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?

"Getting back to our 'Christian Roots'"

As a North American (and I hear this in Britain as well), I have frequently heard churches calling for their congregations, and their nations to come back to their 'Christian Roots'. As an historian, I cringe inside. This is why: I believe there is a very strong case to be made for the fact that none of these countries (Canada, America or Britain) was founded on Christian principles.

Canada
To start with my own home. Canada, even if you only consider its inception as a "country" from the point at which it was colonized by European settlers, was never founded on any principles of Christianity. It was founded on the principles of "taking as much cod from the ocean, furs from the animals, trees from the forests, and minerals from the ground" as possible (economic self-interest). It was founded on the principle of "we're trying to make peace after the 30 years' war, and France would rather have a couple of small islands than take the colonies of northern North America, so they will become British colonies". It was founded on the principle of "we're lots of little, very spread out British colonies, with no hope of economic survival without a transportation hub, so could we please just get along long enough to build a railroad almost 10,000 km long?" Canada has been settled by people from many faiths, including most of the world's Christian denominations. But that does not make Canada a Christian country. Our legal framework was taken almost primarily from the British framework, but that doesn't make it a Christian legal framework. And our parliamentary democracy, whilst not being specifically muslim, hindi, sikh or taoist (to name just a few of the alternatives) is not Christian. It is, and has always been secular.

America
America was colonised by many groups over the years - including anabaptists fleeing religious persecution from within Europe. However, by the time the War of Independence came along the issues were, once again, much more economic and political than religious. Americans were frustrated by the control the British parliament exercised over the taxation of goods sent to America. They were also frustrated by the lack of control they were able to exercise over their own political decisions. Several generations of "pull-themselves-up-by-their-bootstraps" immigrants had worked exceedingly hard to turn what was previous Native American land into a clean, wide-open spaces version of the Europe they had left behind. These new Americans lived to survive at first, but eventually dreamed dreams of independence and financial success. Being under the hand of a powerful overlord did nothing for their ability to succeed. The American Declaration of Independence begins with the following preamble:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

I think it is valuable to note that this language is very similar to that used during the French Revolution, just a few years previously. This is Enlightenment Era Revolution speak, and is not firmly based on that of any religion.

Britain
Even if we go back to the forefather of both of these not-so-Christian countries, I would argue that while Britain has had an official state church for more than a thousand years, its founding (whether you choose the Norman conquests, the Danish conquests, the Saxon conquests or any of the other waves of conquest the British Isles were subject to over its history), I would argue, was always one of economics and politics rather than religion. Britain was an island. At a time (anytime before the 20th century, really) where international success relied heavily on easy shipping routes and good maritime skills, Britain was an important point to control. And although the church tried at times during the Middle Ages to bring its power to bear over the actions of British Kings, it was never really successful, and under King Henry VIII, the power of the church over political affairs was effectively crushed by taking away church lands (and therefore revenues), as well as removing the Church of England from the power of the Pope (who the church had previously been able to run to in matters of political disagreement with the King).

So if we really wanted to get back to our North American and British roots, we would get back to making decisions based on economic self-interest and political expediancy. As it stands, I would much rather move forward to make disciples than swoon about in grief over the loss of a nation or culture that never truly existed.