The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Week 13: Review & Reflection — The Cost We Have Counted

No new reading this week. Review your notes, journals, and underlinings from the entire book.

This final week is a chance to take stock — not of Bonhoeffer's ideas, but of what has actually shifted in you over the past twelve weeks.

Discussion Questions

8 questions

1.When you began this book, how would you have defined discipleship? How would you define it now? What is the most significant change in your understanding?

2.Bonhoeffer's central distinction is between cheap grace and costly grace. Which side of that line do you think your Christian life has been living on — honestly? Has reading the book moved you at all, or has it only confirmed what you already believed?

3.Which chapter or section was most personally convicting for you? What specific truth did it bring home, and what has changed (or needs to change) in your actual behavior or habits as a result?

4.Which chapter or section did you find yourself resisting most strongly? Looking back, do you think that resistance was a sign of a genuine theological disagreement with Bonhoeffer, or a sign that he had found a tender spot?

5.Bonhoeffer wrote this book under a totalitarian regime that was seducing the church into accommodation and silence. What are the specific accommodations and silences that threaten the faithfulness of the church in your own cultural moment? And what would costly discipleship look like in response?

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Closing Prayer

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Lord, we have spent twelve weeks hearing one of your faithful servants call us to account. We have been confronted with cheap grace and called toward costly grace, warned about the broad road and pointed toward the narrow gate, shown the cross and given the hope of resurrection. We have not always been willing students. Forgive us. As we close this study, don't let us close the book and go back to what we were. Let something stick — in our habits, our relationships, our prayers, our witness. Raise up in us the same holy stubbornness that took Dietrich Bonhoeffer to his death, trusting in the life that is on the other side. For the sake of the one who bids us come and die, and calls that dying life. Amen.

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