Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship Part II – Reflections (1)

I have been thinking for a few months about writing a series of reflections on Part II of Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship. Part II is titled, The Church of Jesus Christ and Discipleship; it consists of six chapters and is about one hundred pages. My reluctance has been that it is dense, much denser than Life Together which has 97 pages and for which I wrote 110 reflections a few years ago on this blog. 

When I write “dense” I mean that Bonhoeffer uses concepts that most of us are unfamiliar with – even though they are Biblical – and that those of us who are familiar with them wrestle with (at least I wrestle with them). When I consider that Life Together required 110 reflections to complete the journey, I can’t begin to think what The Church of Jesus Christ and Discipleship might demand, I’m not even sure that I can do it. 

Yet, when I see that the professing church in the United States has abdicated its identity in Christ, when I see that God’s People do not know that they are God’s People and that they are not their own but have been bought with a price, when I see the great need of our generation to know Jesus, I want to explore what Bonhoeffer writes about discipleship and the Church; I want to hear the call of Jesus, I want us to hear the call of Jesus – to live in community, to live as His Body, to be His Presence in the world. 

There is a sense in which Life Together is a practical manual for living in koinonia with one another in Christ, while The Church of Jesus Christ and Discipleship (CJCD) explores the deep space, the height and depth and breadth and length, of who we are as the People of God, the Body of Christ, the Bride of the Lamb, the Temple of God, the Church of the Living God. Perhaps Life Together is our trek to base camp, while CJCD takes us to the summit of Everest. 

I was undecided about embarking on this journey until last Friday, when I had the briefest of interchanges with someone in the parking lot of a building not far from where we live. The nature of the interchange had to do with the book Discipleship, and it was so unusual that I thought that I’d better get with the program and take the journey that Aslan was offering. 

I first read Discipleship (then published as The Cost of Discipleship) about sixty years ago as a teenager. At the time I also read Letters and Papers from Prison (a more comprehensive edition has since been published). I am hardly an expert on Bonhoeffer, but he has been with me most of my life.

When someone says to me, “I know Bonhoeffer,” I want to ask, “Is that possible?” 

On the one hand Bonhoeffer is straightforward when he says, “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.” On the other hand, to live with Bonhoeffer from that point onward is to invite more questions than answers – yet the questions keep us seeking and knowing Jesus and the answers are always found in Jesus Christ – Bonhoeffer is unambiguous about Jesus Christ. He is also unambiguous about us needing to live in koinonia with one another in Christ.  There is no discipleship apart from the Body of Christ. 

My current copy of Discipleship is translated by Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss and is the Reader’s Edition published by Fortress Press. If you want to know Bonhoeffer, in some measure, I don’t think you can do so without knowing Discipleship. If you want to know Jesus, Discipleship can be an important element in that process…and a lifelong friend. It can be the kind of friend who challenges you and puts weight on the bar, the kind of friend who is steadfast and faithful. 

If you want a biography of Bonhoeffer, make the commitment to read Eberhard Bethge’s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer A Biography. Bethge was a close friend of Bonhoeffer’s and was married to his niece. Bethge’s work will not only take you on a journey, but will serve as a future reference, allowing you to return to it time and again to refresh your memory and understanding. There was a (sadly) popular bio of Bonhoeffer published a few years ago that contained historical inaccuracies and lacked literary merit – Bethge is worth the effort. 

My goal in these reflections is to interact with what Bonhoeffer wrote, it is not to explain why Bonhoeffer wrote what he wrote, it is not to delve into Bonhoeffer’s motives, it is to take what he wrote, as he wrote it, and allow the words to speak to us today – we don’t always know the full extent of what we write, of what we say, of what we create.

Discipleship was published in 1937 as Germany and the professing church in Germany were being enveloped in darkness. Bonhoeffer saw the darkness, and in the midst of the darkness he also saw the Light of Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer was in the minority with his perspective, both the minority in society in general and the minority within the professing church. What is popular is seldom true, this was the case in the German church in 1937, and it is the case in the church in the United States in 2025. 

“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matthew 7:13 – 14). 

Part II of Discipleship begins with a short chapter titled Preliminary Questions and in the first paragraph Bonhoeffer poses no less than eight questions. He then begins the second paragraph by telling us that the questions in the first paragraph are all wrong because they indicate that we don’t really believe that Jesus Christ is alive, we don’t believe we are in His Presence. 

“There is something wrong with all of these questions. Every time we ask them, we place ourselves outside the living presence of the Christ” (page 178). 

We might ask ourselves, “Do we speak and act as if Jesus is alive or as if He is dead?” Is Jesus in the past tense or is He in the present? What does our language reveal about the way we think of Jesus? What does our language tell us and others about our relationship with Him, about our discipleship? 

Bonhoeffer writes, “Discipleship in essence never consists in a decision for this or that specific action; it is always a decision for or against Jesus Christ…What counts is not the call as such, but the one who calls” (page 178). 

What role does the Word of God, Scripture, play in all of this? We’ll return to this in the next reflection, the Lord willing, and hopefully have a fruitful beginning in CJCD.  

The Holy Spirit – Revealing and Convicting (10)

 Adoption - I

In our previous reflection we considered that all that the Father has, Jesus Christ also has; and that all that Jesus Christ has we also have in Him. We briefly looked at what it means to be a joint heir (Romans 8:17) with Christ. When we arrive at the Holy of Holies of John Chapter 17, we will hopefully see the confirmation and congruity of these threads, for we are called to be one with the Trinity as the People of God, the Bride, the Temple, the sons and daughters of the Living God.  

Now I would like us to ponder what the Bible means when it speaks to us of adoption. This is a central thought in the Himalayas of Romans Chapter 8, and yet it is something that we miss, that we typically do not understand, and because of this we forgo much of our high calling as daughters and sons of the Living God and joint heirs with Christ. I hope you will give prayerful thought to the Bible’s portrayal of adoption as we work through this, it may take some time, but we can always trust the Holy Spirit to lead us deeper into Jesus and His Word.

I will begin with a statement: In Biblical adoption, you must first be a child of the Father before you can be adopted by Him. 

To put it another way, only those who are already children of God in Christ can be adopted. 

I am making these statements because they go against everything most of us know about adoption and I want to get our attention. Our present-day concept of adoption is the opposite of the above statements, in our world the reason for adoption is to make someone a member of a family, we have no reason to adopt anyone already within the family – and yet, as I hope we will see, Biblical adoption is not about bringing someone into the Family of God, it is about what occurs to those already in the Family of God.

There are three places in the New Testament where the word “adoption” is used, and we will explore all three; Romans 8:12 – 25; Galatians 3:23 – 4:11; Ephesians 1:1 – 14.  What patterns do you see in these passages? Are there similarities? Before we begin with these passages, there are two observations I want to make.

What is our approach, or methodology, in understanding Scripture? If you have read much of my writing these past few years you may realize that I believe that we have suffered a catastrophic failure in our approach to the Bible with our various interpretive methods, including the historical – grammatical method. While elements of some methods can be helpful, they ought not to be the engine that powers the train. We simply cannot understand Scripture and see Jesus Christ, who is the focus of all Scripture, without the illumination and revelation of the Holy Spirit; Jesus speaks to us of the Holy Spirit in the Upper Room (John chapters 13 – 17) and Paul explicitly writes of our dependence on the Holy Spirit in understanding the things of God in 1 Corinthians 1:17 – 2:16. 

As I have written and said many times, if Jesus and the New Testament writers were in seminary, they would receive failing grades in exegesis, for their use of the Old Testament hardly aligns with the historical – grammatical method. The same is true of the Church Fathers, who, as a whole, demonstrate a Christology that far surpasses what we see today and a love and command of Scripture that dwarfs us. 

I am deeply sorry that I didn’t realize this when I was pastoring, and most certainly when I was in seminary. As I look back, I did have professors who were not slaves to naturalistic approaches to Scripture, and I surely believe that all of my professors were fine men and women, people of integrity – we are products of our systems, and when the systems produce our paychecks it does make it difficult to gain perspective. 

Now if the above doesn’t make any sense to you right now, don’t worry about it. However, I do have a point in writing it, and that is that we are going to look at the Bible and only the Bible in pondering adoption; yes, I may make a reference or two to adoption in the Roman Empire, but the core of our focus will be the above three New Testament passages. 

I have read various perspectives on Biblical adoption for decades, many of them confusing, many tentative, most falling far short of the glory of the Biblical passages, and many not thought out at all. Many of them are so mired in the historical – grammatical method that they chase their tails trying to pin down what Paul meant in his historical context and often come to no firm conclusion. 

Some arrive at the correct conclusion without incorporating the best information or knowledge to get there, but their base instincts in Christ nevertheless lead them into the glory of Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians – these are often folks not academically trained and so they are free to respond to the Holy Spirit without the constraints of naturalistic exegesis and hermeneutics. They “see” the glory of sonship, the glory of the Firstborn (Romans 8:29), the glory of the Father “bringing many sons to glory” (Hebrews 2:10).

(One of the consequences of our naturalistic methods, including the historical – grammatical method, is that we have created accessibility barriers to the Bible for the average person, once again the people have been led to believe that only the professionals can truly understand the Bible and that the priesthood of the believer is a fiction.)

The second observation concerns the idea that God adopts us into His family. As I wrote above, this is not what Biblical adoption is about, in the New Testament you must first be a child to be adopted. While we will explore this in-depth when we work through the three passages cited above, I want us to think about what the Bible teaches about becoming a child of God.

“But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become the children of God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12 – 13).

“Jesus answered and said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). 

“That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6).

“But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:4 – 5). 

“For you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable” (1 Peter 1:23). 

We become children of God when we are born of the Holy Spirit, when the very life of God enters into us. This is obviously not like our understanding of adoption, for it is impossible for a human to cause another human to be born again with the adoptive parent’s very life. This is but one way in which what the Bible means by adoption is not what we think of as adoption. 

I also point this out to ask us to think twice before we use the term adoption to indicate what it means to come into a relationship with the Father through the Son – for it bypasses the necessity of the new birth and can cause confusion with people. Furthermore, as I hope we will see, Biblical adoption is for those who are already the children of God, it is not associated with the process and experience of becoming a child of God (other than that becoming a child of God sets us on the maturation process of adoption).

While you will have to be your own judge of these things, hopefully in communion with the Holy Spirit and the Word of God, there is no doubt in my heart and mind that if adoption were an element of today’s Gospel, as it originally was, and if God’s People saw their calling by the Father in the Son to live as sons and daughters in the adoption process, that our lives would be dramatically different and that our witness to the world would be dynamic in Jesus. We simply do not know who we are in Christ or who He is within us. 

How critical is adoption? 

“For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing [this is the adoption process] of the sons of God…the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (see Romans 8). 

I hope you will be meditating on the above passages from Romans 8, Galatians 3 and 4, and Ephesians 1. The Lord willing, we’ll begin our exploration of them in the next post in this series.