Discipleship (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works)

by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The time is coming in which everyone who confesses the living God will become, for the sake of that confession, not only an object of hatred and fury. Indeed, already we are nearly that far along now. The time is coming when Christians, for the sake of their confession, will be excluded from ‘human society,’ as it is called, hounded from place to place, subjected to physical attack, abused, and under some circumstances even killed.

completely powerless and negligible.

will loudly confess and praise the crucified and resurrected Lord, and his coming again. And what prayer, what confession, what song of praise is this? It is a prayer of most intimate love for those who are lost, who stand around us and glare at us with eyes rolling with hatred, some of whom have already even conspired to kill us. It is a prayer for peace for these distraught and shaken, disturbed and destroyed souls, a prayer for the same love and peace that we ourselves enjoy.

It is the shining light, the city on the hill. It is the way of self-denial, perfect love, perfect purity, perfect truthfulness, perfect nonviolence.

The people have to see it. The community of Jesus’ disciples, the community of better righteousness, is the visible community, that took the step beyond the orders of the world. It has left everything behind to gain the cross of Christ.

The perfect are none other than those who, in the Beatitudes, are called blessed.

separating themselves from the world radically and with no willingness to compromise, in order to force into being what is Christian, what is appropriate to discipleship, what is extraordinary.

If Jesus had sent his disciples to their people, to their vocations, their responsibilities, their obedience to the law as the scribes interpreted it to the people, then he would have shown himself to be pious, truly humble, and obedient. He would have inspired people to more serious piety and stricter obedience.

Jesus calls a halt to our thoughtless, unbroken, simple joy in what is visible. He gives a sting to the extraordinary. Jesus calls us to reflection.

Maybe this is why Jesus told those who knew to keep quiet; he wants them to have a personal revelation.

it were, then the focus would no longer be on discipleship itself; then a moment of repose would occur, our following would be interrupted, and we would not be able to take it up again at the point where we had stopped to rest.

What is visible should be hidden at the same time; at the same time both visible and not to be seen. The reflection we have mentioned, thus, needs to be guided so that we do not stray into reflection about our extraordinariness.

Otherwise extraordinariness is no longer the extraordinariness of discipleship, but the extraordinariness of our own will and desire.

The righteousness of the disciples is hidden from themselves.

do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,

Enthusiasts,

The cross is at once what is necessary and hidden, and what is visible and extraordinary.

Otherwise it will really be your goodness, and not the goodness of Christ.

When they love their enemies, then they no longer view them as enemies.

public reward which God intended to store up for me.

Beware—it says—that you do not mistake genuine love for the virtue of kindness or for a human “quality”! It is self-forgetting love in the most genuine sense of the word. In this self-forgetting love, however, the old self must die with all its virtues and qualities.

Then the old self is no longer alive, but Christ is alive in the person. The love of Christ the Crucified, who leads the old self in us to death, is what lives in Christ’s follower. Disciples find themselves only in Christ and in their brothers and sisters.

Even in prayer there is no unmediated access to the Father.

How can I protect myself from myself?

The Lord’s Prayer is the essence of prayer.

This is where Satan is overcome, the power of the world, sin, and death broken. God’s kingdom still is found in suffering and in struggle.

The disciples’ final prayer is to be that someday they be delivered from this evil world and inherit the kingdom of heaven.

this forgiveness can only be received when living in the fellowship of other sinners.

The daily death of the old self cannot be achieved by anything other than faith in Jesus.

This takes place in daily and extraordinary practice of discipline. The disciples are meant when it is said that the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Therefore, “watch and pray.”

So does daily meditation on the word of God, as do all sorts of practices of physical discipline and austerity.

The objection that Christians should take refuge in faith and scripture and forsake asceticism is without any merit.

What is a life of faith, if not an endless manifold struggle of the spirit against the flesh? How can anyone live in faith whom prayer makes slothful, who is tired of scripture, or whose joy in God is stolen by sleeping, eating, or sexual desire?

Asceticism is self-chosen...

Jesus, however, says to his disciples that they should remain humble in the voluntary exercises of humility, that they should never burden others with such exercises, using them as a reproach or a law.

If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! No one can serve two masters;

So their vision is simple. Its sole focus is on the light which comes from Christ.

If the heart clings to the appearances of the world, to the creatures instead of the creator, then the disciple is lost.

Christ alone?

Jesus does not forbid them to use the goods. Jesus was human. He ate and drank just as his disciples did. In doing so, he purified the use of the goods of the earth. Disciples should gratefully use the goods required for their bodies’ daily need and nutrition—goods which are consumed in sustaining life.

Stored-up possessions get between me and God. Where my treasure is, there is my trust, my security, my comfort, my God. Treasure means idolatry.[8]

What other treasures could they be except that extraordinariness, that hiddenness of life as a disciple? What treasures could they be except the fruits of Christ’s suffering, which the life of a disciple will bear?

Fruits of the Spirit

Only when they have won our hearts are they really what they are. Without our hearts, earthly goods and the world mean nothing. They live off our hearts. In that way they are against God. We can give our hearts in complete love only to one object, we can cling only to one master.

If we do not love God, then we hate God. There is no in-between. That is the way God is, and that is what makes God be God, that we can only love or hate God.

But by loving God and also the goods of the world, our love for God is actually hate; our eye no longer views things simply, and our heart is no longer in communion with Jesus. Whether it is your intention or not, it cannot be otherwise. You cannot serve two masters, you who are following Jesus.

Earthly goods deceive the human heart into believing that they give it security and freedom from worry. But in truth, they are what cause anxiety. The heart which clings to goods receives with them the choking burden of worry. Worry collects treasures, and treasures produce more worries. We desire to secure our lives with earthly goods; we want our worrying to make us worry-free, but the truth is the opposite. The chains which bind us to earthly goods, the clutches which hold the goods tight, are themselves worries.

Only those who put tomorrow completely into God’s hand and receive fully today what they need for their lives are really secure.

The only way to understand it is as the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We can change nothing about the conditions of the world.

Worrying means taking God’s rule onto ourselves.

The fact that they find food, however, is not due to their own labor, but to God’s goodness. For who placed their food there where they can find it? . . . For where God has not laid up a supply no one will find anything, even though they all work themselves to death searching.”

who rely on their strength and work, but not on God. Nonbelievers are worriers, because they do not know that the Father knows what their needs are. So they intend to get for themselves what they do not expect from God. But disciples are to “strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”