Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The 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.