Bonhoeffer: Sin boldly justified by faith, a call to discipleship

Bonhoeffer’s chapter on Costly Grace ends with a discussion of Luther’s “sin boldly” statement and how that statement had been twisted by the modern (at the time of Bonhoeffer) German Lutheran church.  The critiques which Bonhoeffer makes against his German church could easily be applied to any modern Christian church in our day. 

“In the depth of his misery, Luther had grasped by faith the free and unconditional forgiveness of his sins.  That experience taught him that this grace had cost him his very life, and must continue to cost him the same price day by day….When he spoke of grace, Luther always implied as a corollary that it cost him his own life, the life which was now for the first time subjected to the absolute obedience of Christ….Luther had said that grace alone can save; his followers took up his doctrine and repeated it word for word.  But they left out its invariable corollary, the obligation of discipleship…The justification of the sinner in the world degenerated into the justification of sin and the world.  Costly grace was turned into cheap grace without discipleship.”

For Bonhoeffer, “cheap grace” meant that that there were no expectations, no strings attached, no follow-on required.  One accepted the atonement, justification and forgiveness offered in Christ Jesus and rolled on without any change in thoughts, words or actions.  The doctrine of “justification by grace through faith”, the clarion call of the Reformation which had been excavated from the layers of Roman Catholic dogma, became justification of the sinner and the latitude to continue on whatever worldly path was being walked.  The burdens of medieval Roman Catholicism—penance, indulgences, self-sacrifice for the purpose of atoning for one’s own sins—were thrown off totally and completely in the name of “justification by grace through faith.”  No more “Hail Mary’s”, no more saints mediating between God and man, no more uncertainty as to the sufficiency of human obedience to contribute to the totality of salvation.  But somehow those who had been so justified by grace became deaf to the call of Christ Himself to take up one’s cross, to lay down one’s nets, to let the dead bury their dead, to sell all for the pearl of great price, to bear good fruit: to feed the hungry, give water to those who thirst, show hospitality to the stranger, clothe the naked and look after the sick and imprisoned.

Again, Bonhoeffer: 

“He [Luther] always looked up on it [grace] as the answer to a sum, but an answer which had been arrived at by God, not by man.  But then his followers changed the “answer” into the data for a calculation of their own.  That was the root of the trouble.  If grace is God’s answer, the gift of Christian life, then we cannot for a moment dispense with following Christ.  But 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….Grace as the data for our calculations means grace at the cheapest price, but grace as the answer to the sum means costly grace….In both cases we have the identical formula—“justification by faith alone.”  Yet the misuse of the formula leads to the complete destruction of its very essence.” 

Bonhoeffer goes on to use the statement by Faust “I now do see that we can nothing know” as an example of the concept he is describing.  For someone—someone young, unstudied, inexperienced—to read that statement and grasp it as truth intellectually leads to cynical ennui and a stunting of any further pursuit of knowledge, truth and understanding: why bother? From the outset, this person holds the mindset that we can’t know anything so any attempts at gaining understanding are worthless and futile.  But those who study, seek, and grapple with knowledge, who wrestle with conflicting philosophical truths, who seek understanding of deep things—they will reach the same conclusion, that we can ultimately know nothing.  But this is a hard-won conclusion, one based upon an attempt to truly grasp knowledge, an attempt which ultimately failed but which revealed the futility of the attempt.  

In a similar way, those who cavalierly leap ahead to “justification by grace through faith” without attempting righteousness and failing miserably are like those who leap to “we can know nothing” without study.   Only when we realize the futility of our own righteousness to justify us before God does the justification by grace offered by God by faith in Christ hold value and significance.  “Such a man knows that the call to discipleship is a gift of grace, and that the call is inseparable from the grace.  But those who try to use this grace as a dispensation from following Christ are simply deceiving themselves.”  

Bonhoeffer brings in Luther’s famous “Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo” that is, “Sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ more boldly still.”  This is not a shallow, cursory, flighty “what the hell—may as well” attitude that makes no attempt to resist temptation and choose what is good and right.  It is not permission to sin, God forbid; as Paul asks hypothetically “Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?  By no means!” (Romans 6: 15).  “Pecca fortiter” frees the guilt-ridden sinner who despairs.  The law of God, the heights of His holiness in comparison with the depths of our depravity, can easily lead to paralysis:  the sinful mind, fully aware of its sinfulness, can only imagine multiple possible future failures and contemplate the magnitude of past failures.  The call to discipleship, to love one’s neighbor, seems only a call to fail.  Overcome by guilt over the past and conviction over the future, such a one will be immobilized by the simultaneous thought that there are so many ways to fall, fail and sin; and the likelihood of failing, falling and sinning.   There is no way to please God; human effort is futile, we are all damned from the outset, cursed from conception and separated from God; no actions or choices or words or deeds can possibly be good in God’s eyes.  In this state, brought so low by the conviction of the law, we cry out with Paul “Who will rescue me from this body of death!?”  Costly grace comes to this one and says “Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24, 25) and “you are justified by grace through faith.”  And then the words of Luther to “sin boldly” become something completely different; they say “you are a sinner, you by yourself are indeed incapable of Godliness and will continue to fail and fall throughout your earthly life—but don’t let that stop you from living, from striving to please God, from seeking to bear good fruit.  Live boldly without fear of sin; live boldly in the confidence of God’s grace to justify you by faith in Christ.”  “Pecca fortiter” becomes then like a magic spell for one paralyzed by the hopelessness of sin—the figurative wand is waved, and the paralysis is removed; “sin boldly” we are told, and come boldly to the throne of grace, because the only other option is to remain fearful, inactive and ineffective. 

But if we jump ahead and use “pecca fortiter” and “justification by grace through faith” as the a priori data points for our calculations, we leap ahead to the false conclusion of cheap grace.  Such a calculation tells us to “sin, sin, sin because grace is cheap and free; nothing you do is so bad it can’t be forgiven, so stop worrying….”  Such a horrific false logic is what the writer of the book of Hebrews warned against, saying “If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgement….How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?” (Hebrews 10: 26-29).  Bonhoeffer says “….pecca fortiter as a principle, grace at low cost…brings neither help nor freedom.  Grace as a living word, pecca fortiter as our comfort in tribulation and as a summons to discipleship, costly grace is the only pure grace which really forgives sins and gives freedom to the sinner.”  

This discussion in his first chapter then makes clear the title of the book, The Cost of Discipleship.  The price paid for our sins reveals how costly the grace that saves us is; it cost the death of Jesus Christ, Son of God.  It should cost us our lives as well, that is the Cost of Discipleship.  

1)      Consider your attitude toward grace and how it may reflect that of the world; have you “trampled the Son of God underfoot” by intentional sins, because of false confidence in cheap grace?  Have you allowed evil thoughts or actions to reign in your life—even for relatively brief periods of time, maybe because you felt certain you were not “hurting” anyone else or there were no apparent consequences of your actions—with an underlying confidence that you could just ask for forgiveness after the fact?  How does our discussion of costly grace challenge this behavior and mindset?

2)      Conversely, have you felt the paralysis of your awareness of sin and sinfulness—the sense that you are incapable of doing anything good and right, that you sin against God at every turn and cannot be trusted to make any right or righteous choices?  How does “sin boldly”—understood in the right way—free you from this paralysis?

3)      Bonhoeffer states that “We Lutherans have gathered like eagles round the carcass of cheap grace, and there we have drunk of the poison which has killed the life of following Christ.”  Have you allowed “cheap grace” to stunt your growth as a Christ-follower?  

4)   Read Romans 7 through 8: 17.  Reflect on what this passage says about the price paid for our forgiveness; the expectation to reject sinfulness and live as disciples of Christ; and the freedom from condemnation which we have in Christ.  How does this passage combat the notion of cheap grace while simultaneously challenging you to live a holy, God-pleasing life?