The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

NEW FOREWORD BY ERIC METAXAS

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the most important theologians of the twentieth century, illuminates the relationship between ourselves and the teachings of Jesus in this classic book on living as a Christian.

What can the call to discipleship, the adherence to the word of Jesus, mean today to the businessman, the soldier, the laborer, or the government worker? 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 girl 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.

Table of Contents:

Contents

Foreword by Bishop G. K. A. Bell

Memoir by G. Leibholz

Introduction

I GRACE AND DISCIPLESHIP

1 Costly Grace

2 The Call to Discipleship

3 Single-Minded Obedience

4 Discipleship and the Cross

5 Discipleship and the Individual

II THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

Matthew 5: Of the "Extraordinariness" of the Christian Life

6 The Beatitudes

7 The Visible Community

8 The Righteousness of Christ

9 The Brother

10 Woman

11 Truthfulness

12 Revenge

13 The Enemy -- the "Extraordinary"

Matthew 6: Of the Hidden Character of the Christian Life

14 The Hidden Righteousness

15 The Hiddenness of Prayer

16 The Hiddenness of the Devout Life

17 The Simplicity of the Carefree Life

Matthew 7: The Separation of the Disciple Community

18 The Disciple and Unbelievers

19 The Great Divide

20 The Conclusion

III THE MESSENGERS

21 The Harvest

22 The Apostles

23 The Work

24 The Suffering of the Messengers

25 The Decision

26 The Fruit

IV THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST AND THE LIFE OF DISCIPLESHIP

27 Preliminary Questions

28 Baptism

29 The Body of Christ

30 The Visible Community

31 The Saints

32 The Image of Christ

Index of Subjects

Index of Biblical References

Review Quotes:
Life Among the Flossenberg martyrs was a remarkable young Lutheran pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had joined the underground convinced that it was his duty as a Christian to work for Hitler's defeat. Bonhoeffer was only thirty-nine when he died, but he had already made a monumental contribution to Christian thought, which today has profound and growing significance for both theologian and layman. Bonhoeffer's books are gaining an astonishing popularity in the secutar world....He is admired by people who have read his best-known books, The Cost of Discipleship and Letters and Papers from Prison, as the example of what a modem Christian must be.


Times Literary Supplement (London) A very moving book, lived as well as written.

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.

ERIC METAXAS is an author whose books have been translated into twenty-five languages. The host of a nationally syndicated radio show and the acclaimed conversation series Socrates in the City, he is a prominent cultural commentator whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the Wall Street Journal. He lives with his family in New York City.

Touchstone Books

Pub Date: September 01, 1995

0.79" H x 8.44" L x 5.5" W

320 pages

paperback