Authors: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, G. K. A. Bell
ISBN-13: 9780684815008, ISBN-10: 0684815001
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group
Date Published: September 1995
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau in 1906. The son of a famous German psychiatrist, he studied in Berlin and New York City. He left the safety of America to return to Germany and continue his public repudiation of the Nazis, which led to his arrest in 1943. Linked to the group of conspirators whose attempted assassination of Hitler failed, he was hanged in April 1945.
What can the call to discipleship, the adherence to the word of Jesus, mean today to the businessman, the soldier, the laborer, or the aristocrat? What did Jesus mean to say to us? What is his will for us today? Drawing on the Sermon on the Mount, Dietrich Bonhoeffer answers these timeless questions by providing a seminal reading of the dichotomy between "cheap grace" and "costly grace." "Cheap grace," Bonhoeffer wrote, "is the grace we bestow on ourselves...grace without discipleship ... Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must know... It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life."
The Cost of Discipleship is a compelling statement of the demands of sacrifice and ethical consistency from a man whose life and thought were exemplary articulations of a new type of leadership inspired by the Gospel, and imbued with the spirit of Christian humanism and a creative sense of civic duty.
Foreword | 11 | |
Memoir | 13 | |
Introduction | 35 | |
I | Grace and Discipleship | 41 |
1 | Costly Grace | 43 |
2 | The Call to Discipleship | 57 |
3 | Single-Minded Obedience | 79 |
4 | Discipleship and the Cross | 86 |
5 | Discipleship and the Individual | 94 |
II | The Sermon on the Mount | 103 |
Matthew 5 | Of the "Extraordinariness" of the Christian Life | |
6 | The Beatitudes | 105 |
7 | The Visible Community | 115 |
8 | The Righteousness of Christ | 120 |
9 | The Brother | 126 |
10 | Woman | 131 |
11 | Truthfulness | 135 |
12 | Revenge | 140 |
13 | The Enemy--the "Extraordinary" | 146 |
Matthew 6 | Of the Hidden Character of the Christian Life | |
14 | The Hidden Righteousness | 155 |
15 | The Hiddenness of Prayer | 162 |
16 | The Hiddenness of the Devout Life | 169 |
17 | The Simplicity of the Carefree Life | 173 |
Matthew 7 | The Separation of the Disciple Community | |
18 | The Disciple and Unbelievers | 182 |
19 | The Great Divide | 189 |
20 | The Conclusion | 196 |
III | The Messengers | 199 |
21 | The Harvest | 201 |
22 | The Apostles | 204 |
23 | The Work | 206 |
24 | The Suffering of the Messengers | 213 |
25 | The Decision | 217 |
26 | The Fruit | 220 |
IV | The Church of Jesus Christ and the Life of Discipleship | 223 |
27 | Preliminary Questions | 225 |
28 | Baptism | 229 |
29 | The Body of Christ | 236 |
30 | The Visible Community | 248 |
31 | The Saints | 272 |
32 | The Image of Christ | 298 |
Index of Subjects | 305 | |
Index of Biblical References | 309 |