The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer argues, 'The new human being is not the single individual who has been justified and sanctified rather, the new human being is the church-community, the body of Christ, or Christ himself.' The implications of this train of thought on philosophy, theology, ontology, ethics, race issues, ecclesiology, etc. Bonhoeffer completely redefines ontology and personhood.

The idea of the Church being the physical manifestation of Christ, and therefore vicariously representing Christ on earth is brilliant. I was so wrong.īonhoeffer puts forth a lot of very radical ideas here. I love the early academic theology of Bonhoeffer, and I'm really interested in Bonhoeffer studies, but I figured that a book couldn't be that interesting and ground breaking if so many fundamentalists love it. I went into Discipleship thinking that I would really hate it. The Cost of Discipleship is a compelling statement of the demands of sacrifice and ethical consistency from a man whose life and thought were exemplary articulations of a new type of leadership inspired by the Gospel, and imbued with the spirit of Christian humanism and a creative sense of civic duty. What can the call to discipleship, the adherence to the word of Jesus, mean today to the businessman, the soldier, the laborer, or the aristocrat? What did Jesus mean to say to us? What is his will for us today? Drawing on the Sermon on the Mount, Dietrich Bonhoeffer answers these timeless questions by providing a seminal reading of the dichotomy between 'cheap grace' and 'costly grace.' 'Cheap grace,' Bonhoeffer wrote, 'is the grace we bestow on ace without discipleship.Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the girl which must be asked for, the door at which a man must know.It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.' One of the most important theologians of the twentieth century illuminates the relationship between ourselves and the teachings of Jesus in this classic text on ethics, humanism, and civic duty.

The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer