The Work
The Cost of Discipleship (Nachfolge) was first published in German by Chr. Kaiser Verlag in Munich in November 1937. The title Nachfolge simply means 'Following' or 'Discipleship.' The English translation, by R.H. Fuller, was published in 1948 by SCM Press (London) and Macmillan (New York); it was revised in 1959. A more recent translation by Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss, published in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works critical edition (Vol. 4, 2001), is now the scholarly standard. The work is approximately 75,000 words long, divided into two parts: an exposition of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) and a meditation on discipleship in the Pauline epistles.
The book originated in Bonhoeffer's lectures at the illegal Confessing Church seminary at Finkenwalde, near Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), which operated from 1935 to 1937 before being shut down by the Gestapo. The seminary trained young pastors who had refused to submit to the Nazi-aligned 'German Christians' movement.
Biblical Engagement
The book is organized as a sustained biblical exposition. Part One works through the Sermon on the Mount almost verse by verse: the call to discipleship (Matthew 4:18-22), the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12), the salt and light sayings (Matthew 5:13-16), the antitheses ('You have heard that it was said... but I say unto you,' Matthew 5:21-48), the Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13), and the narrow gate (Matthew 7:13-14). Part Two extends the analysis to the Pauline epistles, particularly Romans 6 (baptism as death and resurrection with Christ), Galatians 2:20 ('I am crucified with Christ'), and 1 Corinthians 12 (the body of Christ).
The book's most famous distinction - between 'cheap grace' and 'costly grace' - is grounded in Matthew 13:45-46, the parable of the pearl of great price. Bonhoeffer writes: 'Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.' The distinction draws also on Romans 6:1-2: 'Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid.'
Mark 8:34 provides the book's theological backbone: 'Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.' Bonhoeffer's meditation on this verse produces the line that would become the most quoted sentence in twentieth-century Protestant theology: 'When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.' The German (Jeder Ruf Christi führt in den Tod) is even more direct: 'Every call of Christ leads to death.'
The treatment of the Beatitudes is particularly significant. Bonhoeffer reads each beatitude not as a general moral principle but as a description of Jesus himself - and therefore as a description of what happens to those who follow him. 'Blessed are the meek' (Matthew 5:5) means that Jesus renounced every right of his own and was meek unto death on the cross. Those who follow him will share this meekness and this suffering.
Author & Context
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was born in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) into a prominent academic family. His father, Karl Bonhoeffer, was Germany's leading psychiatrist. Dietrich earned his doctorate in theology from the University of Berlin at age twenty-one and completed his habilitation at twenty-four. He studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1930-1931, where his encounter with the African American church at Abyssinian Baptist in Harlem profoundly shaped his understanding of the relationship between faith and justice.
Bonhoeffer was among the earliest and most vocal opponents of the Nazi regime within the German Protestant church. He helped found the Confessing Church in 1934, which rejected the Nazi-aligned 'German Christians' and their attempt to subordinate the gospel to racial ideology. The Barmen Declaration (largely drafted by Karl Barth) became the theological manifesto of this resistance. Bonhoeffer's leadership of the Finkenwalde seminary was an act of ecclesial defiance.
The timing of Nachfolge's publication is essential. By 1937, the Nazi regime had consolidated its power, the Nuremberg Laws had stripped Jews of citizenship, and the German church was deeply compromised. Bonhoeffer's insistence that discipleship means concrete obedience - not just inner conviction - was a direct challenge to the accommodationism of the majority church. His distinction between cheap and costly grace was aimed at Lutheran pastors who used the doctrine of justification by faith alone to justify political passivity.
Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 for his involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler (Operation Valkyrie). He spent two years in various prisons, including Tegel military prison in Berlin, where he wrote the letters and papers published posthumously as Letters and Papers from Prison (1951). He was executed by hanging at Flossenburgs concentration camp on April 9, 1945, just two weeks before the camp was liberated by American forces.
Structure and Argument
The book opens with the famous chapter on cheap and costly grace. Cheap grace is 'the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession... grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.' Costly grace is 'the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has... the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.'
The exposition of the Sermon on the Mount that follows is radical in its directness. Bonhoeffer rejects all attempts to soften Jesus's commands - to spiritualize the prohibition on violence, to qualify the demand for forgiveness, to interpret the command to love enemies as an ideal rather than an obligation. He insists on what he calls 'simple obedience': when Jesus says 'Follow me' to Levi at the tax booth (Mark 2:14), there is no theological interpretation required - Levi simply rises and follows. The command creates the obedience.
Part Two extends this analysis to Paul's theology of the body of Christ. Bonhoeffer argues that the community of disciples - the visible church - is Christ's presence in the world. This ecclesiology, developed more fully in his earlier work Sanctorum Communio (1930), has significant ecumenical implications: the church is not an invisible, spiritual reality but a concrete community of obedience.
Key Passages
The opening of the chapter on costly grace: 'Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting to-day for costly grace... Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian "conception" of God.'
On the call to follow: 'When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow him, or it may be a death like Luther's, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world. But it is the same death every time - death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call.'
On the Sermon on the Mount: 'The followers of Christ have been called to peace... His disciples keep the peace by choosing to endure suffering themselves rather than inflict it on others. They maintain fellowship where others would break it off. They renounce all self-assertion, and quietly suffer in the face of hatred and wrong. In so doing they overcome evil with good, and establish the peace of God in the midst of a world of war and hate.' This passage draws on Romans 12:21 ('Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good').
Critical Reception
The book was immediately recognized as important within the Confessing Church but was virtually unknown outside Germany until the English translation in 1948. Bonhoeffer's execution gave the book a martyr's authority: his arguments about costly grace were authenticated by his own death. The book became a foundational text for the civil rights movement in the United States - Martin Luther King Jr. read it at Crozer Theological Seminary and cited it throughout his career.
Theological reception has been complex. Some Lutheran theologians have argued that Bonhoeffer overcorrects against cheap grace, producing a works-righteousness that undermines the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone. Ernst Feil and others have traced a development in Bonhoeffer's thought from the 'radical obedience' of Nachfolge to the 'worldly Christianity' of the prison letters - suggesting that the later Bonhoeffer qualified or even abandoned some of the earlier work's positions. Other scholars, including Eberhard Bethge (Bonhoeffer's closest friend and biographer) and John de Gruchy, argue for greater continuity.
The book's reception in liberation theology has been significant. Latin American, South African, and Korean theologians have found in Bonhoeffer's insistence on concrete obedience a model for political resistance grounded in faith. The Kairos Document (South Africa, 1985), which challenged church complicity with apartheid, drew explicitly on Bonhoeffer's framework.
Theological Significance
The book's central contribution is its insistence that grace and obedience are not opposites but aspects of a single reality. Bonhoeffer argues that Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone was never meant to excuse the church from following Christ's commands. The Reformation breakthrough - that we are saved by grace, not works - becomes 'cheap grace' when it is used to avoid the costly demands of discipleship. True grace, Bonhoeffer argues, is costly precisely because it cost God the life of his Son, and it demands that we follow the Son into the world.
This argument has implications for ecclesiology (the church must be a visible community of obedience, not an invisible fellowship of believers), for ethics (Christian ethics is not a set of principles but a pattern of following Christ into concrete situations), and for political theology (the church cannot remain neutral in the face of injustice without betraying its Lord).
Legacy
The book's influence extends far beyond academic theology. It shaped the civil rights movement (King), the anti-apartheid struggle (Desmond Tutu cited Bonhoeffer repeatedly), and the global evangelical social justice movement. The phrase 'cheap grace' has entered the common vocabulary of Christian discourse. The image of Bonhoeffer - the brilliant theologian who joined an assassination plot and was executed for his faith - has become the modern exemplar of costly discipleship.
In theology, the book helped launch the twentieth-century recovery of the Sermon on the Mount as a text with direct ethical implications - a recovery that continues in the work of Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, and the broader Christian pacifist and radical discipleship traditions.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) alongside Part One of the book. Mark 8:34-38 (taking up the cross) and Mark 2:14 (the call of Levi) are essential. Romans 6:1-14 (death and resurrection with Christ) and Galatians 2:20 (crucified with Christ) illuminate Part Two. Matthew 13:44-46 (the hidden treasure and the pearl of great price) provides the parabolic foundation for the cheap grace/costly grace distinction.
Further Reading
- Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography (1967; English trans. 1970, revised 2000) - the definitive biography by Bonhoeffer's closest friend. - Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (2010) - a popular biography that brought Bonhoeffer to a wide audience, though scholars have critiqued some of its interpretations. - Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2014) - the most recent major biography, drawing on previously unavailable archival material.