A Call to Costly Grace

"Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks' wares. ... Grace without price; grace without cost!" -Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Bonhoeffer's classic coinage "cheap grace" is as descriptive of the church in Nixon's America as it was then of the church in Hitler's Germany. The astronomical statistics of U.S. destruction in Indochina parallel or surpass similar statistics of German destruction in Europe. While dropping death and destruction in Vietnam, we die at home: our institutions are cancerous with corruption; our cities rot with poverty, injustice and violence; our culture is glutted from the ambrosia of Mammon, the pagan god of materialism; our land is polluted with industrial waste and impoverished by limitless greed; and our nation is infested with racism and ideological nationalism.

The Body of Christ in America, instead of diagnosing these diseases and embodying the alternative of life in Jesus Christ, shares society's sicknesses. Christian businessmen are those who tithe their padded incomes. Christian politicians are those who attend an occasional prayer breakfast. Christian soldiers are those who pray for safety before bombing missions. As long as following Christ is defined mystically and "spiritually" the ethical distinction between the Christian and his culture will be microscopic. Hitler reportedly encouraged the German clergy to preach "The pure gospel." Faith without works is not only dead, it is invisible. This is cheap grace.

How can evangelism "flourish" in such a spiritual slum? Have we made grace more marketable by reducing its moral cost? Do we peddle styrofoam crosses? Do we caricature the Great Commission itself with the distortion of a cheap, easy grace?

I believe that the Great Commission, Matthew 28:18-20, properly understood, is one of the most radical passages of the New Testament. If it were obeyed by American Christians it could again change the world, and would surely raise up a prophetic people. Yet its present popular interpretations render it innocuous in the ethical and spiritual crises of our times. This indictment, if only possibly true, demands a scrutinizing reexamination of the Great Commission.

This reexamination will begin with a brief interpretation and then concentrate on some common distortions.

A brief interpretation
Jesus, after His resurrection, appeared to the eleven disciples and gave them a new commission fundamentally different from that He had given the twelve earlier.

Previously he had told them to go to every Jewish village preaching the kingdom of God, healing the sick, raising the dead, and casting out demons. Now he commissions them with these words:

1. Past: Jesus Christ has been given the kingdom.

All sovereignty has been given to me in heaven and on the earth.

Jesus of Nazareth, vagabond Jewish prophet, born a peasant and executed a heretic and a political criminal, is now the king of the universe. This affirmation is a beautiful and logical beginning to the commission, for if he is sovereign, his disciples will be confident of the ultimate victory of his kingdom, they will understand the cosmic importance of his salvation, and they will risk anything, even death, in his service, therefore,

2. Present: Jesus Christ commands His disciples to, extend their calling to all mankind.

Having gone, therefore, make disciples of all the nations baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you.

Whereas the earthly Jesus commanded the disciples to preach the kingdom only "to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Mt. 10:5-6), now they are to extend to all mankind their unconditional call to follow Jesus by:

a. going to them throughout all the world, (see also Mk. 16:14ff, Acts 1:6-11).
b. baptizing them as a symbol of their voluntary participation in Jesus' death and of their new life relationship with the trinity.
c. teaching them to obey all those things Jesus had taught His disciples.

3. Future: Jesus Christ will be with His disciples to the end.

And lo, I am with you continuously until the consumation of the age.

Jesus began the commission with the claim of universal power; he ends it with a promise of continual presence. The Great Commission is our joyful duty because the severe demands of discipleship are sandwiched between these two affirmations: Jesus Christ is the powerful King, and the present Lord.

Here the commission and the entire gospel of Matthew appropriately end. From here on his disciples, in the power of their present Lord, write and embody the acts of Jesus in the world. We are epistles, known and read of all people (2 Corinthians 3:2).

A Critique of Distortions
1. On going. After this commissioning Jesus' students (disciples) became activists (apostles are "sent ones"). (Without the benefit of modern transportation and communications, without the financial stability modern mission boards offer, they proclaimed the good news over a remarkable area.) In spite of Rome's efforts to contain or extinguish it, the flame spread from that unideentifiable hill in Galilee throughout the empire by donkey and slow Roman cargo ships. Eleven torches ignited the world.

Unlike them we hide in our paranoid but safe Christian ghettoes. Our light does not spread, it just flickers under our ecclesiastical beds and inverted bushel baskets. We do not distort this command, we simply disobey it, either because our theology is too loose to suggest that all men need to be changed by the gospel, or because our lives are too comfortable, too secure, too bourgeois. Going does not involve geographical mobility as much as unconditional forfeiture of our lives to the incarnation and proclamation of the gospel. Going is a radical act.

2. On making disciples. It is obvious that the command to make disciples is not the same as that to proclaim the gospel, both from the etymology of the word used and from the idea of discipleship in the gospels.

The King James Version translation "teach" is misleading: the word means "make disciples." The New Testament writers used many words for announcing the good news, some of which are familiar in English derivations: "evangel" (gospel) "kerygma" (proclamation), "martyr" (originally meaning "witness"). These are common in the New Testament, but Matthew uses a rare word and gives it an apparently original meaning, far more powerful and pregnant than a mere proclamation of the gospel.

When Jesus called the twelve He demanded absolute obedience and sacrifice. Matthew puts it in succinct understatements.

"And He said to them (Peter and Andrew) after me. ...and immediately leaving their nets they followed Him." (4:19)

"... and He called them (James and John), and immediately, leaving the boat and their father, they followed Him." (4:21-22)

"And He said to him (Matthew himself) follow me. And rising up (from his desk at work) he followed Him." (9:9)

Discipling Jesus, however, demands more than abandoning possessions and family—it demands abandoning life itself if necessary.

"Then Jesus said to His disciples, 'If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and let him take up his cross and let him follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever will lose his life for my sake will find it. For what will a man profit if he should gain the whole world and should forfeit his life?" (Mt. 16:24-26)

"The nature of the calling of the disciples of Jesus, and their resultant dependence on Him, means that there is nothing in the life of the disciple which is apart from Jesus and His life. With all they have and are they are drawn into fellowship with him. But the way of Jesus leads to the cross. Hence entry into His fellowship as His disciples carries with it the obligation to suffer. The tradition is unanimous that in fact Jesus left His disciples in no doubt that they were committing themselves to suffering if they followed Him." (from an article on mathetes by K.H. Rengstorf, in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol. IV, p. 449).

The most common distortion of this command is presuming that the mere proclamation of the grace of God in Jesus Christ is the same as making disciples. It separates salvation from discipleship: "faith first, then obedience" is its byline.

The call to salvation and discipleship is one call and the demands are identical. The New Testament teaches clearly that those who are freed from their sin are the very ones enslaved to obedience. The first three gospels all tell of a rich young man, a junior, executive or prep school type, who asked Jesus: "What must I do that I may have eternal life?" This was not a question about becoming one of the twelve; it was a question about salvation itself—"eternal life" was at stake. Jesus commanded him to obey the ten commandments, to sell all his securities, to distribute the proceeds among the poor, and to follow him. The young man, although having kept the ten commandments, could not follow Jesus, "for he had many possessions." Jesus did not run after him to coax him to follow for a while, and if he liked it he could sell some of his things or share them with the rest of the apostles. He said sell, give, follow. This was Jesus' criterion for salvation: unchallenged, unconditional allegience. He knew nothing of cheap grace.

3. On Baptism. Baptism in the New Testament is a symbol of a radical reversal of life orientation because of our decision to follow him and to confess that we are in need of his forgiveness. Whereas the believer previously lived in primary relationship to the world, a captive to its passions, now he has died with Jesus to the world and lives in a primary relationship to God. He is a new creation: a citizen of the kingdom of God and a pilgrim in the world.

"Or do you not know that as many of us were baptized into Christ Jesus, were baptized into His death in order that as Christ was raised from the dead...so also we might walk in newness of life?" (Romans 6:3-4)
"... having been buried with Him in baptism with whom also you were raised through Faith in the power of God who raised Him from the dead." (Colossians 2:12, see also Galatians 2:19-20, 5:24, 6:14 and 2 Corinthians 4:10).

Baptism is a matter of life and death—rather, of life in death. Adoniram Judson, a nineteenth-century missionary, refused baptism to those not willing to openly declare their faith in Burma, where conversion frequently resulted in death. The first several Judson baptized were murdered, and some believers waited years before daring this public declaration. This is the New Testament understanding of the Christian's death with Christ in baptism.

A common distortion of this command to baptize is performing it as a liturgical act without a voluntary declaration of faith, obedience and self-denial from the baptized. This is not only true of churches practicing infant baptism, but of those also who practice adult baptism without explaining the radical change it presupposes. Many a young Baptist is rushed to the waters soon after the mythological "age of accountability" (a synonym for pubescence) without any more an understanding of the commitment and obedience involved than a diapered Presbyterian. Baptism is death—voluntary, conscious death.

4. On teaching. Everything Jesus taught them the disciples were commanded to teach others. One cannot be obedient to Jesus Christ if he is not faithful to the transmission of the entire deposit of His teaching—"all that I have commanded you." This is our great omission from the Great Commission.

This distortion is the result, in part, of a) pragmatism which denies the feasibility of some of His radical ethical teachings, and b) selectivity which emphasizes some to the near denial of others.

a. The pragmatic denial has created some strange bedfellows, among whom are Reinhold Niehuhr, Christian ethical pragmatist extraordinare (Moral Man and Immoral Society, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics) and Charles Ryrie of dispensational Dallas Theological Seminary, who, believing that the Sermon on the Mount is primarily for the future kingdom, proves the irrelevance of a literal interpretation of the Sermon for today by bemoaning the certain bankruptcy of Christian businessmen were they to obey the command to give to him who asks in Matthew 5:42 (Dispensationalism Today, Chicago, pp. 106-107). Convincing, eh? Didn't Jesus say something about a camel, a needle, and a businessman once?

b. The selectivity which disobeys the command to teach all is as harmful as outright pragmatic denial, for the result is the same. Some emphasize Jesus' ethical teaching and omit His teaching about Himself, sin, judgement and salvation. They work for a new society and a new creation, but not so much for new, radically transformed men.

Others emphasize Jesus' evangelical and spiritual commands to the exclusion of the ethical and social ones.

Bill Bright, director of Campus Crusade of Christ (whose motivating vision is, ironically enough, "fulfilling the Great Commission in our generation") unwittingly illustrates this selectivity.

"Then Jesus said, 'Teach them to obey all the commands I have given you ...' What are some of those commands? 'Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.' 'Seek ye first the kingdom of God.' 'Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.' 'Love one another.' 'Ask in My name.' 'When ye pray, believe that ye receive...and ye shall.' 'He that abideth in Me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit.' 'Herein is My Father florified that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be My disciples.' 'Tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high ... ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you; and ye shall be witnesses.' 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations.' " (Revolution Now!, pp. 179-180).

The commands selected here are only about the believer's witness and devotion. There is no mention at all of Jesus' other commands like: "Whoever strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." "Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you." "Do not lay up for yourselves treasure upon the earth." "Do not be anxious for your life, what you will eat, or what you will drink, nor for your body what you will wear."

The implications of this selectivity are monumental, for it excludes important conditions which the unbeliever should understand before conversion, and it perverts what he should be after conversion. If the only commands he knows are devotional, he can pray in his loaded B-52, his new TR-3, his posh office at ITT or his congressional chair in D.C. and never alter his bombing, his spending, his marketing or his voting. He is a kind of superman, who is indistinguishable from others until he changes his appearance in some religious phonebooth to be costumed in the right language and piety in order to fight for truth, justice, and too often also, the American way.

Neither form of selectivity can obey the commission, for the one antiquates the biblical teaching on redemption and the other distorts the biblical teaching on the redeemed man.

Here then is how we should understand the commands of the Great Commission. The demanding life of the disciple is to be extrapolated to all of humankind, and is to be proclaimed along with the message of life in Jesus' death and resurrection. Sacrificially and daringly they are to go throughout all the world with this call, baptizing people into participation with Jesus' death and teaching them all that Jesus had commanded them. They have one message but two paragraphs: free grace in the first, costly discipleship in the second. Salvation suggests sacrifice, self-denial, slavery and suffering.

Bonhoeffer's summary says it all: "When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die." Only this call to costly grace surrounds the entrenched and befouled fortress of man's freedom, beseiges his will, breaks down his self-righteousness, spoils his ego-strength, burns his old values and liberates him by leading him away a slave to Jesus Christ, who conquers, not by violence, but by his loving, sacrificial death! Man stops fighting God when the message leaks out that God's slavery is better than man's freedom and that God's love for him exceeds his love for himself. Man sees God on a cross—dying—for him. Costly grace!

Even though this grace is so demanding and costly, one need not cheapen it to make it more marketable, for it is only costly grace that is worthy of man's surrender, it is only costly grace that frees a man from himself, it is only costly grace that makes the believer distinct from the non-believer, it is only costly grace that revolutionizes the world; in a word, it is only costly grace that fulfills the Great Commission. Were we to obey this commission with the zeal which typified the eleven, our wounded society would feel the painful healing of the presence of a salty people. (Matthew 5:13).

Dennis MacDonald was associate editor of The Post-American, the predecessor to Sojourners, when this article appeared.