The Threat of Discipleship

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.

- DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, THE COST OF DISCIPLESHIP

 
Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes this assertion as a way of reconciling two seemingly incompatible ideas, at least according to the spirit of the age: grace and discipleship. It is the person who has given the most to his or her salvation, Bonhoeffer recognizes, who understands best that only by grace could they have lived it out. Here Bonhoeffer echoes a powerful call from the apostle Paul: “Work hard to show the results of your salvation, obeying God with deep reverence and fear” (Philippians 2:12, NLT). The more you place yourself at risk, the more profound are your experiences of grace and mercy—you come to know, at a bone-deep level, that it is all by grace. This is a knowledge that is never gained by semiobedient people or by the majority of Christians.
 
Bonhoeffer was significantly influenced by Martin Luther. He agreed with Luther’s emphasis on “justification by faith alone” (a companion assertion to the clichéd “salvation by grace alone”) and defended it. In fact, Bonhoeffer lamented the damage that had been done to Luther’s teaching:
 

Nonetheless, what emerged victorious from Reformation history was not Luther’s recognition of pure, costly grace, but the alert religious instinct of human beings for the place where grace could be had the cheapest. Only a small, hardly noticeable distortion of the emphasis was needed, and that most dangerous and ruinous deed was done. . . . Luther knew that this grace had cost him one life and daily continued to cost him, for he was not excused by grace from discipleship, but instead was all the more thrust into it.

 

- Bill Hull & Brandon Cook, 

The Cost of Cheap Grace: Reclaiming the Value of Discipleship, 2020.