The Cost of Discipleship

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote Nachfolge in 1937 while directing an illegal seminary for the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany. In English the book is titled The Cost of Discipleship. Its opening chapter draws a sharp distinction between two kinds of grace: cheap grace, which demands nothing and changes nothing, and costly grace, the gospel that calls a person away from their old life entirely. The distinction shaped much of twentieth-century Protestant discussion of discipleship and Christian ethics.

The first half of the book traces what costly discipleship looks like through close readings of the Synoptic call narratives — the fishermen leaving their nets, Levi leaving the tax booth. Bonhoeffer argues that every call to follow Jesus is a call to leave something concrete behind, that obedience must precede understanding rather than follow from it. The second and longer half is a verse-by-verse exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, read not as an impossible ideal but as the constitution of a visible community of people who follow Jesus publicly. The book closes with chapters on baptism and the church as the institutional forms that give discipleship a concrete shape in the world.

When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

Chapter 4, "Discipleship and the Cross"

First lines

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.

Contents

Reception

The Cost of Discipleship became one of the most widely read works of twentieth-century Protestant theology. The distinction between cheap and costly grace entered the vocabulary of Christian formation globally, and the book influenced theologians, preachers, and movements across denominational lines, including the civil rights movement in the United States; Martin Luther King Jr. drew on its themes. The Touchstone paperback has sold several million copies. Critical reception is broadly positive but not undivided. Scholars working on Bonhoeffer's later writings, particularly Letters and Papers from Prison, note that the two books present different faces of his theology: the earlier one stresses concrete obedience to the historical, embodied Christ; the later one develops a more open, "religionless" Christianity. Some readers have questioned whether the emphasis on costly obedience risks works-righteousness, a charge Bonhoeffer anticipates and addresses in the opening chapter. The book appears consistently in syllabi for Christian ethics, spiritual formation, and modern theology.

Frequently asked

What is the difference between cheap grace and costly grace?

Cheap grace is forgiveness without repentance and baptism without discipline — grace that costs nothing and changes nothing. Costly grace is the gospel that calls a person away from everything and gives them back their only true life. Bonhoeffer argues that the church had traded the costly version for the cheap one.

What does Bonhoeffer mean by discipleship?

Discipleship is following the actual person of Jesus, not an idea about Jesus. It means concrete obedience — leaving what you were doing and going where he goes. The book reads the Sermon on the Mount as the description of a visible community whose shared life makes this following legible in the world.

What was the context in which the book was written?

Bonhoeffer wrote it in 1937 while directing an illegal underground seminary at Finkenwalde for pastors who refused to align with the Nazi-controlled state church. The book is partly a critique of the Deutsche Christen movement's accommodation to National Socialism.