“Grace,” it seems, is not a simple concept but is capable of many possible meanings. Grace without obligation, sacrifice, or demand was the object of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous critique of “cheap grace”—a form of comfortable, undemanding Christianity that he considered the besetting sin of German Lutherans in the 1930s.2 No one preached grace more passionately than Bonhoeffer, but Bonhoeffer’s understanding of grace did not carry the sense “with no strings attached.”
