Costly Grace

What is cheap grace? It is, “grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares.” We represent grace as the Church’s inexhaustible treasury, he says, and call aloud to the people to come and buy grace without cost, without price. The price has been paid in advance, so now everything (sacraments, forgiveness of sins, peace of soul) can be had for nothing. It cost was infinite; now the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite. “What would grace be,” he asks, “if it were not cheap?”

Bonhoeffer goes further. In the church, often people think of Christianity as, “I will intellectually assent to this Christian idea of a loving God, and thus my sins will be forgiven and I will go to heaven.” That is, if a person holds correct doctrine, they have secured a covering for their sins.

This sounds very familiar, and could even be argued for biblically (Isaiah 55, for example). What’s wrong with it? According to Bonhoeffer, cheap grace is the deadly enemy of the Church, and in fact a denial of the incarnation of the Word of God. If our sins are covered, we don’t need to ever need to feel remorse for them. And why should we even care about being delivered from them? Thus cheap grace justifies the sin and leaves the sinner where he was before. It is “forgiveness without repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession—in other words, grace without discipleship=grace without the cross=grace without Christ, living and incarnate.” That’s why it is a denial of the incarnation of the word of God, because it does not grant Christ a place in our present lives and world.

If grace atones for everything, there is no need to follow Christ. Cheap grace is the grace that we give ourselves when we don’t feel good. It doesn’t free us from sin because it doesn’t ask us to know Christ. It’s self-medicating with aspirin when we need chemotherapy (my paraphrase). It’s grace on the self-help book shelf.

Real grace is costly. It’s the treasure in the field that a man sells all he has to go and buy. It’s the call that made Peter and Andrew leave their nets. It needs to be sought and asked for, again and again. It calls us to follow (that is why it’s costly) but it calls us to follow Jesus (which is why it’s grace). And it’s costly because it cost God the life of His only Son. “What cost God so much cannot be cheap for us,” says Bonhoeffer. Real, costly grace is holy. It is not meant to be thrown to the dogs. We should not be begging reluctant people to take it. It cannot be self-administered; it is a response to the call of Christ.

Luther the monk realized that even going through all the observances of monasticism was not enough to save anybody, and in despair and anguish he was forced to grab onto the idea of pure grace—nothing we can do is any good, no matter how much we do. But we take that thought, without ever having tried to follow him, and say, “ Well, I know that nothing’s any good, so I won’t try.” We use his conclusion as our data. Where Luther’s realization of free grace was a realization that it needs us to cost us our lives, every day of our lives, our idea is that it frees us from following at all.

And what is the price of cheap grace? It is unmitigated disaster, the collapse of the organized church, writes Bonhoeffer (in 1937). The Gospel is preached in such a way as to make people feel comfortable with their ungodly living, and the result is a million spiritual corpses. How can we really follow Jesus when we have the cheap and easy substitute at hand? Even if we were called to real grace, we were tempted to false grace with the result that grace has lost its value and its meaning.

The purpose of the book, writes Bonhoeffer, is to help those for whom grace has become empty, to show them how to follow Christ again. It is to clarify the relationship between grace and discipleship, which has been lost. In short, to address the “most urgent problem besetting our Church....how can we live the Christian life in the modern world?