And so to Bonhoeffer

I’m working my way through Eric Metaxas biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, at the moment and what a man he was. I’m not a great one for reading lengthy biographies, but this one gripped my imagination for the way the story of one’s man life is interwoven into the broad sweep of Twentieth Century History that it covered, and the insights of the Christian struggle against Nazism in Germany that it reveals.

Like many of my generation, I’ve had a copy of Bonhoeffer’s “Cost of Discipleship” on my bookshelf for long enough, but I’ve never fully appreciated just how much that cost meant for him personally, when the path of discipleship runs foul of the accepted wisdom of the day. The book traces his path as a student, thinker, Pastor and theologian and then as a pacifist, conscientious objector and finally co-conspirator in the attempt to remove Hitler, and eventually prisoner and martyr.

Makes me wonder how much does my discipleship cost me in personal terms. Am I guilty of being a recipient of what Bonhoeffer likes to call “cheap grace”? Grace, that is happily taken up without thought to what it costs in terms of living for Christ in the real world. How much more costly does that same grace appear for a North Korean believer, or for a follower of Christ in Vietnam, for example, than for me. And, is it likely, that that cost for us in Europe is set to increase with the continued erosion of Biblical values in our society, and as the tide swings further and further away from it’s Christian foundations? Few Christians in pre-WWII Germany fully discerned that welcoming the promised renewal of Germany's greatness that Hitler brought, would mean also adopting a  world view which so totally diminished and devalued the Christianity of the Bible. Tendencies can creep in so subtly, and in today's world no less so.
 
“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer "The Cost of Discipleship" (1937)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bonhoeffer-Pastor-Martyr-Prophet-Spy/dp/1595552464/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1371723331&sr=8-1&keywords=bonhoeffer