Making my way thru Bonhoeffers Discipleship vol. 4 and found this insight below about Bonhoeffer and M. Luther, WOW!
Below half way thru Ch. 1 on “cheep grace” and Costly Grace”
The expansion of Christianity and the increasing secularization of the church caused the awareness of costly grace to be gradually lost. The world was Christianized; grace became common property of a Christian world. It could be had cheaply. But the Roman church did keep a remnant of that original awareness. It was decisive that monasticism did not separate from the church and that the church had the good sense to tolerate monasticism. Here, on the boundary of the church, was the place where the awareness that grace is costly and that grace includes discipleship was preserved. People left everything they had for the sake of
Christ and tried to follow Jesus’ strict commandments through daily exercise.
Monastic life thus became a living protest against the secularization of
Christianity, against the cheapening of grace. But because the church tolerated
this protest and did not permit it to build up to a final explosion, the church
relativized it. It even gained from the protest a justification for its own
secular life. For now monastic life became the extraordinary achievement of
individuals, to which the majority of church members need not be obligated. The
fateful limiting of the validity of Jesus’ commandments to a certain group of
especially qualified people led to differentiating between highest achievement
and lowest performance in Christian obedience. This made it possible, when the
secularization of the church was attacked any further, to point to the
possibility of the monastic way within the church, alongside which another
possibility, that of an easier way, was also justified. Thus, calling attention
to the original Christian understanding of costly grace as it was retained in
the Roman church through monasticism enabled the church paradoxically to give
final legitimacy to its own secularization. But the decisive mistake of
monasticism was not that it followed the grace-laden path of strict discipleship,
even with all of monasticism’s misunderstandings of the contents of the will of
Jesus. Rather, the mistake was that monasticism essentially distanced itself
from what is Christian by permitting its way to become the extraordinary
achievement of a few, thereby claiming a special meritoriousness for itself.
During the Reformation, God reawakened the gospel of pure, costly grace through God’s servant Martin Luther by leading him through the monastery. Luther was a monk. He had left everything and wanted to follow Christ in complete obedience. He renounced the world and turned to Christian works. He learned obedience to Christ and his church, because he knew that only those who are obedient can believe. Luther invested his whole life in his call to the monastery. It was God who caused Luther to fail on that path. God showed him through scripture
that discipleship is not the meritorious achievement of individuals, but a
divine commandment to all Christians. The humble work of discipleship had
become in monasticism the meritorious work of the holy ones. The self-denial of
the disciple is revealed here as the final spiritual self-affirmation of the
especially pious. This meant that the world had broken into the middle of
monastic life and was at work again in a most dangerous way. Luther saw the
monk’s escape from the world as really a subtle love for the world. In this
shattering of his last possibility to achieve a pious life, grace seized
Luther. In the collapse of the monastic world, he saw God’s saving hand
reaching out in Christ. He seized it in the faith that “our deeds are in vain,
even in the best life.” It was a costly grace, which gave itself to him. It
shattered his whole existence. Once again, he had to leave his nets and follow.
The first time, when he entered the monastery, he left everything behind except
himself, his pious self. This time even that was taken from him. He followed, not
by his own merit, but by God’s grace. He was not told, yes, you have sinned,
but now all that is forgiven. Continue on where you were and comfort yourself
with forgiveness! Luther had to leave the monastery and reenter the world, not
because the world itself was good and holy, but because even the monastery was
nothing else but world.[23][1]
[1]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship,
ed. Martin Kuske et al., trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss, vol. 4,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 46–48.
- Totally agree
