The Cost of Discipleship

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Description

Perhaps Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s most radical book, this reading of the Sermon on the Mount has influenced many Christians throughout the world over the last 50 years.

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 02 novembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334053422
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Cost of Discipleship

The Cost of Discipleship

DietrIçh BoNhoeffer

Translated from the GermanNachfolge first published 1937 by Chr. Kaiser Verlag, Munich by R. H. Fuller, with some revision by Irmgard Booth

Translation © SCM Press 1948, 1959 Preface © Stephen Plant 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press.

978 0 334 05340 8

Abridged English translation published by SCM Press in October 1948 Complete edition published by SCM Press in October 1959 This edition first published in 2015 by SCM Press 108-114 Golden Lane, London EC1Y 0TG

Typeset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bookmarque, Croydon, Surrey

Contents

Preface to the 2015 edition Acknowledgements 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 Notes

Preface by Stephen Plant

When Margaret Schlegel, one of the half-German, half-English sisters at the centre of E. M. Forster’s novelHowards End, becomes engaged to be married, she sets out to make something of her fiancé: she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected 1 arches that have never been joined together into a man. In the event, though her project is hardly a success, Margaret comes into the inheritance that her fiancé had once kept from her: the house that is the unlikely eponymous hero of the novel. Forster is anything but a Christian writer andHowards Endanything but a Christian novel, yet this quotation, memorized for an examination over 30 years ago, has kept returning to me as I have re-read Bonhoeffer’sCost of Discipleship. Why? The explanation has nothing to do with any resemblance between Bonhoeffer and Margaret or her unpleasant future husband. The answer is, rather, that Bonhoeffer’s book has led me to think of the ‘rainbow bridge’ because of the connection within its covers of prose and passion, a sense that what it conveys amounts to something whole and good, something fully and truly human. I don’t know how many books I’ve read, thousands certainly, yet very few have made so deep an impression on me that I can remember where I was when I read them, or recall phrases and even whole passages from them verbatim decades later. But that is the case for me withThe Cost of Discipleship. Just as Margaret Schlegel felt on her first visit to Howards End that in some way mysterious she had come home, I can recall quite clearly that on my first reading ofThe Cost of Discipleshipit seemed that I had found something that I had unknowingly been looking for all my life. The book felt at once familiar and strange. With hindsight, I realize that the sense of familiarity came from the fact that so much of Bonhoeffer’s writing arose directly from passages from the Bible that I had known since childhood, in particular from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The sense of strangeness was harder to pin down. I was conscious on that first reading of anurgencyin Bonhoeffer’s theology, of a clarity and purposefulness that made the book stand apart from the more academic style and content of the other theological books I was reading at that time. Here was a book I felt compelled to read slowly not because it took my dull brain time to grasp what was being written but because it felt as if it was speaking directly into my own life and faith with an immediacy that pulled me up short. The book seemed to gather in one place bits of my Christian faith that up until then had seemed irremediably unconnected. Bonhoeffer built me a bridge between the central role played by the Bible in my evangelical upbringing and my developing political concerns and commitments, my sense that if Christianity were to mean much at all it had to be about more than warm religious feelings. He showed me how following Jesus was something worth giving my life to; how discipleship meant simple obedience to alivingperson – not to a principle or an ideology – in whose service I might find true freedom. Bonhoeffer’s theology was not, to be sure, a new doctrine. If I had been paying attention, I would have found the same good news in Jesus’s Sermon itself and in the letters of Paul; but, at least for me, it was Bonhoeffer who woke me up. Bonhoeffer publishedThe Cost of Discipleship(which the editors of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English, titleDiscipleship, in keeping with its original German titleNachfolge, literally ‘following after’) in German in 1937. For several years before that, however, he had had Jesus’ teaching in the central chapters of Matthew’s Gospel on his mind. In April 1934 Bonhoeffer wrote to his friend Erwin Sutz that ‘while I’m working with the church opposition with all my might it’s perfectly clear to me thatthis opposition is only a very temporary transitional phase on the way to an opposition of a very different 2 kind’. Bonhoeffer had realized, after little more than a year of Nazi government, that the real battleground in the future would not be in relations between church parties or even church/state relations understood in political terms, but would lie in a costly sharing in the suffering of the victims of Nazi oppression. ‘I believe, Bonhoeffer wrote: That all of Christendom should be praying with us for the coming of resistance “to the point of shedding blood” and for the finding of people who can suffer it through. Simply suffering is what it will be about, not parries, blows, or thrusts such as may still be allowed and possible in preliminary battles; the real struggle that perhaps lies ahead must be one of simply suffering through in faith. Then, perhaps then God will acknowledge his church again with his word, but until then a great deal must be believed, and prayed, and suffered. You know, it is my belief – perhaps it will amaze you – that it is theSermon on 3 the Mountthat has the deciding word on this whole affair.

Laterthesameyear,afterhehadrelocatedtoparishministryinLondon,Bonhoefferpreparedayoung man, Ernest Cromwell for confirmation. When I interviewed Ernest, now in his nineties, in January 2011, he recalled that the confirmation ‘classes’ simply took the form of reading New Testament texts – particularly the Sermon on the Mount – and talking about them. He told me that what he learned from Bonhoeffer about the Sermon gave him a set of perspectives that had shaped all his subsequent life. In a comment that should delight all those who teach, Ernest Cromwell remarked that ‘I don’t think [Bonhoeffer] actually taught me anything; he let the Scriptures teach … I mean my insights into the 4 meaning of the New Testament came from the Scriptures, not from him … he let the Scriptures teach me’. In a letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge smuggled from prison in July 1944 Bonhoeffer made his last comment aboutThe Cost of Discipleship. Recalling a conversation with a French friend in around 1931. He recalled that

we were asking ourselves quite simply what we wanted to do with our lives. He said he would like to become a saint … I disagreed with him, and said, in effect, that I should like to learn to have faith. For a long time I didn’t realize the depth of the contrast. I thought I could acquire faith by trying to live something like a holy life, or something like that. I suppose I wroteThe Cost of Discipleshipas the end 5 of this path. Today I can see the dangers of this book, though I still stand by what I wrote.

This was not a repudiation ofThe Cost of Discipleship, but it was an acknowledgment that the book addressed a particular context at a particular time, in light of which it perhaps expresses some ideas in sharp blacks and whites, which a slightly older Bonhoeffer, with the hindsight afforded by his involvement in the greyer world of conspiracy, found slightly too stark. It is now more than 70 years since The Cost of Discipleshipwas first published, and, while it indeed belongs, as all books do, to a particular context, it still has tremendous potential to ‘let the Scriptures teach’ what it means to follow Christ Jesus in simple obedience. In such obedience the Christian will, like Forster’s Margaret Schlegel, come into her inheritance, which is the gift of the kingdom of God.

Stephen J. Plant Dean & Runcie Fellow, Trinity Hall, Cambridge

Acknowledgements

The poems ‘Who am I?’ on p. xviii and ‘New Year 1945’ on p. xix are quoted by kind permission ofTime and TideandThe New English Review.

Memoir

byG. Leibholz

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau on February 4th, 1906, the son of a university professor and leading authority on psychiatry and neurology. His more remote ancestors were theologians, professors, lawyers, artists. From his mother’s side there was also some aristocratic blood in his veins. His parents were quite outstanding in character and general outlook. They were very clear-sighted, cultured people and uncompromising in all things which matter in life. From his father, Dietrich Bonhoeffer inherited goodness, fairness, self-control and ability; from his mother, his great human understanding and sympathy, his devotion to the cause of the oppressed, and his unshakable steadfastness. Both his father and mother brought up their son Dietrich with his three brothers, his twin-sister and three other sisters, in Breslau and (from 1912) in Berlin, in that Christian, humanitarian and liberal tradition which to the Bonhoeffers was as native as the air they breathed. It was that spirit which determined Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life from the beginning. Bonhoeffer was as open as any man could be to all the things which make life beautiful. He rejoiced in the love of his parents, his sisters and brothers, his fiancee, his many friends. He loved the mountains, the flowers, the animals - the greatest and the simplest things in life. His geniality and inborn chivalry, his love of music, art and literature, the firmness of his character, his personal charm and his readiness to listen, made him friends everywhere. But what marked him most was his unselfishness and preparedness to help others up to the point of self-sacrifice. Whenever others hesitated to undertake a task that required special courage, Bonhoeffer was ready to take the risk. Theology itself was somehow in his blood. On his mother’s side Bonhoeffer’s grandfather, von Hase, had been a chaplain to the Emperor, whose displeasure he incurred when he allowed himself to differ from his political views. When the Emperor stopped attending his services, Hase was urged to tender his resignation. His great-grandfather was Carl von Hase, the most distinguished Church historian in the Germany of the nineteenth century, who tells us in his autobiography of his visit to Goethe in Weimar in 1830, and who (just as Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s grandfather on his father’s side) was himself imprisoned for 1 his subversive liberal views in the fortress of the High Asperg in 1825. On his father’s side he belonged to an old Swabian family which had been living in Württemberg since 1450 and which was also able to claim not a few theologians in previous generations. This tradition of the Bonhoeffer family may explain why Dietrich Bonhoeffer had already made up his mind at the age of fourteen, when he was still at school, to read theology. At the age of seventeen he entered Tubingen University. A year later he attended courses at Berlin University, and sat at the feet of Adolf von Harnack, R. Seeberg, Lietzmann and others. Harnack soon formed a very high opinion of his character and abilities. Later he came under the influence of Karl Barth’s theology which, though he never went to his lectures or studied under him, left its mark on Bonhoeffer’s first book,Sanctorum Communio. In 1928 he went as a curate to Barcelona for a year and in 1930 at the age of twenty-four he became a lecturer in Systematic Theology in Berlin University. But before actually starting with his academic career he went to Union Theological Seminary in New York as ‘a brilliant and theologically sophisticated 2 3 young man’. His writings quickly gave him a firm reputation in the theological world, especially his Nachfolgewhich through his death has gained a new and deep significance; this book greatly impressed theologians throughout the world at the time when it first made its appearance. Some of his other books, especially hisEthics, written by him in prison, are published in English, and others will appear before long. A splendid career in the realm of theological scholarship lay thus open before him. In the light of his achievement and in the prospect of what he might have achieved, his death is a great tragedy. But worldly standards cannot measure the loss adequately. For God had chosen him to perform the highest task a Christian can undertake. He has become a martyr. ‘And seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not. For behold, I will bring evil upon all flesh; but thy life will I give unto thee for a prey in all places whither thou goest.’ ‘I cannot get away from Jeremiah 45,’ wrote Bonhoeffer from the prison cell.

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