Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Discipleship, Responsibility, Transformation

What does it mean to be a fully committed follower of Jesus Christ?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer devoted his life to that question.  Although his answer shifted over time, his devotion to Christ never wavered and he ultimately gave up his life because of his faith.

A new movie, Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. (Angel Studios, 2024), tells a gripping tale of Bonhoeffer’s life and execution in a Nazi concentration camp on April 9, 1945, but it provides little illumination of the faith this German pastor expressed so powerfully in his writings and his teaching.

At the core of Bonhoeffer’s life was a commitment to the whole gospel and a radical desire to live fully for Christ.

Who was Dietrich Bonhoeffer?

Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister in Germany when the Nazi dictatorship took power in the 1930s and began to eliminate those it hated.  Hitler wanted total allegiance, and that demand is necessarily a problem for Christians, for whom only God is worthy of total allegiance.

Most Christians in Germany at the time did not recognize how incompatible the Christian faith was with Hitler’s hatreds, goals, and methods.  Bonhoeffer saw the problem from the start and sought to keep Christ at the core of the church’s identity. 

Bonhoeffer’s life and teachings come in three parts: discipleship, responsibility, and transformation.  In each phase of his story, he challenges us to put our faith at the center of our lives.

Part 1

Discipleship: Total commitment to every word of Christ

Bonhoeffer started out as a pastor, theologian, and college professor, but he shifted course when the Nazis launched their brutal dictatorship in 1933.  He left Germany and worked through ecumenical circles to try to warn the church around the world that Hitler was not just a political or military threat; he was a spiritual threat because his demands raised him up as an idol in opposition to God.

Bonhoeffer argued that the Nazi regime’s insistence on allegiance to Hitler’s agenda even over conscience and faith was a threat to the very existence of genuine Christianity.

In 1935, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to begin training pastors in what was called the Confessing Church – those who resisted the Nazi regime’s efforts to unite all Protestant churches behind its persecution of Jews and pursuit of transnational domination.  His seminary was eventually declared illegal and shut down by the Nazi government.

In 1937, he published a book that captured the content of the lectures he gave as he prepared pastors to serve in the Confessing Church.  The book never specifically mentions Hitler or what was going on in Germany at the time, but it speaks clearly of the coming persecution and explains what living a life that is fully committed to Christ must look like.

The book was titled Nachfolge, German for “Discipleship,” but the English translation was called The Cost of Discipleship.  It is most famous for its analysis of the difference between “cheap grace” and “costly grace.”

Cheap grace is the belief that, because Jesus died for our sins, it doesn’t matter whether we obey His commandments since we have already been forgiven and justified by His death.  Cheap grace is “grace without discipleship, grace without the cross” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, originally published in 1937 in German as Nachfolge; English revised and unabridged edition published by The Macmillan Company, 1963, p. 47).

Costly grace calls us to take up our cross and follow in the way of Christ.  Costly grace means we accept and embrace a “single-minded obedience to the word of Christ” (p. 88).  Costly grace places the teachings of Jesus first in every aspect of life.

When any part of the Church expects little of its members other than an hour on Sunday and a statement of faith — whether that statement is a creed or a “sinner’s prayer” – it has fallen sway to “cheap grace.”

But there is far more in Bonhoeffer’s book, and even people who take their faith seriously might be uncomfortable with the severity and absolutism of his approach.

For example, according to Bonhoeffer, Jesus’s directive to the rich young man to sell everything and give the money to the poor applies to all of us.  When Jesus says that the person who calls someone a fool is in danger of going to hell (Matthew 5:22), Bonhoeffer says Jesus means it literally.  When Jesus tells us to love our enemies, that means we must do good to them, not just pray for them, because love is not love if it does not take action.  When we are mistreated, Bonhoeffer echoes Jesus in saying we are to relinquish our personal rights by turning the other cheek and must never respond to violence with violence.

All of Jesus’s teachings are to be taken literally, Bonhoeffer tells us.  If we take Jesus’s commands figuratively – as commands intended only for a limited number of people or as aspirational goals that we don’t think God expects us to fully obey – we risk falling into the cheap grace that is no real commitment to Jesus at all.

Bonhoeffer argues that, since Christ became one with us in the Incarnation, He is intimately involved in every aspect of our lives.  In every interaction we have with other people, Christ is there.  He “stands in the center between my neighbor and myself” (p. 112).  Since all of our dealings with other people also include Christ, we must embrace the way of the cross, the way of reconciliation, the way of love even for our enemy, in every interaction.  That is what it means to love others as He loves us.

That is why “any attack even on the least of men is an attack on Christ, who took the form of man, and in his own Person, restored the image of God in all that bears a human form” (p. 341).  Since every person is made in the image of God, we must treat every person with love.  We “recover our true humanity” when we “retrieve our solidarity with the whole human race” (p. 341).  We are called to recognize the connection we have with all other people because that is what Christ did. 

This call to be like Christ does not apply only to saints or pastors.  This discipleship, Bonhoeffer insists, is for all of us.  All are called to obey.

Reflecting on Bonhoeffer’s call to discipleship

Bonhoeffer’s teachings raise many challenging questions.  We might ask ourselves:

• Is the church too willing to let people slide by with cheap grace rather than confronting them with a gospel that demands total commitment?

• When are the teachings of Jesus (for example, to sell all you have, don’t insult others, turn the other cheek, love your enemy, etc.) meant to be taken literally as absolute commands?  Does Jesus want all of us to do all of these things all the time?  How are we to respond to these teachings of Jesus?

• How would our lives be different if we lived them in “solidarity with the whole human race,” as Jesus chose to live in solidarity with us?  Who would we need to embrace or include as one of “us” if we were to adopt this solidarity with others as a guiding principle?

Part 2

The movie Bonhoeffer (Angel Studios, 2024) tells us that the pacifist Dietrich Bonhoeffer chose to get involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, but it does little to explore the conflicting feelings Bonhoeffer had.  He saw clear spiritual risks in this decision and sought to stay true to the suffering Christ.

Responsibility: Free people face difficult choices in this world

Bonhoeffer sought to train pastors in an underground seminary as Hitler was consolidating and extending his power in the 1930s.  Bonhoeffer’s book The Cost of Discipleship, which is based on his lectures at that time, insists that a life of total dedication to Christ will be resisted by those opposed to Christ and will be met with persecution.  To be persecuted is to share in the cross of Christ.  Those who suffer martyrdom enter fully into the cross of Christ and live with Him forever in glory.

When Bonhoeffer’s safety appeared to be in jeopardy, his friends abroad convinced him to leave Germany.  But he soon decided that if he did not join in the suffering of his fellow Christians in Germany, he could not legitimately be part of the rebuilding that he knew would be necessary once Hitler was gone.  So he returned to Germany.  He was arrested in 1943, imprisoned for two years, and ultimately was hanged shortly before the Allies defeated the Third Reich.

The reason why Bonhoeffer was arrested is surprising.  For a while, Bonhoeffer worked as a double agent, ostensibly working for German intelligence while also working for the German Resistance.  Some of his family members were part of a unit in the Resistance that developed a plot to assassinate Hitler.  Bonhoeffer supported that effort.  The plot failed, but Bonhoeffer’s role in the Resistance was discovered and he was arrested on April 5, 1943.

In 1937, Bonhoeffer had taught that violence was never acceptable for a Christian.  He had written: “If I am assailed, I am not to condone or justify aggression. . . .  Suffering willingly endured is stronger than evil. . . .  There is no deed on earth so outrageous as to justify a different attitude.  The worse the evil, the readier must the Christian be to suffer; he must let the evil person fall into Jesus’ hands [i.e., leave the response to Jesus and not take matters into one’s own hands]” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, originally published in 1937 in German as Nachfolge; English revised and unabridged edition published by The Macmillan Company, 1963, p. 158-159).

But as he saw the enormity of the evil being done under the Third Reich – which was killing millions of Jews and other innocent people and undermining the basic tenets of Christianity by not allowing seminaries or churches to operate if they resisted Hitler’s program – he gradually became convinced that violence was necessary in order to rid Germany of Hitler.

I asked Kurt Kreibohm, a retired pastor and tour guide at the Dietrich Bonhoeffer House in Berlin about this seeming contradiction.  He acknowledged the contradiction and said that Bonhoeffer agonized over it.  Bonhoeffer struggled with the idea that what he was doing was a sin (indicating that he still believed what he had written previously); yet he believed the assassination attempt was necessary to prevent the killing of millions of additional people.  He put himself in the hands of God, believing that his participation in the plot was worthy of God’s judgment against him even though he believed it was necessary.

In 1942, a few months before he was arrested, Bonhoeffer wrote a Christmas letter to his co-conspirators.  In that letter, he discusses the need for Germans to exercise “the free responsibility of the free man,” a responsibility that is “founded in a God who calls for the free venture of faith to responsible action and who promises forgiveness and consolation to the one who on account of such action becomes a sinner” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works – Reader’s Edition, Fortress Press, 2015, pp. 7-8).

Bonhoeffer’s thinking has evolved in the five years since he wrote The Cost of Discipleship.  Now, he sees that the need to make concrete decisions in difficult situations presents ethical challenges, and he underscores our responsibility for the actions we choose.

He does not take lightly the possibility that he will make wrong choices as he exercises the free responsibility God has given him.  At the same time, he believes that God will extend forgiveness and grace to him when he falls short.

But it is not cheap grace.  The hope of grace comes with an understanding that we are not making decisions merely to suit our own desires; we are accountable to God because God has made us “co-responsible for the shaping of history” (p. 8).  He goes on to say: “I believe that even our mistakes and shortcomings are not in vain and that it is no more difficult for God to deal with them than with our supposedly good deeds.  I believe that God . . . waits for and responds to simple prayer and responsible actions” (p. 13).  We are still called to live our lives fully for God.

While he is in prison, Bonhoeffer writes to his best friend Eberhard Bethge about “the profound this-worldliness of Christianity” (Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 471).  Looking back on his life, he writes:

I thought I myself could learn to have faith by trying to live something like a saintly life.  I suppose I wrote Discipleship at the end of this path.  Today I clearly see the dangers of that book, though I stand by it.  Later on I discovered, and am still discovering to this day, that one only learns to have faith by living in the full this-worldliness of life. . . .  [O]ne throws oneself completely into the arms of God, and this is what I call this-worldliness: living fully in the midst of life’s tasks, questions, successes and failures, experiences, and perplexities – then one takes seriously no longer one’s own sufferings but rather the suffering of God in the world.  Then one stays awake with Christ in Gethsemane.  And I think this is faith; this is metanoia. (Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 472)

Bonhoeffer’s understanding of faith shifted over time, from seeking to avoid evil to seeking to embrace Christ in the complexities of life in the real world.  But he remained focused on pursuing a life wholly identified with the suffering Christ.

Reflecting on Bonhoeffer’s call to take the risk of engaging in this world

Bonhoeffer is not the only person of faith who has sensed a call to move from saintly separation to a riskier involvement in the world.  The challenges Bonhoeffer faced remain relevant to us today:

• In what ways are we called to embrace difficult choices in a messy world, rather than staying in our safe and saintly enclaves?

• How can we maintain our commitment to total discipleship to the suffering Christ – to a life lived wholly for God – as we grapple with difficult situations that challenge our previous understandings of how to live the life of faith?

• How do we embrace the “this-worldliness” of life, as Jesus did while He was on earth, yet stay focused on God?

Part 3

The movie Bonhoeffer (Angel Studios, 2024) fails to capture the depth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s faith.  His commitment to live fully for Christ is much clearer in his real life than in the film.

Transformation: Living “as Christ” in all circumstances

Dietrich Bonhoeffer began his pastoral life with zeal in the 1930s, calling all people to a severe adherence to every word of Christ – the life of “costly grace.”  Confronted with the enormity of evil in the agenda of Hitler and the Third Reich, Bonhoeffer joined the German Resistance, which led to his arrest and the final phase of his remarkable life.

In prison, Bonhoeffer was an enormous force for good.  Fellow prisoners found strength and hope because of his encouragement.  Even prison guards were impressed by him and helped in the effort to smuggle his prison writings out to the world.  Some of the prayers he wrote in prison have circulated widely in the decades since then.

Bonhoeffer’s 1937 book The Cost of Discipleship spells out his rigorous commitment to following every teaching of Christ: sell all, turn the other cheek, love your enemy.  He urges us to recognize that in every interaction with every other person, Christ is standing between us and them, so we must love every other person.  This is what it means to live as a disciple of Christ.

Late in the book, Bonhoeffer takes another step.  He suggests that in Romans 8:29, where Saint Paul calls us to be “conformed to the image of [God’s] Son,” he is calling us to become “as Christ” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, originally published in 1937 in German as Nachfolge; English revised and unabridged edition published by The Macmillan Company, 1963, p. 337).

“That image,” Bonhoeffer explains, “has the power to transform our lives, and if we surrender ourselves utterly to him, we cannot help bearing his image ourselves.  We become sons of God, we stand side by side with Christ, our unseen Brother, bearing like him the image of God” (p. 337).

In prison, Bonhoeffer presented a living example of what he had taught in his book.  To those around him, he became a living image of Christ.

He had called us to live “as Christ.”  He had tried to live wholly for Christ in the jaws of the Third Reich.  Now, he brought the presence of Christ into each of the four prisons and concentration camps he was detained in before his execution.

In his 1942 Christmas letter to members of the Resistance with whom he worked, Bonhoeffer had described the perspective he had gained as he worked to put his faith into action in the real world: “It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works – Reader’s Edition, Fortress Press, 2015, pp. 20).  He asserts that “personal suffering is a more useful key, a more fruitful principle than personal happiness for exploring the meaning of the world in contemplation and action” (p.20).

That solidarity with those who suffer prepared him to be a light of grace and hope to those in prison.

Bonhoeffer ends The Cost of Discipleship with a description of the goal of discipleship.

The goal, he says, is not to be a perfect rule-follower, even though obeying Christ is a primary mark of a disciple.  Discipleship is not about rules for their own sake; it is about living in an intimate relationship with the One who showed us how to live.  Bonhoeffer ends his book this way:

“If we are conformed to his image in his Incarnation and crucifixion, we shall also share the glory of His resurrection. . . .

“We shall be drawn into his image, and identified with his form, and become a reflection of him.  That reflection of his glory will shine forth in us even in this life, even as we share his agony and bear his cross. . . .

“This is what we mean when we speak of Christ dwelling in our hearts.  His life is not finished yet, for he continues to live in the lives of his followers. . . .

“The Holy Trinity himself has made his dwelling in the Christian heart, filling his whole being, and transforming him into the divine image” (The Cost of Discipleship, p. 343).

Discipleship means allowing God to live in us, fill us with Himself, and transform us into His image, an image that was placed in each of us before we were born.  God gives us freedom and the responsibility to use it to the best of our ability to lives as images of Christ.  We do this by embracing the cross of Christ and extending the love of Christ to all, including those who are maltreated and rejected by others – loving all as Jesus did.  Our calling is to become wholly like Him.

In his writings and in his life, Dietrich Bonhoeffer sought to present a life of total devotion to Christ.  The same invitation is made to all of us, because Christ came so that He might dwell in the heart of every person who embraces Him.

Reflecting on Bonhoeffer’s call to be transformed into the image of Christ

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not the first person to recognize God’s grand plan: to transform us into the image of Christ.  We find his story valuable partly because the times in which he lived were not ideal for trying to live a life wholly devoted to Christ.  He faced difficult choices.  We honor him not because he necessarily always made the “right” choices, but because he always sought to put God first.  How he responded to his times raises provocative questions for us in our own faith lives:

• If we live “as Christ,” who loves everyone else with the same love with which He loves us, how might that change how we view and interact with other people?

• In what ways does the idea of becoming a living image of Christ attract you?  . . . intrigue you?  . . . scare you?  To what extent are you willing to say yes to becoming a living image of Christ?

• How might seeing events from below, from the perspective of those who are outcasts or suffering, help you live as a reflection of Christ in the world?

• What is the next step God is calling you to take, to help you be transformed into His image and to be a clearer reflection of Christ in your world?

In every phase of his life, Dietrich Bonhoeffer sought to live in a manner that was totally committed to the suffering Christ and filled with concern for all who suffer.  He encouraged everyone else to do the same.  May his desire to fully live “as Christ” be our goal as well.