The Cost of Discipleship

Bonhoeffer wrote The Cost of Discipleship while running an underground seminary at Finkenwalde in 1935 to 37, after the Nazi regime had banned him from university teaching. His students were pastors in training for a church that was rapidly being co-opted by the state. The book was both theology and warning.

The opening chapter on cheap grace and costly grace is the heart of the book and the section most frequently quoted. Cheap grace, Bonhoeffer writes, is "grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate." It is the grace we grant ourselves, the assurance that God forgives without any expectation that the forgiven person will change.

Costly grace is different. It is costly because it costs a person their life. It is grace because it gives a person their life back. The paradox is intentional. Bonhoeffer was not arguing that grace is earned. He was arguing that genuine grace is transformative by nature, and that a grace which leaves a person undisturbed has not actually been received.

The second half of the book is an extended meditation on the Sermon on the Mount, not as an impossible ideal but as a description of what the life of a disciple actually looks like. Bonhoeffer read Matthew 5 to 7 with radical literalism and considerable discomfort. He thought the church had spent centuries finding sophisticated reasons not to do what it said.

The book was written in a context of acute pressure. Bonhoeffer's students were young men who were about to be tested. The theology he taught them was not an academic exercise. It was preparation. Several of those students died in the war. Bonhoeffer died at Flossenbürg in 1945. The text has the weight of a document written by someone who intended to live by it.