Costly Grace

These are my reflections on the first chapter of The Cost of Discipleship, "Costly Grace."

Bonhoeffer's argument for "costly grace" over "cheap grace" at first seems to contradict his attack upon the religious trappings of the church which overburden people and make genuine decisions for Christ difficult. He describes cheap grace as "the grace we bestow upon ourselves... it is the justification of sin without justification of the sinner... preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance... grace without discipleship... grace without the cross."

"By making this grace available on the cheapest and easiest terms" the Church may have Christianized a nation but at the expense of true discipleship. "We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition." The call to follow Jesus fell silent.

The danger of cheap grace is that "the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing." What I have come to understand is that he argues against religious prerequisites to receiving grace. That it is indeed the free gift of God that cannot be earned, bought, or bestowed by man, but he is also passionately attacking "grace as a license to sin," that recipients of grace cannot rest content living just like the world. While the grace of God is free, it is a costly gift, and the receipt of such a gift makes us stewards of His grace. As those who have been forgiven so great a debt, we are under a holy obligation to follow after Christ, which we do at the cost of our very lives. In the end he says that the message of cheap grace has ruined more Christians than any commandment of works.

Martin Luther's departure from the monastery was "the worst blow the world had suffered since the days of early Christianity. The renunciation he made when he became a monk was child's play compared with that which he had to make when he returned to the world." Until that time the Christian life was believed only possible to the spiritual elite, but now Luther demonstrated that "the only way to follow Jesus was by living in the world." He says that Luther learned that "grace had cost him his very life, and must continue to cost him the same price day by day." The Reformation launched a revolution of believers who had been called to follow Christ in their everyday lives. Grace could no longer be separated from discipleship, as though it were optional. The most urgent problem in Bonhoeffer's day as well as ours is "How can we live the Christian life in the modern world?"