The Cost of Discipleship

by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God alone is righteous. On the cross this truth is apprehended as our condemnation as sinners. But when we are brought to faith in the death of Christ, we receive the righteousness of God triumphant on the cross in the very place where we receive our own condemnation as sinners. We can then receive justification because we willingly renounce every attempt to establish our own righteousness and allow God alone to be righteous. Thus the only way we can be righteous in the sight of God is by recognizing that he only is righteous, and we ourselves sinners in the totality of our being.

Through fellowship and communion with the incarnate Lord, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time we are delivered from that individualism which is the consequence of sin, and retrieve our solidarity with the whole human race. By being partakers of Christ incarnate, we are partakers in the whole humanity which he bore. We now know that we have been taken up and borne in the humanity of Jesus, and therefore that new nature we now enjoy means that we too must bear the sins and sorrows of others. The incarnate Lord makes his followers the brothers of all mankind. The “philanthropy” of God (Titus 3.4) revealed in the Incarnation is the ground of Christian love towards all on earth that bears the name of man. The form of Christ incarnate makes the Church into the Body of Christ. All the sorrows of mankind fall upon that form, and only through that form can they be borne.

If we are conformed to his image in his Incarnation and crucifixion, we shall also share the glory of his resurrection. “We shall also bear the image of the heavenly” (I Cor. 15.49). “We shall be like him, for we shall see him even as he is” (I John 3.2). If we contemplate the image of the glorified Christ, we shall be made like unto it, just as by contemplating the image of Christ crucified we are conformed to his death. We shall be drawn into his image, and identified with his form, and become a reflection of him. That reflection of his glory will shine forth in us even in this life, even as we share his agony and bear his cross. Our life will then be a progress from knowledge to knowledge, from glory to glory, to an ever closer conformity with the image of the Son of God. “But we all, with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory” (II Cor. 3.18).