Archive: What Dietrich Bonhoeffer Might Say To The United Methodist Church

By Bishop Ole Borgen (1925-2009)

January/February 1990
Good News

It was German theologian and church leader Dietrich Bonhoeffer who first coined the terms “costly grace” and “cheap grace” in his well-known The Cost of  Discipleship. Bonhoeffer wrote other Christian classics before being executed by the Nazis in 1945.

In The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to his Lutheran church in the 1930s: “We confess that, although our church is orthodox as far as her doctrine of grace is concerned, we are no longer sure that we are members of a Church which follows its Lord. … The issue can no longer be evaded. It is becoming clearer every day that the most urgent problem besetting our church is this: How can we live the Christian life in a modern world?” (1).

With sorrow Bonhoeffer admits that many people come to church really wanting to hear what the church and the people of God have to say but discover that they have made it too difficult for them to come to Jesus: “They are convinced that it is not the Word of Jesus himself that puts them off, but the superstructure of human, institutional, and doctrinal elements in our preaching.” And he continues, “ … so let us get back  to the Scriptures, to the Word and call of Jesus Christ himself” (2). With this he points to the great malaise of the Church: The life of God to be lived in the lives of people has been reduced to concern with institutional structures and abstract ideological systems. Thus the living Lord, Jesus Christ, has been lost. The roots of the problems go deeper than that, as Bonhoeffer sees it. The Church has turned God’s wonderful gift of grace into cheap grace, thus corrupting and destroying God’s redemptive work in Christ:

“Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian ‘conception’ of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins…. In such a church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition required, still less any desire to be delivered from sin.  Cheap grace, therefore, amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, in fact, a denial of the incarnation of the Word of God” (3).

Bonhoeffer then gives a revealing description of the life under cheap grace:

“Instead of following Christ, let the Christian enjoy the consolations of his grace! That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace which we bestow upon ourselves.”

“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship. grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate (4).

In other words, repentance, confession of my sin and sins, forgiveness and discipleship are absolutely necessary for genuine Christian life wider God’s grace And that grace is costly:

“Such grace is costly because it call us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all it is costly because it cost God the life of his son: ‘ye were bought at a price,’ and what has cost much cannot be cheap for us. Above all it is grace because God did not reckon his son too dear a price to pay for our lives, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God” (5).

With an almost bitter honesty he castigates his own church for having left the path of discipleship:

“We gave away the Word and sacraments wholesale, we baptized, confirmed and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition. Our humanitarians sentiment absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition. Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which was holy to the scornful and unbelieving. We poured forth unendings streams of grace. But the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard …. Cheap grace has turned out to be utterly merciless to our [Lutheran] Evangelical Church”(6).

For true faith leads to discipleship and the cross:

“The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ – suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachment of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ…  When Christ calls a man he bids him come and die …. In fact every command of Jesus is a call to die, with all our affections and lusts” (7).

“In this sacrificing of ourselves we gain brothers and sisters and become the community of faith, a community of the forgiven and forgiving. But the community as Christ’s body, the Church, must watch out:

“If the Church refuses to face the stern reality of sin it will gain no credence when it talks of forgiveness. Such a Church sins against its sacred trust and walks unworthily of the gospel. It is an unholy Church, squandering the previous treasure of the Lord’s forgiveness. Nor is it enough simply to deplore in general terms that the sinfulness of man infects even his good works. It is necessary to point out our concrete sins and to punish and condemn them”(8).

But sin is not the final word:

“Happy are they who, knowing that [all sufficient] grace [of Christ], can live in the world without being of it, who, by following Jesus Christ, are so assured of their heaven by citizenship that they are truly free to live their lives in this world” (9).

This is some of what Bonhoeffer said to his own church. And this, I believe, is also what he would say today.

When he wrote this article, Bishop Ole Borgen, was retired, Beeson scholar in residence at Asbury Theological Seminary. He had served as the Methodist bishop to the Nordic countries from 1970 to 1989. He was a delegate to the World Council of Churches and became president of the Council of Methodist Bishops, as the first non-American. He was professor of systemic theology at Asbury Theological Seminary from 1989 to 1992.

 

Notes

1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship. Trans. by R. H. Fuller. London: SCM Press Ltd.,1959, pp, 46-47. Hereafter cited Cost.
2. Cost, pp. 29-30.
3. Cost, p. 35.
4. Cost, pp. 35-36. The italics are mine.
5. Cost, p.37.
6. Cost, p.45.
7. Cost, p. 79.
8. Cost, pp. 259-260.
9. Cost, p. 47.