility of a lower standard of life for others.

And so we get the paradoxical result that monasticism, whose mission was to preserve in the Church of Rome the primitive Christian realization of the costliness of grace, afforded conclusive justifica­tion for the secularization of the Church. By and large, the fatal error of monasticism lay not so much in its rigorism (though even here there was a good deal of misunderstanding of the precise content of the will of Jesus) as in the extent to which it departed from genuine Christianity by setting up itself as the individual achievement of a select few, and so claiming a special merit of its own.

When the Reformation came, the providence of God raised Martin Luther to restore the gospel of pure, costly grace. Luther passed through the cloister; he was a monk, and all this was part of the divine plan. Luther had left all to follow Christ on the path of absolute obedience. He had renounced the world in order to live the Christian life. He had learnt obedience to Christ and to his Church, because only he who is obedient can believe [and “only he who believes obeys²”]. The call to the cloister demanded of Luther the complete surrender of his life.

But God shattered all his hopes. He showed him through the Scriptures that the following of Christ is not the achievement or merit of a select few, but the divine command to all Christians without distin­ction. Monasticism had transformed the humble work of discipleship into the meritorious activity of the saints, and the self-renunciation of discipleship into the flagrant spiritual self-assertion of the "religious." The world had crept into the very heart of the monastic life, and was once more making havoc. The monk's attempt to flee from the world turned out to be a subtle form of love for the world. The bottom having thus been knocked out of the religious life, Luther laid hold upon grace.

Just as the whole world of monasticism was crashing about him in ruins, he saw God in Christ stretching forth His hand to save. He grasped that hand in faith, believing that "after all, nothing we can do is of any avail, however good a life we live." The grace which gave itself to him was a costly grace, and it shattered his whole existence. Once more he must leave his nets and follow. The first time was when he entered the monastery, when he had left everything behind except his pious self. This time even that was taken from him. He obeyed the call, not through any merit of his own, but simply through the grace of God. Luther did not hear the word: "Of course you have sinned, but now everything is forgiven, so you can stay as you are and enjoy the consolations of forgiveness." No, Luther had to leave the cloister...

It is a fatal misunderstanding of Luther's action to suppose that his rediscovery of the gospel of pure grace offered a general dispensation from obedience to the command of Jesus, or that it was the great discovery of the Reformation that God's forgiving grace automatically conferred upon the world both righteousness and holiness. On the contrary, for Luther, the Christian's worldly calling is sancti­fied only in so far as that calling registers the final, radical protest against the world. Only in so far as the Christian's secular calling is exercised in the following of Jesus does it receive from the gospel new sanction and justification. It was not the justification of sin, but the justification of the sinner that drove Luther from the cloister back into the world.

The grace he had received was costly grace. It was grace, for it was like water on parched ground, comfort in tribulation, freedom from the bondage of a self-chosen way, and forgiveness of all his sins. And it was costly, for, so far from [excusing] him from good works, it meant that he must take the call to discipleship more seriously than ever before. It was grace because it cost so much, and it cost so much because it was grace. That was the secret of the gospel of the Reformation – the justification of the sinner.

Yet the outcome of the Reformation was the victory, not of Luther's perception of grace in all its purity and costliness, but of the vigilant religious instinct of man for the place where grace is to be obtained at the cheapest price. All that was needed was a subtle and almost imperceptible change of emphasis, and the damage was done. Luther had taught that man cannot stand before God, however religious his works and ways may be, because at bottom he is always seeking his own interests. In the depth of his misery, Luther had grasped by faith the free and unconditional forgiveness of all his sins. That experience taught him that this grace had cost him his very life, and must continue to cost him the same price day by day. So far from dismissing him from discipleship, this grace only made him a more earnest disciple.

When he spoke of grace, Luther always implied as a corollary that it cost him his own life, the life which was now for the first time subjected to the absolute obedience of Christ. Only so could he speak of grace. Luther had said that grace alone can save; his followers took up his doctrine and repeated it word for word. But they left out its invariable corollary, the obligation of discipleship. There was no need for Luther always to mention that corollary explicitly for he always spoke as one who had been led by grace to the strictest following of Christ.

Judged by the standard of Luther's doctrine, that of his followers was unassailable, and yet their [so-called] orthodoxy spelt the end and destruction of the Reformation as the revelation on earth of the costly grace of God. The justification of the sinner in the world degenerated into the justification of sin and worldliness. Costly grace was turned into cheap grace without discipleship.

Luther had said that all we can do is of no avail, however good a life we live. He had said that no­thing can avail us in the sight of God but "the grace and favour which confer the forgiveness of sin." But he spoke as one who knew that at the very moment of his crisis he was called to leave all that he had a second time and follow Jesus. The recognition of grace was his final, radical breach with his besetting sin, but it was never the justification of that sin. By laying hold of God's forgiveness, he made the final, radical renunciation of a self-willed life, and this breach was such that it led inevitably to a serious following of Christ. He always looked upon it as the answer to a sum, but an answer which had been arrived at by God, not by man. But then his followers changed the "answer" into the data for a calculation of their own.

That was the root of the trouble. If grace is God's answer, the gift of Christian life, then we cannot for a moment dispense with following Christ. But if grace is [merely a “get-out-of-jail-free” card] for my Christian life, it means that I set out to live the Christian life in the world with all my sins justi­fied beforehand. I can go and sin as much as I like, and rely on this grace to forgive me, for after all, the world is justified in principle by grace. I can therefore cling to my bourgeois secular existence, and remain as I was before, but with the added assurance that the grace of God will cover me. It is under the influence of this kind of "grace" that the world has been made "Christianized," but at the cost of secularizing the Christian religion as never before.

The antithesis between the Christian life and the life of bourgeois respectability is at an end. The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different from the world, in fact, in being prohibited from being different from the world for the sake of grace. The upshot of it all is that my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven. I need no longer try to follow Christ, for cheap grace, the bitterest foe of discipleship, which true discipleship must loathe and detest, has freed me from that.

Grace as [merely a “get-out-of-hell-free” card] means grace at the cheapest price, but grace as the answer to the sum means costly grace. It is terrifying to realize what use can be made of a genuine evangelical doctrine. In both cases we have the identical formula:"justification by faith alone." Yet the misuse of the formula leads to the complete destruction of its very essence.

At the end of a life spent in the pursuit of knowledge Faust had to confess: "I now do see that we can nothing know." That is the answer to a sum, it is the outcome of a long experience. But as Kierke­gaard observed, it is quite a different thing when a freshman comes up to the university and uses the same sentiment to justify his indolence. [“I won’t go to class today because ‘all is vanity.’”] As the answer to a sum it is perfectly true, but as [a “get-out-of-class-free” card] it is a piece of self-deception. For acquired knowledge cannot be divorced from the existence in which it is acquired. The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ.

Such a man knows that the call to discipleship is a gift of grace, and that the call is inseparable from the grace. But those who try to use this grace as a dispensation from following Christ are simply deceiving themselves.

But, we may ask, did not Luther himself come perilously near to this perversion in the understanding of grace? What about his "Sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ more boldly still"? … Is this the proclamation of cheap grace, naked and unashamed, the carte blanche for sin, the end of all discipleship? Is this a blasphemous encouragement to sin boldly and rely on grace? Is there a more diabolical abuse of grace than to sin [presumptuously, relying] on the grace which God has given? [...]

If we are to understand this saying of Luther's, everything depends on applying the distinction be­tween [a “get-out-of-jail-free” card] and the answer to the sum. If we make Luther's formula a premise for our doctrine of grace, we are conjuring up the spectre of cheap grace. But Luther's formula is meant to be taken, not as the premise, but as the conclusion, the answer to the sum, the [cap]-stone, his very last word on the subject...

For Luther "sin boldly" could only be his very last refuge, the consolation for one whose attempts to follow Christ had taught him that he can never become sinless, who in his fear of sin despairs of the grace of God. As Luther saw it, "sin boldly" did not happen to be a fundamental acknowledgement of his disobedient life; it was the gospel of the grace of God before which we are always and in every circumstance sinners. Yet that grace seeks us and justifies us, sinners though we are. Take courage and confess your sin, says Luther, do not try to run away from it, but believe more boldly still. You are a sinner, so be a sinner, and don't try to become what you are not. Yes, and become a sinner again and again every day, and be bold about it. But to whom can such words be addressed, except to those who from the bottom of their hearts make a daily renunciation of sin and of every barrier which hinders them from following Christ, but who nevertheless are troubled by their daily faithlessness and sin? Who can hear these words without endangering his faith but he who hears their consolation as a renewed summons to follow Christ? Interpreted in this way, these words of Luther become a testimony to the costliness of grace, the only genuine kind of grace there is.

Grace interpreted as a principle, “sin boldly” as a principle, grace at a low cost, is, in the last resort, simply a new law, which brings neither help nor freedom. Grace as a living word, “sin boldly” as our comfort in tribulation and as a summons to discipleship, costly grace, is the only pure grace, which really forgives sins and gives freedom to the sinner.

[Church-goers]³ have gathered like vultures around the carcase of cheap grace, and there have [consumed] the poison which has killed the life of following Christ. It is true, of course, that we have paid the doctrine of pure grace divine honours... “So long as our Church holds the correct doctrine of justification, there is no doubt whatever that she is a justified Church!” So they said, thinking that we must vindicate our [church] heritage by making this grace available on the cheapest and easiest terms. To be [Reformed] must mean that we leave the following of Christ to the legalists… and [zealots] – and all this for the sake of grace. It justifies worldliness and condemns as heretics those who try to follow Christ. A result was that [Germany as] a nation became Christian and Lutheran, but at the cost of true discipleship. The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap. Cheap grace had won the day.

But do we also realize that this cheap grace has turned back upon us like a boomerang? The price we are having to pay today [in Germany] in the shape of the collapse of the organized Church is only the inevitable consequence of [the] policy of making grace available to all at too low a cost. We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition. Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which was holy to the scornful and unbelieving. We poured forth unending streams of grace. But the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard.

Where were those truths which impelled the early Church to institute the catechumen-system, which enabled a strict watch to be kept over [those entering the church] and afforded [a high wall of] protection for costly grace? What had happened to all those warnings of Luther's against preaching the gospel in such a manner as to make men rest secure in their ungodly living? Was there ever a more terrible or disastrous instance of the Christianizing of the world than this? What are those three thousands Saxons put to death by Charlemagne compared with the millions of spiritual corpses in [Nazi Germany]? With us it has been abundantly proved that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generations. Cheap grace has turned out to be utterly merciless to our Evangelical Church.

This cheap grace has been no less disastrous to our own spiritual lives... Instead of calling us to follow Christ, it has hardened us in our disobedience. Perhaps we had once heard the gracious call to follow Him, and had at this command even taken the first few steps along the path of discipleship in the discipline of obedience, only to find ourselves confronted by the word of cheap grace… The effect was to …. seduce us to the mediocre level of the world, quenching the joy of discipleship by telling us that we were following a way of our own choosing, that we were spending our strength and disciplining ourselves in vain – all of which was not merely useless, but extremely dangerous. After all, we were told, our salvation had already been accomplished by the grace of God... Deceived and weakened, men felt that they were strong now that they were in possession of this cheap grace, whereas they had in fact lost the power to live the life of discipleship and obedience. [Perhaps] The word of cheap grace has been the ruin of more Christians than any commandment of works.

...We must therefore attempt to recover a true understanding of the mutual relation between grace and discipleship. The issue can no longer be evaded. It is becoming clearer every day that the most urgent problem besetting our Church is this: How can we live the Christian life in the modern world?

Happy are they who have reached the end of the road we seek to tread, who are astonished to discover the by-no-means-self-evident truth that grace is costly just because it is the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

Happy are the simple followers of Jesus Christ who have been overcome by His grace and are able to sing the praises of the all-sufficient grace of Christ with humbleness of heart. Happy are they who, knowing that grace, can live in the world without being of it, who, by following Jesus Christ, are so assured of their heavenly citizenship that they are truly free to live their lives in this world. Happy are they who know that discipleship simply means the life which springs from grace, and that grace simply means discipleship. Happy are they who have become Christians in this sense of the word. For them the word of grace has proved a fount of mercy.”

Source: https://df34e017f9c26b9c7b00-b8e800764aa7fb8b32de2e07e74ef69f.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/uploaded/t/0e8233652_1547052993_the-cost-of-discipleship-bonhoeffer-pdf.pdf downloaded 31 Dec 2024, edited by Nate Wilson.