“We create admirers. We don’t create followers.” So says the painter Ohlendorf in Terrence Malick’s film, A Hidden Life. The film tells the story of Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious objector who refuses to fight for the Nazis in World War II. His opposition is mainly informed by his Christian faith and bolstered by his love for home and hearth. In one scene, Franz visits Ohlendorf who is busy adding another masterpiece to the church walls. The old painter laments that, yet again, his work only depicts “the comfortable Christ.” It is not the suffering Christ—“the true Christ”—who humbly submits to the cross.
“A darker time is approaching,” Ohlendorf warns Franz, when the truth will be ignored. People who should know better will do terrible things because they refuse to see “Christ’s life is a demand.” They do not know the cost of discipleship.
It was this cost of discipleship which pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew so well. A dissident of the Nazi regime, Bonhoeffer urgently sought to persuade his fellow citizens to follow the path of Christ, even when it led to suffering. Indeed, resisting Hitler came at a terrible price, one which Bonhoeffer paid with his life.
In his 1937 book, The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer painstakingly commends joyful suffering through the lens of Christ’s words in the Sermon on the Mount.1 Paramount is his distinction between “costly grace” and “cheap grace” (43-56). Being a good Lutheran, Bonhoeffer assumes his tradition’s dialectic between a theology of glory and a theology of the cross. The former relies on cheap grace—a grace that does not make demands and leaves the human person free to earn his salvation. But if we are to truly hear Christ’s words to his disciples, Bonhoeffer argues, we will see the reality of costly grace.
The term is something of a paradox. How can something that is freely given be costly? Grace is costly, says Bonhoeffer, because it demands a whole life of obedience. But it is grace because it is wholly alien to us. The Lord imputes Christ’s righteousness without any merit on our part. In gratitude, we give God our whole selves, living by faith and in total obedience to God’s ways.
Bonhoeffer further illustrates his point with a helpful metaphor. Justification by faith alone, the traditional Reformed confession, is like a formula. The question is this: Is grace “the answer” or “the data”? (51) Should we say grace is the data, we reveal ourselves to be like the antinomians whom the Apostle Paul answers in Romans 6: “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!” But since grace is the answer, we must radically alter our life against the standards of a sinful world. We must commit our entire life to Christ.
Bonhoeffer demonstrates the idea further by looking at the story of the rich, young ruler in Matthew 19. The young man asks Jesus, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Christ responds by asking him if he has kept the law. The lad answers that he has, perfectly in fact. Christ then tells him to give everything he has to the poor and follow him. The young man leaves unsatisfied and unwilling to comply with Christ’s demanding call. What does this story have to do with costly grace?
For one, Bonhoeffer sees in it our proclivity for “pseudo-theology,” or a tendency to so nuance Jesus’ words that it dilutes any real meaning. Bonhoeffer provides an example. Pseudo-theology is like a young boy, after hearing his father’s instructions to go to bed, instead argues “What my father really means is I’m tired and need to rest, so I will go play outside because that helps me rest all the same” (81). We see that the child has re-interpreted his father’s clear instructions in such a way as to assure himself that his disobedience is really obedience.
Still, Bonhoeffer argues, there is an element of truth in the child’s rationale. When Jesus commands the rich, young ruler to sell all he has, he is not endorsing works-righteousness. The act of selling all he has will not save the rich young ruler. Indeed, Christ only wants his faith. Yet Christ is the one who issues the call, and he is free to create the situation in which the young man can have faith in him. So far as Christ is issuing the call, we are not free to disobey.
The point of the story, Jesus later explains to his disciples, is that no man is capable of obeying God without first being called. He is completely dead in his trespasses (Ephesians 2:1). He needs the Lord to save him. “Who then can be saved?” ask the disciples, the full weight of Christ’s words dawning on them.” “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible,” answers Jesus. This is the costly grace that Bonhoeffer assumes when he says, “only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient believes” (63).
Having proven that Christ’s life is indeed a demand on his followers, Bonhoeffer turns to the uncomfortable task of demonstrating exactly what that discipleship looks like in real life. In a word, says Bonhoeffer, it is suffering. This begins as soon as we first confess Christ as Lord. Jesus says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:24-25).
But notice how this expectation of suffering and death comes at the beginning of discipleship. It is not some distant future. Bonhoeffer’s application is quite different from the popular understanding of suffering among Christians today. While there can be no doubt Christians might suffer terribly in this life, we ought not assume that temporal suffering is all Christ has in mind. If it were it would inevitably lead to the earthly asceticism typical of early and medieval monks. It was precisely opposition to ascetic monasticism which helped fuel the Protestant Reformation and elevated the doctrine of vocation.
What Bonhoeffer describes is a universal, spiritual suffering at the initiation of religious conversion. All Christians immediately die to the old self and put on the new man (Ephesians 4:22-24). While sin corrupted the old man, Christ restores the new, imputes his righteousness to us, and issues a new ethic for a new life. This is not an endorsement of a perpetual loser mentality. Rather, it describes the genesis of what Scripture overwhelmingly describes as a life of victory in Christ (1 John 5:4; James 1:1-5; Romans 8:31-32).
Undoubtably, the Christian ethic is radically at odds with the world’s at times, something Bonhoeffer himself knew all too well. The citizen of heaven gives up those rights he once possessed as a citizen of the world. They no longer belong to him. Where personal revenge was not only permissible but expected, the Christian relinquishes his claim and makes peace. Whereas he could once hate his enemies, Christ now demands that he love them. Still, this is not because the Christian suffers and loses on principle, but because he is now a disciple of Christ. To him belongs judgment. “Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord (Romans 12:14-21; Deuteronomy 32:35).
There are some who take issue with Bonhoeffer’s description of Christ’s kingdom ethics. They either dismiss him as naive or passive to the very real evil in our world. Indeed, others praise Bonhoeffer for those exact reasons. But as I’ve demonstrated above, these sentiments are largely driven by improper readings. After all, passivity is a strange charge against a man who actively participated in assassination attempts against Hitler. Either Bonhoeffer is a hypocrite, or his opponents misunderstand him. Assuming the best, how might we understand Bonhoeffer’s apparent contradictions and what might his case for costly grace mean for us today?
First, we must never divorce Bonhoeffer’s words in Cost of Discipleship from his other works—works in which he passionately defends Christian life within the church.2 The final chapters of Cost of Discipleship reveal Bonhoeffer’s high view of the church as one, indivisible body of Christ. While it is admittedly difficult at times, the reader must discern when Bonhoeffer applies certain ethics to individual believers or the institutional church.
We must also remember that Bonhoeffer is not a modern American evangelical. He is a Continental Lutheran, existing squarely within his own tradition, and assumes doctrines like Luther’s two kingdoms theology which is regularly rejected in modern American evangelicalism. When Bonhoeffer speaks of giving up rights, for example, he is not thinking about the inalienable rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. He only means to speak of worldly rights, like the right to revenge and the right of the strong to dominate the weak. These are the world’s rights which are overturned in the church.
Bonhoeffer—a freedom fighter in his own right—also rejects passivity to evil. Christians ought to oppose evil in this life (sometimes with violence) but never at the cost of disobedience. We must obey Christ in all circumstances regardless of how difficult they may be. Part of discipleship is accepting suffering, even death, if it be the Lord’s will. Not out of a preference for quietism or defeat, but with faith that evil is ultimately undone in the cross.
These are important lessons no less applicable to our own time. The church in America faces many threats, including political persecution. The measure of our obedience will not be counted in how many court cases we win or lose, but in our love for God and neighbor. There is no honor in adopting our own pseudo-theology or cleverly finding ways to keep our jobs, wealth, and status at the cost of our discipleship. A darker day is approaching when Christians will have to decide between gender pronouns and financial security or costly obedience. Let us pray that on that day the Lord will bless us with enough strength to be followers and not just admirers.
All quotations come from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s, The Cost of Discipleship (New York, NY: Touchstone, 2018).
Bonhoeffer’s 1939 book, Life Together, comes to mind.