Dietrich Bonhoeffer - The Cost of Discipleship (1937)

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To endure the cross is not tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Grace at a low cost, is in the last resort simply a new law, which brings neither help nor freedom.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The call to the cloister demanded of Luther the complete surrender of his life. But God shattered all his hopes. He showed him through the Scriptures that the following of Christ is not the achievement or merit of a select few, but the divine command to all Christians without distinction. Monasticism had transformed the humble work of discipleship into the meritorious activity of the saints, and the self-renunciation of discipleship into the flagrant spiritual self-assertion of the "religious."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Bless them that persecute you.' If our enemy cannot put up with us any longer and takes to cursing us, our immediate reaction must be to lift up our hands and bless him. Our enemies are the blessed of the Lord. Their curse can do us no harm. May their poverty be enriched with all the riches of God, with the blessing of Him whom they seek to oppose in vain. We are ready to endure their curses so long as they redound to their blessing.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The antithesis between the Christian life and the life of bourgeois respectability is at an end. The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different from the world, in fact, in being prohibited from being different from the world for the sake of grace. The upshot of it all is that my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven. I need no longer try to follow Christ, for cheap grace, the bitterest foe of discipleship, which true discipleship must loathe and detest, has freed me from that.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Neighbourliness is not a quality in other people, it is simply their claim on ourselves.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Love, in the sense of spontaneous, unreflective action, spells the death of the old man.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The wars of Israel were the only 'holy wars' in history... there can be no more wars of faith. The only way to overcome our enemy is by loving him.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Earthly possessions dazzle our eyes and delude us into thinking that they can provide security and freedom from anxiety. Yet all the time they are the very source of anxiety.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Sanctification means that the Christians have been judged already, and that they are being preserved until the coming of Christ and are ever advancing towards it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
All are called to be what in the reality of God they already are.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If there is no element of asceticism in our lives, if we give free rein to the desires of the flesh (taking care of course to keep within the limits of what seems permissible to the world), we shall find it hard to train for the service of Christ. When the flesh is satisfied it is hard to pray with cheerfulness or to devote oneself to a life of service which calls for much self-renunciation.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In Jesus, the service of God and the service of the least of the brethren were one.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
When a man really gives up trying to make something out of himself - a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called clerical somebody), a righteous or unrighteous man,...and throws himself into the arms of God...then he wakes with Christ in Gethsemane. That is faith, that is metanoia and it is thus that he becomes a man and Christian.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Incarnation is the ultimate reason why the service of God cannot be divorced from the service of man.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The life of discipleship is not the hero-worship we would pay to a good master, but obedience to the Son of God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
My past life is abundantly full of God's mercy, and, above all sin, stands the forgiving love of the Crucified.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
But they all stood beneath the cross, enemies and believers, doubters and cowards, revilers and devoted followers. His prayer, in that hour, and his forgiveness, was meant for them all, and for all their sins. The mercy and love of God are at work even in the midst of his enemies. It is the same Jesus Christ, who of his grace calls us to follow him, and whose grace saves the murderer who mocks him on the cross in his last hour.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Wherever it pleases God to put man in this world, the Christian must be ready for martyrdom and death. It is only in this way that man learns faith.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The cross is God's truth about us, and therefore it is the only power thatcanmakeustruthful.Whenwe know the cross we are no longer afraid of the truth.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others, we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as ourselves.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
At the end of a life spent in the pursuit of knowledge Faust has to confess: "I now see that we can nothing know." That is the answer to a sum, it is the outcome of a long experience. But as Kierkegaard observed, it is quite a different thing when a freshman comes up to the university and uses the same sentiment to justify his indolence. As the answer to a sum it is perfectly true, but as the initial data it is a piece of self-deception.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer