The Cost of Discipleship

by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Whenever the Church was accused of being too secularized, it could always point to

monasticism as an opportunity of living a higher life within the fold, and thus justify the other possibility of a lower standard of life for others.

By and large, the fatal error of monasticism lay not so much in its rigorism (though even here there was a good deal of misunderstanding of the precise content of the will of Jesus) as in the extent to which it departed from genuine Christianity by setting up itself as the individual achievement of a select few, and so claiming a special merit of its own.

The call to the cloister demanded of Luther the complete surrender of his life. But God shattered all his hopes. He showed him through the Scriptures that the following of Christ is not the achievement or merit of a select few, but the divine command to all Christians without distinction.

Luther’s return from the cloister to the world was the worst blow the world had suffered since the days of early Christianity.

That was the secret of the gospel of the Reformation—the justification of the sinner.

We must therefore maintain that the paradoxical interpretation of the commandments of Jesus always includes the literal interpretation, for the very reason that our aim is not to set up a law, but to proclaim Christ.