Grace
I’ve been reading The Cost of Discipleship by Bonhoeffer the past few weeks. It has been recommended to me so many times that I finally decided to pick it up used at Powells a while back. And now I know why it was recommended…phenomenal, just phenomenal book (and I’m only 2 chapters in).
So far this one section has stood out to me the most. I know this is a long quote but stick with it, it just may change how you think of God’s grace for you (it did for me).
“If grace is the data for my Christian life, it means that I set out to live the Christian life in the world with all my sins justified beforehand. I can go and sin as much as I like, and rely on this grace to forgive me, for after all the world is justified in principle by grace. I can therefore cling to my bourgeois secular existence, and remain as I was before, but with the added assurance that the grace of God will cover me. It is under the influence of this kind of “grace” that the world has been made “Christian,” but at the cost of secularizing the Christian religion as never before. 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 my sins are all forgiven” (emphasis mine).
If that doesn’t feel like a punch to the stomach I don’t know what will.
(Photo: Dave Ross)
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Tyler Braun.
I’m so glad you have time to read this (and are willing to, considering it is your summer break) . This is a chewy but thought-provoking treatise on human nature and our relationship with a sovereign God. I had many ‘light-bulb moments’ (think: cartoon character who suddenly realizes, “I get it!”) reading this! I’m looking forward to seeing which other quotes you choose to put in your posts.
I started reading it again a few years ago but didn’t make it much past Chapter 2. Worth it even so for the initial cheap/costly grace chapter. I actually excerpted some from it in a blog post (http://seth.heasley.net/blog/2007/12/books/bonhoeffers-costly-grace/). Fantastic stuff. I should pick that one up again.
One of my all-time favorites. I first read it about 30 years ago as part of a study group of college-age folks home for the summer. I have gone back to it repeatedly over the years. It is pretty heavy stuff–the sort of thing you read and then reread and then reread again and maybe, finally, you begin to get the good stuff. His “Life Together” is another good one—not quite as difficult to get through (partly b/c it’s shorter in length) but equally profound.
Debbie is right. Glad you finally listened to others and got the book
ouch.
this is over 30 yrs old and yet look how it applies even today. what does that say about us?