Background Notes from Bonhoeffer - Chapter 2 'The Call to Discipleship'

The response of the disciples is an act of obedience, not a confession of faith in Jesus.

Bonhoeffer spends the second chapter of his book talking about our call to discipleship. He begins by discussing the calling of Matthew (or Levi).

Because Jesus is the Christ, he has the authority to call and to demand obedience to his word. Jesus summons men to follow him not as a teacher or a pattern of the good life, but as the Christ, the Son of God.

...And what does the text inform us about the content of discipleship? Follow me, run along behind me! That is all. To follow in his steps is something devoid of all content.

He contrasts this calling with the experiences of three would-be disciples to make the following point:

Discipleship without Jesus Christ is a way of our own choosing. It may be the ideal way. It may even lead to martyrdom, but it is devoid of all promise. Jesus will certainly reject it.

The passage he refers to is Luke 9:7-62:

The Cost of Following Jesus

As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, "I will follow you wherever you go." Jesus replied, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head." He said to another man, "Follow me."But the man replied, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God." Still another said, "I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say good-by to my family." Jesus replied, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God."

He then makes points about each would-be disciple. Bonhoeffer says that the first would-be disciple volunteers on his own, but cannot, on his own choose the life of suffering that is involved in true discipleship.

No man can choose such a life for himself. No man can call himself to such a destiny, says Jesus, and his word stays unanswered. The gulf between a voluntary offer to follow and genuine discipleship is clear.

The second would-be disciple, says Bonhoeffer, wants to ensure he fulfills the law first, and then wants to follow.

A definite legal ordinance acts as a barrier between Jesus and the man he has called. But the call of Jesus is stronger than the barrier. At this critical moment nothing on earth, however sacred, must be allowed to come between Jesus and the man he has called - not even the law itself.

The third would-be disciple again attempts to volunteer as a disciple - and even stipulates the terms upon which he will do so.

...although he is ready enough to throw in his lot with Jesus, he succeeds in putting up a barrier between himself and the Master. "Suffer me first." He wants to follow, but feels obliged to insist on his own terms. Discipleship to him is a possibility which can only be realized when certain conditions have been fulfilled. This is to reduce discipleship to the level of the human understanding.

So far, Bonhoeffer's "Steps to Discipleship" look a little like this:

1. The Call
2. Clean Break From Previous Existence (places the disciple in a place where faith is possible)

   So long as Levi sits at the receipt of custom, and Peter at his nets, they could both pursue their trade honestly and dutifully, and they might both enjoy religious experiences, old and new. But if they want to believe in God, the only way is to follow his incarnate Son.

Then Bonhoeffer wrestles for a while with:

only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient believes

Do this! Give up that! Leave the ship and come to me! When a man says he cannot obey the call of Jesus because he believes, or because he does not believe, Jesus says: 'First obey, perform the external work, renounce your attachments, give up the obstacles which separate you from the will of God. Do not say you have not got faith. You will not have it so long as you persist in disobedience and refuse to take the first step. Neither must you say that you have faith, and therefore there is no need for you to take the first step. You have not got faith so long as and because you will not take the first step but become hardened in your unbelief under the guise of humble faith.'

He goes on to discuss the story of the rich young ruler.

The answer to the young man's problem is - Jesus Christ. He had hoped to hear the word of the good master, but he now perceives that this word is the Man to whom he had addressed his question. He stands face to face with Jesus, the Son of God: it is the ultimate encounter. It is now only a question of yes or no, of obedience or disobedience. The answer is no. He went away sorrowful, disappointed and deceived of his hopes, unable to wrench himself from his past.

And then he finishes the chapter by comparing the rich young ruler to the introduction to the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Thoughts on 'Costly Grace'

One of the questions we've been asking for a long time is what is the point of going to church on a Sunday morning. It often feels like it is simply an opportunity for people to make themselves feel better about themselves - sing some happy-clappy songs, listen to a self-help sermon, exchange some sincere smiles over bad coffee and get on with your life. We've been frustrated by the lack of depth that we've met in churches, the lack of change that it feels like people are willing to even discuss (much less achieve) in their lives. In otherwords, the lack of discipleship and interest/willingness to engage in the process of discipleship.

Another concurrent question we've been asking is how did a "Christian" country - Germany in the 1930s - allow the attrocities of Nazi Germany to be perpetuated within its borders and beyond?

All that is to say that this chapter really resonated with me - it captured my interest in the book and made me feel like there was something relevant here for me to learn from. This is why:

Bonhoeffer wrote this in Germany in 1937 - two years before the outbreak of World War II. His treatise is that without the discipleship of costly grace the church is completely ineffectual, and furthermore has been inoculated from the power of the call of Christ on an individual's life. His explanation of what this inoculation looks like is actually a bit frightening - lets recap:

We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition. ... We poured forth unending streams of grace.

According to Bonhoeffer, the German church was willing to do anything to get people to come through its doors. The important thing was bums on seats, and to achieve this end the church was willing to prostitute itself to as many citizens as possible - selling for the cheapest price that it might obtain the largest numbers.

But the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard.

Calling people to follow Jesus along his narrow way is not a great way to get people flocking. This is a costly choice - Jesus promises that it will be. And if we can have grace on the cheap, why would we need to make the costly choice of grace? We've had our 'grace shot', we're inoculated against our guilt, we've listened to our self-help sermon, worded in such a way as we can feel like we're probably all right after all ("not as bad as Mrs. Buggins over in the third pew ... did you hear what she did last week?!?")

And equally if our churches have been able to gain the outward signs of success - a large parking lot, full to bursting every Sunday morning; a healthy balance on the offerings from week to week - without the cost of investing individually into people's lives; the cost of church discipline as well as baptism; the cost of confession as well as communion; to be honest, these days, the cost of communion as well as the sermon; then why would they trade the outward expressions of success for the challenge and upheaval of costly grace?

Bonhoeffer, although writing over seventy years ago, is asking the questions that many are asking today - how can the Church have an impact on its world? How can Christians live out their calling and their mission in the 21st century? And as much as we look for answers that are big, new, showy, and important, perhaps Bonhoeffer's answer - discipling individual Christians with costly grace - is an avenue we may find, in the long run, bears far more widespread impact.

I recently overheard someone who was mussing about the effectiveness of the early disciples on their world, versus the impact of the emergent church on North America. They were commenting specifically on Peter, and his ability to go from scared, Christ-denying, promise-forgetting fisherman to the rock upon which Christ built his Church. Yet if you were to ask Bonhoeffer how Peter was able to achieve this radical transformation you would get a very simple answer: Christ called, Peter gave up everything, obeyed in faith and followed. In otherwords, he was offered - and he chose - the discipleship of costly grace. But more about that in Chapter 4.

Background Notes from Bonhoeffer, Chapter 1 - Costly Grace

Dietrich Bonhoeffer. "The Cost of Discipleship". Notes from Chapter 1 - 'Costly Grace'

The first chapter of Bonhoeffer's treatise on discipleship is about grace. Bonhoeffer contrasts "cheap grace" with "costly grace". He says:

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting to-day for costly grace.

He then goes on to describe the differences between cheap and costly grace.

Cheap Grace:

• grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system
• forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth
• the love of God taught as the Christian "conception" of God
• intellectual assent to the ideal of forgiveness is seen to be sufficient to secure remission of sins
• no contrition required
• no real desire to be delivered from sin
• justification of sin without the justification of the sinner
• "Grace alone does everything, they say, and so everything can remain as it was before."
• preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentence
• baptism without church discipline
• Communion without confession
• absolution without personal confession
• grace without discipleship
• grace without the cross
• grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate

Costly grace, on the other hand:

• treasure hidden in the field
• kingly rule of Christ which causes the disciple to leave his nets and follow him
• the gospel which must be sought again and again
• the gift which must be asked for
• the door at which a man must knock
  
• condemns sin yet justifies the sinner

Bonhoeffer uses the life of Peter to argue that grace and discipleship were intended to be intrinsically linked. But when the world became "Christianized" in the 4th century, Bonhoeffer says,

and the Church became more secularized, this realization of the costliness of grace gradually faded. The world was Christianized, and grace became its common property. It was to be had at low cost.

He then goes on to give a history of the rise of the monastic movement.

Thus monasticism became a living protest against the secularization of Christianity and the cheapening of grace. But the Church was wise enough to tolerate this protest, and to prevent it from developing to its logical conclusion. It thus succeeded in relativizing it, even using it in order to justify the secularization of its own life. Monasticism was represented as an individual achievement which the mass of the laity could not be expected to emulate. By thus limiting the application of the commandments of Jesus to a restricted group of specialists, the Church evolved the fatal conception of the double standard - a maximum and minimum standard of Christian obedience.

Bonhoeffer then moves on to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Luther, who had entered the monastic life for the purpose of reaching that maximum standard was confronted with a reality check.

[God] showed [Luther] through the Scriptures that the following of Christ is not the achievement or merit of a select few, but the divine command to all Christians without distinction.

Having met with this understanding of grace, Luther renounced his vows, and

taught that man cannot stand before God, however religious his works and ways may be, because at bottom he is always seeking his own interests.

However, Luther's followers managed to twist the understanding once again from costly grace, to cheap grace.

If grace is God's answer, the gift of Christian life, then we cannot for a moment dispense with following Christ. But if grace is the data for my Christian life, it means that I set out to live the Christian life in the world with all my sins justified beforehand. I can go and sin as much as I like, and rely on this grace to forgive me, for after all the world is justified in principle by grace. I can therefore cling to my bourgeois secular existence and remain as I was before, but with the added assurance that the grace of God will cover me.

And then Bonhoeffer goes on to explain why the Lutheran organized Church is collapsing around them.

We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptized, confirmed, and 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 unending streams of grace. But the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard. Where were those truths which impelled the Church to institute the catechumenate, which enabled a strict watch to be kept over the frontier between the Church and the world, and afforded adequate protection for costly grace? ... What are those three thousands Saxons put to death by Charlemagne compared with the millions of spiritual corpses in our country to-day? ... Cheap grace has turned out to be utterly merciless to our Evangelical Church.

Bonhoeffer is explicit when he lays out the effect this cheap grace has had on our spiritual lives.

Instead of opening up the way to Christ it has closed it. Instead of calling us to follow Christ, it has hardened us in our disobedience. Perhaps we had once heard the gracious call to follow him, and had at this command even taken the first few steps along the path of discipleship in the discipline of obedience, only to find ourselves confronted by the word of cheap grace. Was that not merciless and hard? The only effect that such a word could have on us was to bar our way to progress, and seduce us to the mediocre level of the world, quenching the joy of discipleship by telling us that we were following a way of our own choosing, that we were spending our strength and disciplining ourselves in vain - all of which was not merely useless, but extremely dangerous. After all, we were told, our salvation had already been accomplished by the grace of God. The smoking flax was mercilessly extinguished.

And thereby Bonhoeffer reaches his chapter's concluding question:

It is becoming clearer every day that the most urgent problem besetting our Church is this: How can we live the Christian life in the modern world?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer - The Cost of Discipleship

I finally picked up Bonhoeffer's "The Cost of Discipleship" this weekend. I've been meaning to read this book for years. I now know both why I needed to read it, and why I haven't read it yet! It is heavy going, but it is full of so much depth and value.

I'm not overly great at the kind of thinking exercise that this book requires of a person, so for my own benefit primarily, I'm going to spend some time over the next few weeks blogging through the chapters. I would LOVE some feedback from anyone who wants to comment on this - I'd love it even more if someone would read alongside with me and we could discuss what Bonhoeffer's saying in more depth. I feel there is a ton of great value and practice in what he is saying, but its not a book to be simply read and put down. I think it'll take some head-scratching to get it.