DISCIPLINE: Costly Grace (Part 2) by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

From The Cost of Discipleship

When the Reformation came, the providence of God raised Martin Luther to restore the gospel of pure, costly grace.  Luther passed through the cloister; he was a monk and all this was part of the divine plan.  Luther had left all to follow Christ on the path of absolute obedience.  He had renounced the world in order to live the Christian life.  He had learnt obedience to Christ and to his church, because only he who is obedient can believe.  The call to the cloister demanded of Luther the complete surrender of his life.  But God shattered all his hopes.  He showed him through the scriptures that the following of Christ is not the achievement or merit of a select few, but the divine command to all Christians without distinction.  Monasticism had transformed the humble work of discipleship into the meritorious activity of the saints, and the self-renunciation of discipleship into the flagrant spiritual self-assertion of the “religious.”  The world had crept into the very heart of the monastic life, and was once more making havoc.  The monk’s attempt to flee from the world turned out to be a subtle form of love for the world.  The bottom having thus been knocked out of the religious life, Luther laid hold upon grace.  Just as the whole world of monasticism was crashing about him in ruins, he saw God in Christ stretching forth his hand to save.  He grasped that hand in faith, believing that “after all, nothing we can do is of any avail, however good a life we live.”  The grace which gave itself to him was a costly grace, and it shattered his whole existence.  Once more he must leave his nets and follow.  The first time was when he entered the monastery, when he had left everything behind except his pious self.  This time even that was taken from him.  He obeyed the call, not through any merit of his own, but simply through the grace of God.  Luther did not hear the word: “Of course you have sinned, but now everything is forgiven, so you can stay as you are and enjoy the consolations of forgiveness.”  No, Luther had to leave the cloister and go back to the world, not because the world in itself was good and holy, but because even the cloister was only a part of the world.

Luther’s return from the cloister to the world 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.  Now came the frontal assault.  The only way to follow Jesus was by living in the world.  Hitherto the Christian life had been the achievement of a few choice spirits under the exceptionally favorable conditions of monasticism; now it is a duty laid on every Christian living in the world.  The commandment of Jesus must be accorded perfect obedience in one’s daily vocation of life.  The conflict between the life of the Christian and the life of the world was thus thrown into the sharpest possible relief.  It was a hand-to-hand conflict between the Christian and the world.

It is a fatal misunderstanding of Luther’s action to suppose that his rediscovery of the gospel of pure grace offered a general dispensation from obedience to the command of Jesus, or that it was the great discovery of the Reformation that God’s forgiving grace automatically conferred upon the world both righteousness and holiness.  On the contrary, for Luther the Christian’s worldly calling is sanctified only in so far as that calling registers the final, radical protest against the world.  Only in so far as the Christian’s secular calling is exercised in the following of Jesus does it receive from the gospel new sanction and justification.  It was not the justification of sin, but the justification of the sinner that drove Luther from the cloister back into the world.  The grace he had received was costly grace.  It was grace, for it was like water on parched ground, comfort in tribulation, freedom from the bondage of a self-chosen way, and forgiveness of all his sins.  And it was costly, for, so far from dispensing him from good words, it meant that he must take the call to discipleship more seriously than ever before.  It was grace because it cost so much, and it cost so much because it was grace.  That was the secret of the gospel of the Reformation – the justification of the sinner.

Yet the outcome of the Reformation was the victory, not of Luther’s perception of grace in all its purity and costliness, but of the vigilant religious instinct of man for the place where grace is to be obtained at the cheapest price.  All that was needed was a subtle and almost imperceptible change of emphasis, and the damage was done.  Luther had taught that man cannot stand before God, however religious his works and ways may be, because at bottom he is always seeking his own interests.  In the depth of his misery, Luther had grasped by faith the free and unconditional forgiveness of all his sins.  That experience taught him that this grace had cost him his very life, and must continue to cost him the same price day-by-day.  So far from dispensing him from discipleship, this grace only made him a more earnest disciple.  When he spoke of grace, Luther always implied as a corollary that it cost him his own life, the life which was now for the first time subjected to the absolute obedience of Christ.  Only so could he speak of grace.  Luther had said that grace alone can save; his followers took up his doctrine and repeated it word-for-word.  But they left out its invariable corollary, the obligation of discipleship.  There was no need for Luther always to mention that corollary explicitly for he always spoke as one who had been led by grace to the strictest following of Christ.  Judged by the standard of Luther’s doctrine, that of his followers was unassailable, and yet their orthodoxy spelt the end and destruction of the Reformation as the revelation on Earth of the costly grace of God.  The justification of the sinner in the world degenerated into the justification of sin and the world.  Costly grace was turned into cheap grace without discipleship.

Luther had said that all we can do is of no avail, however good a life we live.  He had said that nothing can avail us in the sight of God but “the grace and favor which confers the forgiveness of sin.”  But he spoke as one who knew that at the very moment of his crisis he was called to leave all that he had a second time and follow Jesus.  The recognition of grace was his final, radical breach with his besetting sin, but it was never the justification of that sin.  By laying hold of God’s forgiveness, he made the final, radical renunciation of a self-willed life, and this breach was such that it led inevitably to a serious following of Christ.  He always looked upon it as the answer to a sum, but an answer which had been arrived at by God, not by man.  But then his followers changed the “answer” into the data for a calculation of their own.  That was the root of the trouble.  If grace is God’s answer, the gift of Christian life, then we cannot for a moment dispense with following Christ.  But if grace is the data for my Christian life, it means that I set out to live the Christian life in the world with all my sins justified beforehand.  I can go and sin as much as I like, and rely on this grace to forgive me, for after all the world is justified in principle by grace.  I can therefore cling to my bourgeois secular existence, and remain as I was before, but with the added assurance that the grace of God will cover me.  It is under the influence of this kind of “grace” that the world has been made “Christian,” but at the cost of secularizing the Christian religion as never before.  The antithesis between the Christian life and the life of bourgeois respectability is at an end.  The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different from the world, in fact, in being prohibited from being different from the world for the sake of grace.  The upshot of it all is that my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven.  I need no longer try to follow Christ, for cheap grace, the bitterest foe of discipleship, which true discipleship must loathe and detest, has freed me from that.  Grace as the data for our calculations means grace at the cheapest price, but grace as the answer to the sum means costly grace.  It is terrifying to realize what use can be made of a genuine evangelical doctrine.  In both cases we have the identical formula – “justification by faith alone.”  Yet the misuse of the formula leads to the complete destruction of its very essence.