Tag Archives: The Cost of Discipleship

Bonhoeffer For Today: Discipleship Still Costs

One of my book groups chose to read The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian pastor murdered by the Nazi’s toward the end of World War II. Bonhoeffer, a pacifist by inclination, chose to oppose Hitler’s reign of terror and was imprisoned, then executed.

His work with the “confessing church” in Germany before his imprisonment echos in today’s confused times. He ministered during the 1930’s, before World War II, when many Germans, including Christians, were mesmerized by Hitler’s oratory, a balm to humiliation suffered after World War I.

Bonhoeffer wrote when belief in Christendom still existed in Europe and America, a belief that the Christian religion was paramount in Western countries. However, the lack of genuine Christian living, he believed, encouraged the rise of Nazism. It allowed a charlatan, one who could blind multitudes with spell-binding, hate-filled speeches, to lead them toward the creation of the Holocaust.

Christians in Germany, he wrote, “drank of the poison which has killed the life of following Christ.” And in another place: “The prices we are having to pay today in the shape of the collapse of the organized Church is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available to all at too low a cost.”

If Bonhoeffer wrote today, would he claim that Christians’ lack of discipleship, not political changes or the new atheism or the Internet, has encouraged the moral atmosphere in which we live? Perhaps he would say it is the way we have NOT lived that has led to the abandonment of our faith by so many.

 

Leaving Home: Scribblings From Exile

 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian pastor executed by the Nazis in World II, wrote: “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow Him, or it may be a death like Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world. But it is the same death every time—death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call.” (from The Cost of Discipleship)

The reason I title my blogs, “Scribblings from Exile,” is that I believe Christians, even in America, are in exile. The blessings of democracy compel us to perform earthly citizenship duties, but we are, as the apostle Paul called us in one of his letters, ambassadors from another kingdom. Jesus rebuked his disciples for supposing he intended to be a political king.

A theme of my story Singing in Babylon is the understanding of this calling into exile. Kate and Philip, American Christians, feel themselves in exile when they journey to work in Saudi Arabia, a Muslim majority country. On returning home to the United States, they realize they are still exiles. They do not belong to the consumer culture of the West any more than they belong to the Muslim-majority Middle East.

If we Christians in Western countries understood the call to die to our culture, as we might if we understand Bonhoeffer, would our message be listened to rather than ignored or ridiculed?