The Image of Christ

At a glance

Summary

In the book's final chapter, Bonhoeffer draws every earlier thread — costly grace, the cross, the visible community, sanctification — toward a single destination named in Romans 8:29: believers are foreordained to be conformed to the image of God's own Son. This is not a vague spiritual aspiration but the specific, concrete goal that discipleship has been aiming at from the book's very first page, when cheap grace was rejected precisely because it asked nothing of the disciple that could actually produce this transformation.

He is insistent that the image in question is not primarily Christ in future glory but Christ crucified: the disciple bears, before anything else, the image of a Lord who suffered, and only through that suffering conformity comes eventually to share his glory too. This closes the loop with chapter 4's discipleship and the cross — the cross was never a preliminary stage to get past on the way to something else, but the actual, permanent shape a disciple's whole life takes, from baptism onward, in union with Christ.

Bonhoeffer connects this transformation to ‘the philanthropy of God’ revealed in the Incarnation — God's own love for humanity taking on human form — which now becomes the pattern for the disciple's love for others: bearing the sins and sorrows of other people, as Christ bore the world's, is what it actually looks like for the divine image to be renewed in a human life. This is not achieved through willpower or private piety but through the daily, ongoing death to self that chapter 4 already called taking up one's cross, now understood as the mechanism by which Christ's own image is actually formed in a person over time.

The book ends, fittingly, without triumphalism: Bonhoeffer does not describe conformity to Christ's image as a finished achievement any disciple can claim, but as a lifelong process running from baptism to the believer's own death, sustained entirely by grace from beginning to end. The whole argument that began with the deadly danger of cheap grace closes by showing what the alternative actually produces — not a harder religion, but a life so united to Christ that it comes, over time and at real cost, to bear his own likeness.

Key points

• The book's closing chapter names discipleship's destination explicitly: conformity to the image of Christ, as promised in Romans 8:29.
• The image in view is Christ crucified before it is Christ glorified — suffering conformity comes first, glory follows from it, not the reverse.
• This closes the loop with chapter 4: the cross is not a stage to pass through but the permanent shape a disciple's whole life takes in union with Christ.
• The Incarnation's ‘philanthropy of God’ becomes the pattern for the disciple's own love — bearing others' sins and sorrows as Christ bore the world's.
• The book ends without triumphalism: conformity to Christ's image is a lifelong process from baptism to death, sustained by grace throughout, not a finished achievement.

Related Scripture

• Romans 8:28–29
• 2 Corinthians 3:18
• Philippians 3:10–11
• 1 John 3:2

For reflection and discussion

1. Looking back over the whole book, which single chapter or idea has most reshaped how you think about the cost, and the gift, of following Christ?
2. Bonhoeffer insists Christ's image is borne in suffering before it is borne in glory. Where is that pattern visible — or resisted — in your own life right now?
3. If conformity to Christ is a lifelong process sustained by grace rather than a finished achievement, what would it look like to hold your own spiritual growth with both seriousness and patience?