Bonhoeffer on Costly Grace: What Cheap Grace Is Doing to the Church

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote The Cost of Discipleship in 1937, while leading an underground seminary in Nazi Germany that was training pastors for a church that was actively resisting the regime. The book was not written as an abstract theological exercise. It was written by a man who understood that the question of discipleship — what it actually costs, what it actually requires — was, in his time, a matter of life and death.

He did not know then that his resistance to the Nazi regime would eventually cost him his own life. He was executed in April 1945, weeks before Germany's surrender, at age 39.

This context matters because the opening of The Cost of Discipleship — the famous cheap grace/costly grace distinction — is not a pastoral scolding. It is a cry from someone who watched a church capitulate to evil because it had settled for grace without discipleship.

What Cheap Grace Is

Bonhoeffer's definition of cheap grace is precise:

"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."

Cheap grace is not a different religion. It uses all the same words. It uses grace, forgiveness, love, acceptance. But it severs grace from its necessary partner: the demand of discipleship. It offers the benefits of Christ's death without the call to follow him.

In practical terms: cheap grace is the Christianity that tells someone their sins are forgiven without inviting them into a process of transformation. It's the version that fills megachurches by making the gospel as comfortable as possible. It's the spirituality that functions as emotional wellness without any claims on how you live. It's the version that Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Augustine would not have recognized.

Bonhoeffer saw cheap grace as the most dangerous enemy of the church — not atheism, not persecution, but the internal corruption of making grace cost nothing.

What Costly Grace Is

"Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble... Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ."

Notice the structure: it is grace because it calls. Not grace and then a call. The call to follow is itself the form of grace. You cannot separate the forgiveness from the following without distorting both.

Bonhoeffer draws this from the actual gospel narratives. When Jesus calls his first disciples in Mark 1, they leave their nets immediately. No deliberation period. No assurance that this won't disrupt their lives. The grace is in the specific word spoken to specific people: "Follow me." And the response that makes sense of grace is the leaving — the actual physical turning away from one thing to follow another.

"When Christ Calls a Man, He Bids Him Come and Die"

This may be Bonhoeffer's most famous line, and it's worth sitting with its full context. He's not being melodramatic. He's drawing on Jesus's own words in Matthew 16:24-25: "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it."

The cross, in Jesus's day, was not a metaphor. Denying yourself, taking up your cross — his disciples understood these as references to literal execution. They'd seen it happen. To take up your cross was to walk to your death.

Bonhoeffer isn't arguing that all discipleship leads to martyrdom. He's arguing that the self that comes to Christ must be given over. The old self — the one that wants Jesus's benefits without Jesus's lordship, grace without the cross — must die. What remains is not a diminished person but, as Paul says in Galatians 2:20, Christ living in you.

Why This Matters Now

Bonhoeffer's critique of cheap grace is more applicable today than it was in 1937. We live in a culture with unprecedented access to Christian content — podcasts, worship music, devotional apps, online sermons. It has never been easier to consume Christianity. And it has perhaps never been easier to confuse consumption with discipleship.

The question the Cost of Discipleship asks is not "are you receiving enough grace?" but "are you following?" Following implies direction, cost, a path that diverges from the one you were on before. It implies a Lord whose agenda is not identical to your personal flourishing as you define it.

None of this means that grace is absent from costly discipleship — on the contrary. Bonhoeffer argues that costly grace is the most grace-full thing imaginable: to be called by name, by Jesus, into a way of life that is genuinely new. "It is grace because Jesus says to the man: 'Your sins are forgiven'; it is costly because he says: 'Follow me.'"

The Question Bonhoeffer Leaves Us With

If you were to describe the Christianity you are actually practicing, not the one you believe in theory — would you describe it as costly or cheap? Not as a guilt exercise, but as a diagnostic: where is the cost in your following? Where are you being asked to give something over that you're holding back?

Bonhoeffer himself gave the ultimate answer to that question with his life. But he didn't argue that martyrdom is the standard. He argued that honesty about what discipleship costs — and saying yes to that cost — is where grace becomes real rather than merely verbal.

A Prayer

Lord, I am afraid that I have settled for cheap grace — the kind that costs me nothing and therefore changes me very little. I want the real thing, even if it's more expensive. Teach me what it means to follow rather than merely believe. Show me the specific place where You are asking me to take up something I'd rather put down. And give me the courage — because I don't have it naturally — to say yes. Amen.

Testimonio includes teachings and meditations drawn from the great voices of Christian history, including Bonhoeffer. Download the app to explore our Discipleship series.

FAQ

Did Bonhoeffer think grace could ever be free? Yes — the distinction is not about whether grace is a gift, but whether the gift is real or counterfeit. Real grace, Bonhoeffer argues, is free but not cheap. It cost God the life of His Son. To receive it for nothing — without the resulting transformation and following — is to treat the cross as a transaction rather than an invitation into a new life.

Is The Cost of Discipleship easy to read? It's theologically demanding but not inaccessible. The first two chapters (on cheap and costly grace, and on the call of the disciples) are the most widely read and can stand alone. The later sections on the Sermon on the Mount are deep but rewarding. Most editions run 300+ pages.

What does Bonhoeffer mean by "church discipline"? In the context of his cheap grace critique, he means the church's willingness to be an accountable community — not just a gathering that accepts everyone without expectation of formation. He was drawing on the Reformation understanding of church discipline as one of the marks of the true church. This is not punitive discipline but formative accountability.