Community in Jesus Christ: Costly Discipleship vs Cheap Grace

By Darrell W. Wood

Community, for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is centered solely in Jesus Christ. Discipleship focuses on being more like Jesus and can be realized most fully in being a part of the Body of Christ, the church. Following Christ means bearing the cross daily and seeking to bring others into this fellowship of believers.

Discipleship can be costly; lack of obedience without discipleship leads to "cheap grace," according to Bonhoeffer. When a person decides to follow Christ, He bids him to come and die. Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor and theologian, paid the ultimate sacrifice with his death as an anti-Nazi dissident at the age of 39. For his faith and resistance to Hitler's rise to power, he was hanged in prison just days before the Allied liberation in 1945.

When it comes to living the Christian life, to conform or not to conform, that is the question. Will believers conform to the standards of a secular society apart from God or be transformed by the power of God's Spirit?

Romans 12:2 says--

"Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold, but let God re-mold your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all His demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity."

According to Bonhoeffer, there is a wrong way of staying in the world and a wrong way of fleeing from it.

One of the persistent threats to the Christian life is the pull and push of the world in which it must be lived. All around, people live their lives in ways which assume that God does not exist or, at least, can be ignored. The tragedy is that so often believers are gradually caught up in this way of thinking. Of course, Christians do not believe God does not exist or should be ignored. But by conformity to the ways of the world, are not even believers often guilty of practicing a form of practical atheism? --living as if God did not exist.

Bonhoeffer's writings, including Life Together, a classic exploration of authentic Christian community, would counter and challenge the secularist presuppositions.

No greater weakness exists in contemporary Christianity than the fact that many church members accept without question the dominant intellectual and social atmosphere of the age. The intellectual seedbed of today has spawned a godless form of secularistic humanism which elevates humans to the position of God and leaves God out of the equation altogether.

The very word "conformed" suggests the gradual process by which sensitivity to sin is dulled or deadened completely. By subtle stages believers drift into consensus and agreement with the values and demands of the world.

Society, as it organizes itself apart from God, imposes its own standards, and gradually Christians come to think and act as the world does. Jesus said in John 15:5--

"I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing..."

The corrosives of secularism have eroded away the imprint of grace. Christ-followers ought to live in the new age with the power of a risen life; instead, Christians are too often content to conform to secular ideas which society dictates.

Countering this trend, Bonhoeffer, a seminary professor and key founding member of the Confessing Church in Germany, wrote The Cost of Discipleship, considered a classic of Christian thought. Based on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, Bonhoeffer expounds on what Jesus identifies as characteristics of Kingdom people and what it means to be a follower of Christ. The book is an exposition about the cost of discipleship and Bonhoeffer's view on costly grace, obedience, discipleship, and being more Christ-like.

If believers are not transformed by faith as God's people, they may unconsciously step off the Highway where Christians walk with faces lifted toward God, on to the misty flats, the in-between level place of easy-going complacency. This is the place where people walk in the mist telling each other that no one can see things clearly. Such is the social climate of a postmodern age. This anemic relativism has given birth to all kinds of godless philosophies, situation ethics being not the least among them.

This has happened because some have allowed God to die in their hearts. And a world denying God means the death of the absolute.

To conform to this kind of worldly thinking is to drift to and fro in the misty flats with the in-betweeners. For such persons life has no goal but pleasure and no purpose. The danger is coming under the influence of such a heresy and losing sight of God's high calling and purpose for believers' lives. Such people merely float downstream, seldom against the current of secularism which threatens to destroy like a raging tidal wave.

Bonhoeffer's life and ministry presented a stark alternative to the anemic relativism of this age. He took a stand for Christ and righteousness, and it cost him his life. Participating in the plot to assassinate Hitler, he was arrested, imprisoned, and executed by hanging.

Those who believe are obedient, but only the obedient truly believe.

Persons who are seeking to be like Jesus are faced with the peril of being gradually modified into conforming with something which is doomed and cannot last. In sharp contrast to the short-lived character of today's secular society is the abiding stability of the life in Christ which God grants to every believer. But it is God's gift, not human achievement.

Christ-followers are transformed by the renewing of their minds ("the practical reason or moral consciousness") which has become paralyzed in persons with a worldly outlook.

The result of this transformation is the ability to prove, to discern in actual experience, what is the will of God--the good, acceptable, and perfect will of the gracious heavenly Father.

Thus, while it is true that the Body of Christ makes a deep invasion into the sphere of secular life, yet at the same time the great gulf between the two is always fixed and understood by the believer. And it must become increasingly so. But whether in the world or out of it, the Christian's choice is determined by obedience to the same word in Romans 12:2--

"Be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind."

Bonhoeffer lived and died by this principle. Before being martyred by the SS Nazis near the end of World War II in 1945, Bonhoeffer left a legacy of writings that has achieved worldwide notoriety for their testimony of faith and courage for Christians everywhere.

The book, Life Together, is Bonhoeffer's inspiring account of a unique fellowship in an underground seminary during the Nazi reign in Germany. Life Together includes food for thought and bread for all who hunger for the authentic life of Christian community--marked by koinonia (fellowship) and agape love. The role of personal and communal prayer, worship in common, everyday work, and Christian service/ministry is laid out in simple, almost biblical, terms.

In Bonhoeffer's concluding remarks in Life Together, he says, "The fellowship of the Lord's Supper is the superlative fulfillment of Christian fellowship. As the members of the congregation are united in body and blood at the table of the Lord so will they be together in eternity. Here the community has reached its goal. Here joy in Christ and his community is complete. The life of Christians together under the Word has reached its perfection" [in the Lord's Communion].

All rights reserved.