The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Week 5: Discipleship and the Individual / The Beatitudes

Read Chapters 5-6 of The Cost of Discipleship ("Discipleship and the Individual" and "The Beatitudes"). Key passages: Matthew 5:1-12.

Bonhoeffer now enters his long meditation on the Sermon on the Mount, and the Beatitudes are his doorway — read them slowly before engaging these questions.

Discussion Questions

8 questions

1.Bonhoeffer argues that discipleship creates a new kind of individual — one who has been separated from all previous attachments and securities and placed in direct relationship with Christ. He calls this a "mediation" — Christ stands between the disciple and everything else. How does this image reshape how you think about your closest relationships?

2.He describes the community of the Beatitudes as "a community of those who are utterly lost" — the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek. Why does Jesus begin his manifesto for the kingdom with this catalogue of apparent weaknesses rather than virtues?

3.Bonhoeffer insists that "poor in spirit" does not mean a spiritual attitude — it means actual poverty, actual renunciation of possessions and status for the sake of the kingdom. How does this more concrete reading challenge or clarify your understanding of the Beatitude?

a.What does it mean for Jesus to call the materially poor "blessed"? Is he romanticizing poverty or saying something subversive about the kingdom?

b.How are you "poor in spirit" in Bonhoeffer's sense — or how might you need to become so?

4.He connects "those who mourn" to mourning over sin and a broken world — a community that refuses to be comforted by the world's anesthetics. What are the "comforts" you most reach for when you want to avoid mourning? What might God be trying to say through what grieves you?

5.Bonhoeffer describes "the merciful" as those who enter into the suffering of others and are themselves wounded by it — refusing the safety of detached compassion. Who in your life needs that kind of mercy from you right now?

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Closing Prayer

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Lord, your kingdom looks nothing like the kingdoms we build. You call blessed the ones the world calls losers — the poor, the mourners, the meek, the persecuted — because they have staked everything on you. Forgive us for reaching for every comfort except you. Make us people who truly mourn, truly hunger, truly show mercy — not because we are spiritually advanced, but because we have been broken open by your grace and filled with your Spirit. Shape us into the community the Beatitudes describe. Amen.

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