Everything on this page is written by UECF.NET as background for readers new to Bonhoeffer. It is our own introductory material, not a translation or paraphrase of anything in The Cost of Discipleship itself. The book's own Foreword (by Bishop G. K. A. Bell) and Memoir (by G. Leibholz) appear only in the printed edition.
Who was Dietrich Bonhoeffer?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian who became one of the twentieth century's most influential Christian voices, in large part because of the way he lived — and died — what he wrote. Trained in Berlin and ordained into the German Evangelical Church, he became an early and outspoken critic of the Nazi regime's interference with the church, helping to found the "Confessing Church" movement that refused to accept a state-controlled, racially purged Christianity.
From 1935 to 1937, Bonhoeffer directed an underground seminary for Confessing Church pastors at Finkenwalde, in eastern Germany, training young ministers at a time when the regime was steadily closing off legitimate channels for such training. The Cost of Discipleship (German: Nachfolge) grew directly out of his teaching there, and was first published in Germany in 1937, the same year the Gestapo shut the seminary down.
Bonhoeffer later became involved in the political conspiracy against Hitler, including contacts with a plot to assassinate him. He was arrested in April 1943 and, after two years of imprisonment, was executed by hanging at Flossenbürg concentration camp on 9 April 1945 — only weeks before Germany's surrender and the camp's liberation. His letters from prison, later published as Letters and Papers from Prison, are, alongside The Cost of Discipleship, the work for which he remains best known.
What is The Cost of Discipleship about?
The Cost of Discipleship is structured as a close, chapter-by-chapter reading of the New Testament's teaching on following Jesus, moving through the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7), the mission discourse of Matthew 10, and Paul's teaching on baptism and the church, before closing with a chapter on being conformed to the image of Christ. Rather than writing a general treatise about Christian ethics, Bonhoeffer works verse by verse through these passages, asking at each point what obedience to this particular command actually requires of a disciple living under the pressures of his own time.
That question was not academic for Bonhoeffer or his students. Writing and teaching as the Confessing Church faced growing state pressure to conform, Bonhoeffer was working out, in real time, what it would cost pastors and ordinary believers to remain faithful to Christ rather than to a comfortable, state-approved version of the church. The book's argument is inseparable from the situation that produced it, even though its central claims are meant to apply far beyond Germany in the 1930s.
Costly grace
The book's most famous idea, introduced in its opening chapter, is the distinction between "cheap grace" and "costly grace." Cheap grace, as Bonhoeffer describes it, is grace treated as a general truth about God's forgiveness — available without repentance, without any real change of life, and without any call to follow Christ concretely. Costly grace is the same forgiveness recognised as inseparable from a call: because it cost God the life of his Son, it cannot be received by a life that goes on unchanged. Bonhoeffer's concern was that the church of his day had quietly converted the first into the second — offering comfort without ever asking for obedience.
Discipleship and following Christ
For Bonhoeffer, discipleship is not a set of moral improvements a Christian adds on top of correct belief; it is a whole-life response to a specific call from Christ, which he traces back to the Gospels' own accounts of people like Levi and Peter being told simply, "Follow me." Obedience, in his reading, is not something a person works out to their own satisfaction and then performs — it is the very way faith becomes real, so that faith and obedience turn out to be two ways of describing a single event rather than two separate steps. This is the thread that runs through the whole book: what it means, concretely, to follow Jesus Christ rather than merely to admire, agree with, or believe correct things about him.
Major themes
Beyond costly grace and the call to follow, readers of this study companion will meet several themes that recur across the book's four parts: the cross as the actual, permanent shape of a disciple's life rather than a painful prelude to something easier; the visible, gathered church as genuinely Christ's own body in the world, not merely an institution founded in his memory; and the goal of the whole Christian life as being conformed, over time and by grace, to the image of Christ himself. Each chapter page in this study companion draws these threads out for the specific passage under discussion.
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