Study Guides by
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
2 discussion guides available
Life Together
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote Life Together in 1938, drawing directly from his experience leading the underground Confessing Church seminary at Finkenwalde, Germany — a community that the Gestapo would eventually shut down. The book is both a practical handbook and a theological meditation on what it means to live in genuine Christian community. Its central thesis is deceptively simple and profoundly challenging: Christian community is not a human achievement or an ideal to be realized, but a divine gift to be received. When we approach community as something we create — shaped by our wishes and dreams — we inevitably become disillusioned and destructive. But when we receive one another as gifts of God's grace, something miraculous becomes possible. Bonhoeffer organizes this argument across five chapters: Community, The Day with Others, The Day Alone, Ministry, and Confession and Communion.
View Discussion GuideThe Cost of Discipleship
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote The Cost of Discipleship in 1937 — from the context of a Germany sliding into totalitarianism and a church being seduced by compromise — and its central argument has lost none of its urgency. The book's thesis is announced in its very first line: "Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church." Against the comfortable Christianity that demands nothing, Bonhoeffer sets the call of Jesus Christ, which demands everything. True discipleship, he argues, is not a religious program layered on top of ordinary life; it is a new kind of existence, born in obedience to a living Person. The book moves in two major movements: a theological examination of grace and call (Part One), followed by a sustained, verse-by-verse meditation on the Sermon on the Mount and the missionary discourse of Matthew 10 (Part Two). Together, they form one of the most searching challenges to comfortable Christianity ever written.
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