The Cost of Discipleship

Summary

Published in Munich in 1937 under the one-word title Nachfolge (following, or discipleship), The Cost of Discipleship is Bonhoeffer's attempt to recover the plain command of Jesus to follow him from a Lutheran church that had, he believed, turned grace into a doctrine requiring nothing. Its first chapter sets the terms for the whole book with the contrast between cheap and costly grace. Cheap grace is forgiveness preached without repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, grace as a principle that justifies the sin rather than the sinner. Costly grace is the call of Jesus Christ that demands a person's life and gives life in return; it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son. Bonhoeffer reads Luther's own entry into and exit from the monastery as a recovery of costly grace that his heirs reduced to a comfortable formula. The following chapters examine the call itself through the Gospel stories of Levi, the rich young man and the would-be followers who first wish to bury a father. Bonhoeffer insists on the unity of faith and obedience: only the one who believes obeys, and only the one who obeys believes. He attacks the habit of reinterpreting clear commands as inner attitudes, which he calls single-minded obedience's opposite, and he argues that the call isolates each person from family, nation and natural ties so that Christ becomes the mediator of every relationship. The long central part is a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5 to 7. The Beatitudes describe a community already visible in the world; the antitheses on anger, lust, oaths, retaliation and love of enemies define a righteousness that exceeds the Pharisees' by being extraordinary; the hidden piety of chapter 6 forbids even self-observation of one's goodness; chapter 7 warns against judging and closes with the narrow gate. A third part treats the sending of the twelve in Matthew 10, and a fourth, largely drawn from Paul, argues that baptism, the body of Christ and the visible church give discipleship its concrete form, ending with the restoration of the image of God in human beings conformed to Christ. The book grew out of lectures at the Confessing Church's illegal seminary at Finkenwalde, closed by the Gestapo in 1937, and it was written while German Christians and many bishops accommodated the regime. Its insistence that obedience must be concrete gives it a political edge it rarely states outright. Bonhoeffer later wrote from prison that he saw the dangers of the book while still standing by it, and its readers have argued ever since about how its near-pacifist reading of the Sermon on the Mount relates to his later part in the plot to kill Hitler.

Top Lessons

• Grace that asks nothing is a counterfeit

  Bonhoeffer's distinction between cheap and costly grace argues that forgiveness detached from changed life becomes a licence for conformity. In 1937 the target was a church that could call itself justified while accommodating Nazism.

• Obedience cannot be postponed until belief is complete

  The formula that only the believer obeys and only the obedient believe refuses the familiar sequence of first being certain and then acting. Bonhoeffer argues that faith is learned in the step taken.

• The plain sense of the Sermon on the Mount

  Bonhoeffer resists every interpretation that turns turning the other cheek or loving enemies into inner attitudes or ideals for another age. The commands are to be done, which makes the book a challenge to Christian support for violence and revenge.

• Community as a visible alternative

  The last part insists that the church must take up physical space in the world, with its own order and discipline, rather than being an inward association. Finkenwalde was Bonhoeffer's experiment in that visibility.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The book has no clinical content, but it matters for readers interested in moral psychology and in the medical ethics of the Nazi period. Bonhoeffer's father Karl was a leading Berlin psychiatrist who served on hereditary-health courts under the 1933 sterilization law while privately opposing the regime, and Dietrich later wrote against the killing of patients in his Ethics. Within this book, the chapter on discipleship and the cross treats suffering as something to be accepted rather than escaped, and the hidden-righteousness chapter offers a striking critique of self-monitoring and scrupulous self-observation, which can be read alongside clinical accounts of scrupulosity. These are interpretive links, not themes Bonhoeffer develops medically.

• Part One, Discipleship and the Cross

  Suffering and rejection are presented as the mark of the follower; the call is described as a summons to die to the old self.

• Part Two, Matthew 6 (hidden righteousness)

  Bonhoeffer argues that good deeds must be hidden even from oneself and that reflective self-observation destroys them, a theme relevant to scrupulosity and perfectionism.

• Part Two, Matthew 5 (the enemy)

  Love of enemies and refusal of retaliation are read as concrete commands, written amid persecution of Jews and dissenters.