As Christianity
spread, and the Church became more secularized, this realization of the
costliness of grace gradually faded. The
world was Christianized, and grace became its common property…..The
justification of the sinner in the world degenerated into the justification of
sin and the world. Costly grace was
turned into cheap grace without discipleship…….It is under the influence of
this kind of 'grace' that the world has been made 'Christian,' but at the cost
of secularizing the Christian religion as never before…The Christian life comes
to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no
different form the world, in fact, in being prohibited from being different
from the world for the sake of grace.
The upshot of it all is that my only duty as a Christian is to leave the
world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that
my sins are all forgiven. I need no
longer try to follow Christ, for cheap grace, the bitterest foe of
discipleship, which true discipleship must loathe and detest, has freed me from
that. Grace as the data for our
calculations means grace at the cheapest price, but grace as the answer to the
sum means costly grace. It is terrifying
to realize what use can be made of a genuine evangelical doctrine. In both cases we have the identical formula -
'justification by faith alone.' Yet the misuse of the formula leads to the
complete destruction of its very essence.
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer
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