Introduction

Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. MATTHEW 16:24

Few Christians of the twentieth century are quoted more often than Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and few are quoted less carefully. His name turns up in sermons of every kind, on posters and in speeches, pressed into service by conservatives and radicals, by pacifists and by men who wanted a theology for war. Lines he wrote are trimmed into slogans; at least one saying that circulates widely under his name, about silence in the face of evil, is found nowhere in his writings at all. He has become a kind of mirror in which every generation sees what it hoped to see. The aim of this book is to set the mirror down and look through the window instead — at what the man actually taught, and at the Lord he taught about.

He was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian, a doctor of theology at twenty-one, and the head of an illegal seminary of the Confessing Church at Finkenwalde. He opposed Hitler from the first days of the regime, was drawn through his family into the conspiracy against the dictator, and was hanged at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945, a few days before the camp was liberated. He was thirty-nine.

Why he still matters

Bonhoeffer matters, first, because he asked the plainest question in the New Testament and would not let it be softened. Jesus said to fishermen and tax collectors, Follow me, and they got up and went. What would it mean to take that call as seriously in the twentieth century as they took it in the first? Bonhoeffer thought the churches of his day had quietly stopped asking. They had kept the doctrine of grace and dropped the call to discipleship, and the result was a Christianity that cost nothing and changed nothing. His answer, set out in the book that English readers know as The Cost of Discipleship, is still unsettling, and still needed.

He matters, second, because he thought hard about the church — not the church as an idea, but the actual gathering of forgiven sinners who must eat together, pray together, forgive one another and bear with one another day after day. The little book Life Together, written out of the common life of his seminary, has probably done more good in more ordinary congregations than anything else he wrote. It is practical, humble and searching. It will not let a Christian love his picture of the church more than the real brothers and sisters God has given him.

He matters, third, because he did not stop thinking when the questions became terrible. In prison, with his own death likely, he went on asking what faith looks like when every prop is gone. Some of his answers were unfinished, and some have been badly used. But he asked honestly.

The one thread

If there is a single thread running through everything Bonhoeffer taught, it is this: Jesus Christ is not an idea to be held but a living Lord who is present, here and now, and who calls. Grace is costly because it comes from him and calls us after him. The Sermon on the Mount is to be obeyed because he spoke it. The church is not a religious club but Christ himself existing among his people. The Psalms are his prayer before they are ours. And the question he kept asking in his cell was, in effect, who this Christ really is for us today. The chapters that follow are all variations on that theme.

Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever. HEBREWS 13:8

How this book is arranged

The second chapter tells his life. The sixteen chapters that follow each take one of his key teachings. They begin with costly grace and the call to follow, move through the Sermon on the Mount and his teaching on Christ and the church, spend some time in the daily practices of Life Together — the day together, the day alone, listening and bearing, confession, the Psalms — and end with the harder questions of his last years: the church for others, responsibility and guilt, suffering with God, and the hope that looked past the gallows. A conclusion draws the threads together, and a reader’s guide points to his own books.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. Bonhoeffer would have wanted it so. He was suspicious of a knowledge of God that never became obedience; he thought the first step mattered more than the fifth argument. So read a chapter, stop at the questions, do one of them, and pray.

A note on how he is presented

Bonhoeffer’s writings, and their English translations, are still in copyright, so this book reproduces none of his words. Everything said here is Ochorus’s own summary, and his books are named throughout so that the reader may go and read him — which is the whole point. The only words quoted are those of Scripture, from the Authorised (King James) Version.

Reading him with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and it would be a poor tribute to a man who warned so fiercely against cheap grace to offer him cheap praise. There are four things the reader should know at the outset.

First, the conspiracy. Bonhoeffer, who in the 1930s leaned strongly towards pacifism, came to support a plot that included plans to kill Hitler. Serious Christians have disagreed about whether he was right, and still do. This book does not pretend the question is simple, and it gives both sides a fair hearing in its chapter on responsibility and guilt.

Second, the prison fragments. In letters from his cell he wrote of a world come of age and of a religionless Christianity. These were unfinished thoughts, sent to a friend, never worked out. After the war some radical theologians took them up and pressed them in directions — towards a Christianity without a personal God, or without the supernatural — that the rest of his life and writing plainly contradict. The reader should know both what he wrote and how it was used.

Third, his background. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran, and he was trained in the liberal academic theology of Berlin, though he broke with much of it. His views of baptism, of the sacraments and of the way Scripture came to be written are not those of many evangelical readers. On the great matters of Christ, the cross, grace and obedience he speaks with a clarity that crosses traditions; on others, readers will want to weigh him carefully.

Fourth, the legend. His life has been retold with more heroism than the record allows. This book keeps to what is well established, and says so where a famous story rests on a single witness.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21

He would not have wanted it otherwise. A disciple is not above his master, and the only one worth following is Jesus Christ.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Write down, in one sentence, what you think it costs to be a Christian. Keep the sentence and read it again when you finish this book.

2. Think of a saying you have heard attributed to a famous Christian. Before you repeat it again, find out whether he or she really said it.

3. Ask yourself honestly whether your faith is more an idea you hold or a Person you follow. What would the difference look like on Monday morning?

4. Choose a regular time to read this book slowly, one chapter at a sitting, and decide now to act on at least one application point from each chapter.

5. Read Matthew 5–7 straight through this week, at one sitting, as though you had never heard it before.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus Christ, You called fishermen from their nets and a tax collector from his table, and they rose and followed You. You call still.

Forgive me for admiring those who followed You more than I have followed You myself. Forgive me for turning Your call into an idea I can discuss.

As I read of one who counted the cost, give me honesty to count my own. Show me who You are for me today, and give me grace to obey what You show.

Keep me from making heroes of Your servants. Let me look past them to You, the only Master worth following. Amen.