The call to discipleship is built on the indissoluble statement of the Saviour: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Following Christ remains that sine qua non of the Christian religion, even in the twentieth century.
Consequently, the community, implicitly the sinner, has only one option and chance: he or she must die in order to live. Without this “dogma,” the church becomes irrelevant. To use this concept to justify your immoral deeds means to shatter and rob the gospel of its own power of salvation and transformation of the sinner. The opposite of cheap grace is “costly grace.” The volume outlines the idea that grace is free, but never cheap, because forgiveness cost God everything He had most dear and costly: His Son. It is “grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” The book’s content, dominated by the Sermon on the Mount commentary, is an undisguised reproach to the German Church for the fact that it is moving away from authentic Christianity and choosing the path of secularisation. Bonhoeffer begins the piece with a direct, incisive, and blinding statement: “Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church” because it is “the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner.” His book is a true manifesto against the church’s tendencies to reject the call of Christ and to accept “Caesar’s” offer of collaboration for the common good of the people. He felt the political and religious rhythm of his time, thus leaving a valuable and timeless theological legacy. He vehemently opposed the Nazi Party’s attempt to subjugate the church to the political and ideological approach of the time. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), author of The Cost of Discipleship and one of the remarkable figures of twentieth-century Christianity, served as a Lutheran pastor and theologian in Tübingen, Berlin, and New York, in a dark period of human history.
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