The Cost of Discipleship: Nachfolge, The Book
It was circa May 1971 and I was flying across the Andes looking out of the airplane window contemplating what I had just been reading. As beautiful as the snow-capped Andes were, it was the majesty of the words I had just read that caused my soul to rise in admiration.
“Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace… The church that teaches this doctrine of grace thereby confers such grace upon itself. The world finds in this church a cheap cover-up for its sins, for which it shows no remorse and from which it has even less desire to be set free. Cheap grace is, thus, denial of God’s living word, denial of the incarnation[1] of the word of God.”[2]
These words reset the course of my life, they opened my theological eyes, and helped me see clearly that grace was an active force that created action, or it wasn’t grace at all. I wanted to explode out of my seat and run up and down the skinny airplane aisle to burn off the excitement I was feeling. These were the words of young pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He spoke them to a group of twenty-three ministerial students in a small town of Finkenwalde in northern Germany, the site of the illegal Confessing Church Seminary. In fact, the first two hours of daily instruction were from this work simply titled Discipleship, or Nachfolge, which literally means following. The English translation is succession. The faith, or allegiance, that Bonhoeffer is speaking of is a faith that only becomes real in following. In other words, if your faith does not result in discipleship is not faith, not belief, and has nothing to do with grace.
This new monasticism, nothing like the old as Bonhoeffer described to his brother Klaus in a letter, was his Grand Experiment. These twenty-three young men were living in community and learning a new and radical way to live as they prepared for ordained ministry in a church that has been stripped of national recognition. Its clergy would no longer be paid and would have no retirement, no medical care, and no prospects other than the Eastern Front once the Gestapo would close the school after 2 years.
The group was quite interesting. German theology was very academic and intellectual, but not very practical by today’s standards. These men lived largely in their heads. So, when Bonhoeffer asked them to practice the daily office in the morning by spending thirty minutes in silence, they didn’t want to do, couldn’t do it, and rebelled against it. When he asked for volunteers to help in the kitchen and no one offered, Bonhoeffer locked himself in the inside and cleaned up after all twenty-three students by himself. They soon learned that following would entail more than just passing a theology test. This was the context in which he wrote the book we know as The Cost of Discipleship, and the men he taught it to. People like you and me would rather let someone else do the dishes, smoke our pipes or cigarettes, take a walk, or get a few more winks in before a long and demanding day of class was to begin.
Karl Barth, Europe’s most important theologian of the twentieth century, wrote about the book some twenty years later regarding Bonhoeffer’s treatment of his students, explaining the unity of justification and sanctification:
“Easily the best that has been written on this subject… In these the matter is handled with such depth and precision that I am almost tempted simply to reproduce them in an extended quotation. For I cannot hope to say anything better on the subject than what is said here…”[3]
We can’t understand the book unless we know that it was written in the middle of the church struggle, the struggle for the church’s faithfulness to the gospel. and That begins with defining the gospel and what it means to be a faithful disciple. It’s interesting that Bonhoeffer did not require his students to take political sides, condemn them for joining the Army, or supporting the Fatherland. This was a matter of conscience. The German Reich Church had capitulated its thinking that you could blend the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. That you could appease evil. That you might reach them for Christ if you befriended them or joined in with them. The only problem is that much of the church was so liberal that they had not only lost their souls, they had also lost their message.
Jesus said you can’t serve two masters[4] and Bonhoeffer was determined to break the church out of its standard mode of compromise and accommodation to political power for the sake of their own survival. Hitler took over the church and appointed Ludwig Muller as Bishop at the Cathedral in Wittenberg after much turmoil because Luther attached his 95 theses on the church door. Such news would have put Luther in a foul mood - not that much was required to get him upset.
In The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer proclaimed that Luther’s principle of “faith alone” needed to be restored because the German Lutheran Church had retooled it to justify inaction and indifference in its pietistic evasions to the very meaning of faith. Bonhoeffer didn’t like pietism, emotionalism, altar calls, or easy decisions for Christ. He wanted to unify justification and sanctification under the single rubric of discipleship. As Bonhoeffer so graphically stated, “We Lutherans have gathered like eagles round the carcass of cheap grace, and there we have drunk of the poison which has killed the life of following Jesus.”[5]
We are not faced with as stark and immediate a crisis as the German Church in the 1930s. Our government has yet to attempt a takeover of the church or asked for an oath of allegiance to our nation and our leader. Our leader is not talking about a 1000-year reign for the Reich, or trains loaded with undesirables. Troublesome dissents, writers, artists, and clergy are not headed to reeducation or extermination camps.
What we face, however, are the remnants of the Reformation that shifted salvation from a community, or societal, focus on the holiness of God to an individualistic focus on the transaction of getting saved and escaping Hell. The culture has worked to eat the heart out of the church. Every television show, talk show, and late-night show lives with a multicultural narrative that champions a permissive lifestyle - do whatever you want and follow your heart. This sentimental nonsense is destroying the family, creating a culture of murder of the unborn, and confusing the troops. Across the board it denies or rejects virtually every New Testament norm of human sexuality, treatment of other human beings, and of what Jesus called the good life. Indeed, it is a culture war.
Let’s take the advice of C.S. Lewis and reach back and pick up an old book in order to face our contemporary problems. My copy of The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer has 361 pages.
[1] The word “incarnation” appears in students’ notes from Finkenwalde only on February 3, 1936 – especially in what would become the final chapter, “The Image of Christ” (see DBS14:461).
[2] The Cost of Discipleship
[3] Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth
[4] Matthew 6:24, Luke 16:13
[5] Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1964
