If you’re interested in quotable mid-century Protestant theologians, Dietrich Bonhöffer may be more directly relevant for us today than C.S. Lewis. Bonhöffer’s 1937 book, Nachfolge, is best known for its discussion of “cheap grace,” but there’s a lot more going on.

1) The title of the first English translation, The Cost of Discipleship, isn’t thematically inappropriate, but it is inaccurate. The German title doesn’t mention cost, and more recent translations just use the title Discipleship. The German title is not derived from the noun “disciple,” however, but from the verbal imperative that Jesus uses when he calls his disciples. A more precise translation, if possible, would be something like “Come, Follow-ing” or “Come, Follow-ment” or even “Come, Follow Me.”

2) “Cheap grace” has a specific meaning. It’s not a catch-all term for an approach to sin and forgiveness that you may not like. According to Bonhöffer, cheap grace is “preaching forgiveness without repentance, baptism without church discipline, the Lord’s Supper without admission of sin, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without the living, incarnate Jesus Christ” (30).[1] Cheap grace is “justification of the sin, not of the sinner” (29). Bonhöffer saw cheap grace as one of the primary failings of Protestant churches in his time. While their doctrine of grace was correct, the churches were no longer on the path of discipleship, with grievous consequences: “Is the price that we are today required to pay, the collapse of the organized churches, anything else but a necessary consequence of grace too cheaply obtained?” (40)

3) Cheap grace isn’t a both-sides issue. The opposite of cheap grace is expensive grace, but the opposing vice of cheap grace is dependence on works. Bonhöffer offers a formula emphasizing the connection between faith and obedience: “Only those who believe are obedient, and only those who are obedient believe” (52). Both parts are essential: “If the first clause stands alone, the believer is yielded up to cheap grace, that is, damnation; if the second clause stands alone, the believer is yielded up to works, that is, damnation” (57). But Bonhöffer sees cheap grace as the more acute threat: “The word of cheap grace has destroyed more Christians than any commandment of works” (42).

I don’t think the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a systematic problem with cheap grace. We preach obedience and repentance and discipleship. One might accuse us of relying on works, and while I would dispute that, I could at least see where the argument is coming from.

4) Bonhöffer is serious about discipleship requiring obedience to the law in all its senses and particulars. Christians keep the commandments not to earn grace, but because Jesus followed the law and called us to follow him in all that he did. Obedience is the “situation in which belief is possible” (52), and the first step towards faith: “A first step of obedience must be taken so that faith does not turn into pious self-deception, cheap grace. It comes down to the first step” (53). He sees in many deliberations about ethics an attempt to evade the demand of simple obedience: “People are pulled away from the clear commandment and from simple, childlike obedience by ethical misgivings, by the remark that the commandment of course still requires interpretation and explication” (61-2). He is deeply suspicious of the intent behind interpretation: “The only response to the distress of ethical conflict is God’s commandment itself and thus the demand to cease further discussion and instead, finally, to obey. Only the Devil has a solution to offer to ethical conflict, and it says: Remain in your questioning, so you will be free from obeying” (62).

5) Bonhöffer is skeptical of many intellectual responses to the Gospels. “The tendency to problematize for the sake of problematizing will flare up easily and distract from the clear, simple truth. It will lead to willfulness and disobedience to God’s command” (247). Where the text is silent, he rejects attempts to rationalize, historicize or psychologize the various actors. He repeatedly rejects any attempt to play off one element of scripture or doctrine against another, such as grace vs. works, Mathew vs. Luke, Luke vs. Mark, the Gospels vs. Paul’s epistles, Paul vs. James, or the Law vs. the Gospel. If our eye offends us, should we pluck it out figuratively, or literally? “In this seemingly so deadly earnest yes-or-no question, our will counsels us to flee from the decision. But this question itself is false and wicked. It cannot reach an answer” (127).

6) Bonhöffer makes a number of statements very similar to frequently-quoted parascriptures. “Hate the sin, love the sinner,” “be in the world but not of the world” and even “Jesus said it, I believe it, that settles it” all get some support from Bonhöffer: “Jesus has spoken, his is the word, ours is to obey” (191). Or: “A misunderstood love of the sinner is frighteningly close to love of the sin. But Christ’s love of the sinner is itself the condemnation of sin, it is the sharpest expression of hate for sin” (178). For Bonhöffer, “the world” nearly always has a negative meaning in contrast to the community of disciples who have separated from it, even as they remain in it, a usage that will be quite familiar to LDS readers.

7) Piece by piece, Bonhöffer builds up  a Christian church founded on discipleship. The book opens with a discussion of Jesus’ calling of disciples and a detailed explication of the Sermon on the Mount, then focuses on later passages in the Gospels and the epistles. Although rooted in a Protestant ecclesiology, Bonhöffer’s view of what the Christian church is and should be is not entirely unfamiliar. The Church is not hidden, but visible: “The escape into invisibility is denial of the call. A church of Jesus that wants to be an invisible church is no longer a church that follows him” (113). Those who want to take the first step of obedience need look no further than the nearest steeple: “This step can be taken in complete freedom. Come to church! You can do that by the power of your human freedom. You can leave your house on Sunday and attend the sermon. If you don’t, you capriciously exclude yourself from the place where faith is possible” (54). Discipleship is only possible in the Church: “It is the deceptive arrogance and the false spiritual craving of the old person, who wants to be holy outside of the visible congregation of brethren. Hiding behind the humility of this inwardness is disdain for the body of Christ as the visible community of justified sinners” (278). According to Bonhöffer, the Church, composed of baptized Christians, is Christ: “The space of Jesus Christ in the world after his departure is occupied by his body, the Church. The Church is the presence of Christ himself” (232).

8) Bonhöffer does not offer a message of sunshine and positivity on the journey to self-esteem and enlightenment. Discipleship is a work of rigorous, steel-reinforced theology, deeply committed to Luther’s triple sola gratia – sola fide – sola scriptura. Its beginnings go back to 1933 and Bonhöffer’s work to build up the Confessing Church, an attempt to preserve some part of German Protestantism free of the Nazi regime. Much of the book was first formulated as lectures to resisting pastors in training. Published in 1937, it would be Bonhöffer’s last completed work before he was imprisoned in 1943, for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler, and executed shortly before the end of the war in 1945. It is the theological foundation that Bonhöffer thought pastors would need to resist the temptation of accepting a position with the regime-loyal church. It offers a theology to strengthen the spine during one of the darkest times in human history, even if the path chosen ultimately ends in a prison cell and martyrdom.

9) And yet Bonhöffer does not offer a theology of resistance. He only touches on the political realities of his time obliquely, for example in his rejection of unconditional loyalty oaths, subsuming Christian love to patriotism, or government interference in the Christian church, and in his affirmation of the full brotherhood of converted Jews. Far from a theology of resistance, Discipleship reiterates Paul’s counsel that Christians must submit to authority. (What then can explain Bonhöffer’s later activity to bring down the Nazi regime? I have a suggestion, but I’ll save it for a later time, since it requires some unpacking.)

10) Bonhöffer makes numerous points that resonate with Latter-day Saint doctrine. He would likely have seen us as an example of “sneaking sectarianism” (208) and our theological foundations are quite different, but you’ll probably find yourself nodding as he discusses the relationship of grace and works, the importance of an organized Church, apostolic authority, the utility of fasting or the sacrality of marriage. Some statements are particularly striking, like “The temple is the site of God’s gracious presence and residence among human beings. It is simultaneously the place in which the Church is accepted by God” (238). Bonhöffer even has his own couplet on deification: “We can only be as he was, because he was as we are” (304). Of course Bonhöffer meant something very different than we do by these statements.

Or did he? And if so, in what ways? Despite the differences, much of what Bonhöffer writes is compatible with our teachings, close enough that we can converse with Bonhöffer. We can learn from our differences. It’s a conversation worth having.

 

[1] Page number references are to Nachfolge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke vol. 4. All translations are my own.