1937

Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship: Cheap and Costly Grace

In The Cost of Discipleship (1937) Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote of "cheap grace": the principle of sola gratia, which for Luther had been the answer to an agonizing struggle, had become a teaching that freed people from the need to struggle. Cheap grace is grace as doctrine, principle, system; the preaching of forgiveness without repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, "grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate". Costly grace is costly because it calls us to follow Christ, and it is grace because it gives the only true life; it cost the life of the Son of God. "Only the one who believes is obedient, and only the one who is obedient believes." Bonhoeffer maintained that this was not a denial of the Reformation but a protest against the distortion of its doctrine by later generations.