In the opening lines of The Cost of Discipleship, the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bohnoeffer (1906-1945) exposed the most fatal enemy of the church—cheap grace. For Bonhoeffer, cheap grace is essentially “grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system.”
[1] Cheap grace is “intellectual assent” to a doctrine of forgiveness without any real attachment to Christ’s person, Christ’s suffering, and Christ’s cross.
[2] In other words, cheap grace is doctrine devoid of embodiment, intellectualism devoid of action, belief devoid of discipleship. Cheap grace is impractical theology, that is, theology removed from the burdens of history and the mission of the church to bear such burdens. The life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an indelible witness to the utter inseparability of theology and practice. In the midst of the vexing problems his time, Bonhoeffer was in every way a practical theologian, for his theology manifested itself in a costly performance of the Christian faith.
Just three years before Adolf Hitler became the Reich Chancellor of Germany, Bonhoeffer completed his Doctorate at the University of Berlin and published his first dissertation entitled Communion of Saints. A year later Bonhoeffer published a second dissertation, Act and Being, and argued in it that the church is the community where persons encounter Christ in the other. Bonhoeffer’s promising early work on ecclesiology reflects a theme which would persist throughout his entire theological and pastoral career: namely, the theme of what it means to be a member of the Body of Christ. Such a theme could not have been more vexing for the Christian living in Germany during the Third Reich. For the majority of Christians in 1930s Germany, being a member of the Body of Christ meant unqualified participation in the German national church. In the eyes of Germany’s despot, however, membership in this body was nothing other than exclusive allegiance to Germany itself, for, as Hitler once asserted, “one is either a German or a Christian.” After securing their position in the German Christian Church, the Nazis commenced their anti-semetic ideology and called all Lutheran pastors to undivided loyalty to Hitler. In the minds of many German Christians, Paul’s admonition to “let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God” required complete conformity to the laws and ideology of Nazism.
[3]In light of this German-Christian compromise, Bonhoeffer cast a radically alternative ecclesiological vision for Christians in Germany. For Bonhoeffer, “the church is the church only when it exists for others.”
[4] During his time at Union Theological Seminary in the United States, Bonhoeffer had a formative experience at the Abyssinian Baptist Church. It was here that Bonhoeffer witnessed a church that existed solely for the oppressed and suffering African-Americans of Harlem. Returning to Germany after this experience, Bonhoeffer turned his theological and pastoral attention to the question of how the church in Germany might exist for others in light of the increasing dangers of German nationalism and militarism. Bonhoeffer became one of many Lutheran pastors to join the Confessing Church, a church which aimed to speak prophetically to the German Christian Church as well as resist Nazi totalitarian ideology. In 1934 Bonhoeffer was invited to found and direct one of the seminaries established by the Confessing Church. While at the seminary in Finkenwalde, Bonhoeffer’s attention was drawn to the Sermon on the Mount, particularly the beatitude about peacemakers. Bonhoeffer held that Christ’s command to be peacemakers is binding on every Christian. The disciple is to do nothing other than “establish the peace of God in the midst of a world of war and hate.”
[5] Pacifism, a doctrine at the core of Bonhoeffer’s theology and teaching, was by no means a speculative doctrine divorced from real life. For both Bonhoeffer and his students, pacifism had costly political implications, for if one resisted the military draft under Hitler’s regime, one risked being “lined up and shot.”
[6] Bonhoeffer could do nothing but pray, along with some of his students, that God would grant them the power to resist the draft. In 1935 the seminary at Finkenwalde was dissolved by the Gestapo, and two years later Bonhoeffer returned to the United States to avert an imminent draft. Less than two months after he arrived in the United States, Bonhoeffer realized that he had made a mistake in leaving his country and his people. Here one observes the utter integrity of this practical theologian: “I shall have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share in the trials of this time with my people.”
[7] Shortly after returning to Germany, Bonhoeffer resolved that the Christian must not only bind up the victims of the wheel, but must “put a spoke in the wheel itself.”
[8] Thus, Bonhoeffer joined a resistance plot which aimed to overthrow Hitler and establish a new government. Bonhoeffer, who assisted Jews in escaping Germany and worked as an international liaison for the conspiracy, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943. He was executed on April 9, 1945 at the Flossenburg concentration camp. The inscription on his monument at Flossenburg is a quite fitting portrayal of his life and work: Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Pastor.
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, (New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1937), 45.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Rm. 13:1
[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge, (New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1953), 382.
[5] Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 126.
[6] Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Memories and Perspectives, (Vision Video, 1994). This phrase was used by one of Bonhoeffer’s students.
[7] Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 16. Emphasis mine.
[8] Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Memories and Perspectives, 1994.
All of us have been disillusioned with Christian community. All of us have had dreams of what the church ought to be, and all of us have had those dreams shattered by the harsh realities of life together. Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew about disillusionment. After all, he lived during the "German-Christian compromise," a time when most of his brothers and sisters in Christ swore allegiance to Hitler. What is striking about Bonhoeffer, however, is that he did not wallow in his disillusionment. In point of fact, he warned his seminary students of the dangers of developing "wish dreams" for Christian community. "Wish dreams" are the source of disillusionment itself and a detriment to true community. "Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter..." (Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 27).
