Guest Post by Sam Adams
It was a hunch that led me to propose a course titled, “Ethics of Søren Kierkegaard and Dietrich Bonhoeffer” for the new Kilns College MA in Social Justice. I knew enough about both thinkers to know that it would be interesting to read them together but what I didn’t realize was that the connection between the German theologian and the Danish philosopher is much more organic: Bonhoeffer was deeply influenced by his reading of Kierkegaard, and this especially plays out in his ethics. What I found fascinating and exciting in this connection is the way that both overcame the grace/works dichotomy by making central the real, living person of Jesus Christ.
Bonhoeffer is, of course, known for his sharp criticism of what he calls “cheap grace.” Its advocates have taken Luther’s “grace alone” and turned it into an abstract principle that conflicts with the opposite and equally abstract principle, ‘works’ or ‘works righteousness.’ Most of us are well aware of the perceived tension between grace and works, or between faith and deeds. Western Christianity since the Reformation has rarely been able to resolve this tension. For Bonhoeffer, grace and works are, indeed, at odds with each other—unless we see them in their concrete basis, in the very real person of Jesus Christ and in his call for us to follow him. In Jesus—and only in Jesus—do they hold together.
When Jesus called his first disciples to leave their fishing nets and follow him, was that call not grace? And, is that call somehow distinguishable from works? For Bonhoeffer, costly grace “is costly, because it calls to discipleship; it is grace, because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly, because it costs people their lives; it is grace, because it thereby makes them live.”[1]
By contrast, cheap grace was adopted as a means of avoiding the demands of Jesus’s call to discipleship, for to follow him with human action would be to turn again to works. The significance of this for Bonhoeffer’s day was that the difficult call of Jesus to follow him contradicted the intensifying nationalist claim on the German believer—and if one followed Bonhoeffer’s reasoning this meant that one could not hide behind the slogan “grace alone” while joining with the Third Reich.
In Copenhagen nearly a hundred years earlier, Kierkegaard confronted his own Danish church with a similar (and scathing) critique. Instead of facing the totalizing influence of fascism as Bonhoeffer would later face in Germany, there the church faced rapid industrialization, a newly emerging middle-class, and a growing secularism that was being embraced according to the logic of “grace alone.” The Lutheran doctrine, abstracted, became an easy justification to join the cultural movement and avoid the radical call of discipleship. And so Kierkegaard’s critique was radical and total in the opposite direction, rejecting the distortion of the Lutheran doctrine and blasting the compliance of the church.
Kierkegaard argued that in the realm of human teaching, authority is never greater than the doctrine—a philosopher is only as good as his teaching. But, in Christianity, authority is all-important. This is because the authority is Jesus Christ—a person, not a doctrine, and one who has real, legitimate authority in a way that no other person has.[2]
This is the precursor to Bonhoeffer’s critique of cheap grace, a critique focused on the abstraction of grace away from the very real person of Jesus Christ. For both Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer, that which holds together grace and works is not a thing, but a person—a person who calls us to follow him.
In a wonderful passage in Discipleship, Bonhoeffer shows how Martin Luther, the monk, had made withdrawal into the monastery the work by which he hoped to achieve salvation—on his own. In this way, that work was a worldly activity, an activity not determined by the gospel, but by the prideful piety of the monk. But Luther’s discovery of grace changed all that. Bonhoeffer writes:
“It was 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 the world.”[3]
This all boils down to the reality that the call to follow Jesus is a call to the world, for the sake of the world; and this call—even this call to act to change the world—is grace. Why? Because it is a person who calls, not an idea or a doctrine. And it is this particular person, the savior, who calls.
By abstracting grace away from the person—the call—of Jesus Christ, we find that grace can be opposed to works, and discipleship disappears to be replaced by mere belief. The tragedy of this sort of thinking is that it would have made the witness that was the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (and Søren Kierkegaard) impossible.
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey, trans. Barbara Green, and Reinhard Krauss, DBWE 4, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 45.
[2] Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. and trans. Alexander Dru (London: Oxford, 1951), 357.
[3] Bonheffer, Discipleship, 48.
I am not sure the term of “cheap grace” is a good one. Perhaps “cheap faith” is a better term to use. After all is not all grace from God? Can anything from God be considered cheap? We can take God’s grace for granted and claim a faith that is not true. The cheapness lies in the individual not in the grace.
Our good works are paramount to a living Christian faith, but even these works that “we do” are only done because of God’s grace working in us and through us. The problem is cheap faith not cheap grace.
II. GRACE
1996 Our justification comes from the grace of God. Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life.46
1997 Grace is a participation in the life of God. It introduces us into the intimacy of Trinitarian life: by Baptism the Christian participates in the grace of Christ, the Head of his Body. As an “adopted son” he can henceforth call God “Father,” in union with the only Son. He receives the life of the Spirit who breathes charity into him and who forms the Church.
1998 This vocation to eternal life is supernatural. It depends entirely on God’s gratuitous initiative, for he alone can reveal and give himself. It surpasses the power of human intellect and will, as that of every other creature.47
1999 The grace of Christ is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of his own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it. It is the sanctifying or deifying grace received in Baptism. It is in us the source of the work of sanctification:48
Therefore if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself.49
2000 Sanctifying grace is an habitual gift, a stable and supernatural disposition that perfects the soul itself to enable it to live with God, to act by his love. Habitual grace, the permanent disposition to live and act in keeping with God’s call, is distinguished from actual graces which refer to God’s interventions, whether at the beginning of conversion or in the course of the work of sanctification.
2001 The preparation of man for the reception of grace is already a work of grace. This latter is needed to arouse and sustain our collaboration in justification through faith, and in sanctification through charity. God brings to completion in us what he has begun, “since he who completes his work by cooperating with our will began by working so that we might will it:”50
Indeed we also work, but we are only collaborating with God who works, for his mercy has gone before us. It has gone before us so that we may be healed, and follows us so that once healed, we may be given life; it goes before us so that we may be called, and follows us so that we may be glorified; it goes before us so that we may live devoutly, and follows us so that we may always live with God: for without him we can do nothing.51
2002 God’s free initiative demands man’s free response, for God has created man in his image by conferring on him, along with freedom, the power to know him and love him. The soul only enters freely into the communion of love. God immediately touches and directly moves the heart of man. He has placed in man a longing for truth and goodness that only he can satisfy. The promises of “eternal life” respond, beyond all hope, to this desire:
If at the end of your very good works . . ., you rested on the seventh day, it was to foretell by the voice of your book that at the end of our works, which are indeed “very good” since you have given them to us, we shall also rest in you on the sabbath of eternal life.52
2003 Grace is first and foremost the gift of the Spirit who justifies and sanctifies us. But grace also includes the gifts that the Spirit grants us to associate us with his work, to enable us to collaborate in the salvation of others and in the growth of the Body of Christ, the Church. There are sacramental graces, gifts proper to the different sacraments. There are furthermore special graces, also called charisms after the Greek term used by St. Paul and meaning “favor,” “gratuitous gift,” “benefit.”53 Whatever their character – sometimes it is extraordinary, such as the gift of miracles or of tongues – charisms are oriented toward sanctifying grace and are intended for the common good of the Church. They are at the service of charity which builds up the Church.54
2004 Among the special graces ought to be mentioned the graces of state that accompany the exercise of the responsibilities of the Christian life and of the ministries within the Church:
Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; he who teaches, in his teaching; he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who contributes, in liberality; he who gives aid, with zeal; he who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.55
2005 Since it belongs to the supernatural order, grace escapes our experience and cannot be known except by faith. We cannot therefore rely on our feelings or our works to conclude that we are justified and saved.56 However, according to the Lord’s words “Thus you will know them by their fruits”57 – reflection on God’s blessings in our life and in the lives of the saints offers us a guarantee that grace is at work in us and spurs us on to an ever greater faith and an attitude of trustful poverty.
A pleasing illustration of this attitude is found in the reply of St. Joan of Arc to a question posed as a trap by her ecclesiastical judges: “Asked if she knew that she was in God’s grace, she replied: ‘If I am not, may it please God to put me in it; if I am, may it please God to keep me there.'”58
-Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraphs 1996-2005
Well done, Sam!
Thanks, Jon. “Cheap grace” is Bonhoeffer’s term and I’d recommend engaging with his arguments in “Discipleship.” I will say this, though: the point of the argument is that Jesus’s call IS grace so that the reverse formulation “costly faith” misses the point that God’s grace comes with a command, or a call, to follow him. “Cheap grace” articulates grace as something without the command, thus abstracting it from the actual call of Jesus. Does that help?
Hey Sam,
This is another great connection you have made between Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer, one that I had not picked up on. For my master’s I wrote a paper comparing the ethics of Bonhoeffer and Kierkegaard demonstrating their shared preoccupation with obeying the will of God in their ethics. It is on my website if you want to check it out. Are you writing on Bonhoeffer for your dissertation at St. Andrews?
Hi Timothy,
Thanks for the comment…I checked out your website and glanced through a bit of your posts on SK and DB…good stuff! My thesis at St Andrews was a critique of NT Wright’s historical and theological method (I’m done with it now). I bring him into dialogue with SK and DB as well as TF Torrance and Karl Barth. Basically, I conclude that he needs a more ‘apocalyptic’ theology to truly account for the reality of God in his methodological work.