Cheap Grace
Cheap GraceCheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjack's wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace is represented as the Church's inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost!
Like ravens we have gathered around the carcass of cheap grace. From it we have imbibed the poison which has killed the following of Jesus among us. A people became Christian but at the cost of discipleship, at an all-too-cheap price. We have absolved an entire nation unquestionably and unconditionally. We have poured out rivers of grace without end, but the call to rigorously follow Christ is seldom heard. Our church's predicament is proving more and more clearly to be a question of how we are to live as Christians in the modern world.
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace.
The Cost of Discipleship (1937-first English translation, 1949)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer