2īonhoeffer’s concept of “costly grace” has appealed to many who think it is the answer to the apathy and worldliness of contemporary Christians.
Such a man knows that the call to discipleship is a gift of grace, and that the call is inseparable from grace. The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who left all to follow Christ. He wrote of “costly grace” as opposed to “cheap grace,” which he described as “Grace without price grace without cost,” or “grace without discipleship.” 1 To him, costly grace is inseparable from discipleship: The view that salvation is costly received its modern impetus from the German theologian and activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who expressed his views in the book The Cost of Discipleship, first published in English in 1949. We will now survey the two opposing views. If these conditions are not conditions for salvation, then the issue of discipleship must be distinguished from the issue of salvation so that discipleship is truly costly and salvation, truly free. If the conditions of discipleship are also conditions of salvation, then every Christian is, by definition, a disciple, and salvation, by definition, is costly. This critical difference is the subject of this third and last article in my series on discipleship. However, the disagreement comes over whether the conditions for costly discipleship are also conditions for salvation.
There is no view of discipleship which would disagree with this conclusion. The Scriptures are clear that to be a disciple in the fullest sense of the term means that a person must pay a price.
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