Cheap Grace and the Alliance between Evangelical Christianity and Authoritarianism

Introduction

[1] Alliances between conservative religious movements and authoritarianism are not historically anomalous, nor uniquely Christian. But with democracy and its legitimacy on the wane in the West,[1] Trumpism’s overwhelming mobilisation of, and sustained appeal to, evangelical Christianity has spurred a re-examination.[2] Trumpism shows that the conservative-religious/authoritarian alliance promises moral and national restoration without the need to atone or repent; it simplifies or nullifies responsibility toward others, leverages threatened religious identities and reframes faith as loyalty to a human or to a specific partisan movement.[3] The research, however, mostly counsels caution without offering resources to counter the accelerating slide into authoritarianism.[4]

[2] Using Lutheran ethics to create a deeper theological framing, Lori Brandt Hale and Reggie Williams, back in 2018, suggested how Bonhoeffer—specifically in his church context in 1930s Nazi Germany—can help.[5] Bonhoeffer lived in a time when the huge masquerade of evil had thrown all ethical concepts into confusion, with ungodliness appearing in the form of light, good deeds, historical necessity and social justice.[6] The parallels are obvious:

In the elections of 1928 and 1932, the … vast majority of Protestants voted for the Hitler party. When Hitler [was] appointed as Reichskanzler in January 1933…Protestants all over Germany rejoiced. The believed that a new and better chapter in the history of Germany had begun. … Protestants backed the new regime without any reservations. It was not that some Protestants failed to recognise that harsh and unjust measures were taken by the Nazis, but they dismissed any objections with…’Wo gehobelt wird da fallen Spähne.’[7] …Those who supported Hitler did not care about the early victims of Nazi rule and did not comprehend the political and cultural implications of Hitler’s quest for totalitarian rule.[8]

[3] Some speak of a ‘Bonhoeffer moment’ now: a radical need for resistance and mobilisation of social, political and theological forces.[9] Bonhoeffer has of course been co-opted for partisan ends across the spectrum,[10] so I specifically embrace his theological grammar of cheap grace –a grammar which was central not only to Bonhoeffer’s views of the proper relationship between church and government,[11] but also of Christianity’s true calling.[12] By embracing cheap grace, authoritarian supporters forsake at least four ontological commitments Bonhoeffer made to animate his resistance. These commitments (which are equally theological and scriptural) concern the relationships between God and humans, between Christ and humans, among humans, and between humans and their leaders. I refract these relationships through the lens of cheap grace to further diagnose its seduction and discern levers for resistance and repentance.[13]

God and Humans

[4] Cheap grace distorts the relationship between God and humans because it severs grace from obedience. In Bonhoeffer’s theology and social ethics, Luther is of course always close at hand.[14] Luther’s sola fide[15]called out the impossibility—indeed arrogance—of attempting to sway God through human moral achievement. Works, according to Luther’s Von den güten Wercken (On Good Works) of 1520, were not irrelevant but reordered: they followed justification as its fruit, not its cause. First Gabe, then Aufgabe.( First the gift, then the obligation.)[16] It is this reordering that cheap grace later forgets. Abstracted from Luther’s polemical context, sola fide can be misread as a theological permission slip for ethical inactivity: because justification is already secured, nothing further is required of the human.

[5] Bonhoeffer birthed ‘cheap grace’ as a condemnation against this understanding. In Nachfolge, he didn’t just protest the lax contentment of German society under nascent fascism. With justification from God assured, people could live on as usual: acquiescing in, condoning or even doing active duty for the regime. What wound up Bonhoeffer was sin collecting in the inaction, in the not-doing status-quo—in the spaces where people were cozy, cushy and comfortable, or even enthusiastic.[17] If there was any moral compunction, they could just come back for another dose of grace from the ‘bargain basement’ next Sunday. “What happened,” Bonhoeffer asked, “to Luther’s warnings against a gospel which made people secure in their godless lives?” Churchgoers, Bonhoeffer saw, had “left out and did not consider and did not mention what Luther always included as a matter of course: discipleship.”[18] Their faith had been evacuated of its original dynamism as a lived, responsive relation to God’s grace and subsequent call.

[6] Bonhoeffer’s indictment of cheap grace rested heavily on the neo-orthodox epistemology he shared with Karl Barth.[19] In his 1922 commentary on Epistle to the Romans, Barth had spoken of God’s transcendence as ‘wholly other:’ a profoundly Lutheran idea,[20] but by then a radical break with Germany’s historical-critical liberal theology. Although he was well-educated to do historical-critical hermeneutic work, Bonhoeffer argued that in order to know anything about God, humans had to rely on revelation from God. Barth’s theology emphasised God’s no to human self-assertion; Bonhoeffer used Scripture to explain ethical and social responsibility.

[7] Importantly, the rise of totalitarianism was not evident immediately—which is consistent with drifting into failure.[21] Effective authoritarianism slowly colonises and permeates institutions; modifying language, governance, control and administration to render authoritarianism salonfähig; it delegitimates and neuters dissent (‘Lügenpresse; fake news’). These also constitute “myriad ways in which our culture encourages us to not see what is going on around us. It may even encourage us to see what is going on around us as fine, as morally commendable.”[22] With the assurance of cheap grace we can remain, as Augustine put it, curvatus in se: bent inward, curved in on ourselves and unwilling or unable to stretch out to see what is being done to fellow human beings around us. We are  unable to glimpse over the horizon to recognise that even worse things are headed our way.

[8] Bonhoeffer’s invective against this shows similarities with that of the prophets Amos or Micah.[23] They too take a theology of cheap grace to task. But one difference is that Bonhoeffer eschewed prophetic exhortations, leaving the societal and moral risks of cheap grace to speak for themselves.[24] The second difference, of course, is the historical insertion of Christ since the prophets. Let’s turn to that now.

Christ with Humans

[9] Bonhoeffer’s insistence on costly grace was founded on a rich Christological realism.[25] Reconciliation of God with the world through Christ meant a crucial, inescapable ontological commitment. Costly grace arises where the priority of God’s action is bound to the concrete call to obedience in the world. When the disciples viewed Christ’s behaviour in context, they saw him defying customs, violating norms, breaking laws and pushing boundaries. That was not sin. Acquiescing in legalised, normalised injustice was.[26] In (what became) Ethics, Bonhoeffer wrote that “there are occasions when…the strict observance of the explicit law of a state…entails a clash with the basic necessities of human life… To deny them would be ceasing to act in accord with reality.”[27] He advocated Jesus’ resisting heinous social injustices.[28]

[10] In 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote Bethge from prison, asking ‘who is Christ actually for us today?’ The question acknowledges that evolving social, political and economic conditions shape Christian faithfulness after contemporary needs. By asking who Christ is (rather than what he did), Bonhoeffer named an ontology that calls Christians into healthy community guided by Christ-centred concreteness. Faith is an obedient trust that reorients one’s whole of life. This ontological commitment necessarily draws people into costly participation in Christ’s suffering for others—for we humans in a sense, as theologian Christopher Holmes argues, are Stellvertreter (“stand-ins”). Christ calls us into a specific form of life: ‘When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.’[29]

[11] When cheap grace neutralises this call, what gets ontologically distorted? First, it retains Christ as redeemer while refusing to obey Christ the Lord. As Sider put it, Christians out for cheap grace happily embrace Jesus as their saviour, but not as Lord—that part is too hard.[30] Second, (evangelical) Christianity has developed a way of preaching the Gospel which distorts and betrays scripture by introducing an element of co-redemption: Humans can be saved because of their decision, their conversion, their being born again.[31] This encourages the boastfulness which Luther objected to.[32] It legitimates, even encourages differencing and discrimination—on which authoritarianism thrives, as does Trumpism and its evangelical support base. In political terms, this allows Christians to acclaim Christ in a form of spiritual warfare, aligning themselves with coercive power, national myth, punitive policies and the supremacy of one group at the exclusion of others.

Humans among Humans

[12] For Bonhoeffer, human beings exist for one another before God; ethical life is irreducibly relational. Cheap grace fractures this. Responsibility toward others becomes optional, conditional, or selectively applied. Cheap grace enables what might be called a theologically sanctioned moral asymmetry: grace for ‘us,’ and indifference or animosity toward ‘them.’ In Nachfolge, Bonhoeffer made clear that cheap grace does not radicalise human action in the way of Luther’s gospel. Instead, cheap grace tamed and domesticated it, colluding in the status quo. Bonhoeffer protested the church’s ostentatious devoutness that hid its theological quietism. This left the structures of power, exclusion and injustice unchallenged.[33]

[13] Indifference to fellow human beings was anathema for Bonhoeffer—incompatible with the Christ-reality we inhabit. Faith means embracing our relationships in this world as they actually are. Holmes reminds us that such Stellvertretung (or vicarious representative responsibility) carries a grave obligation—because we as humans

are agents who are responsible to one another, that is, to actual human beings. This is and ought to be the case precisely because God’s love has extended itself to all, rendering each one of us historically responsible for living in light of this love on behalf of all people.[34]

[14] Scripture consistently guides Christians toward the powerlessness and the suffering. The ontological shape of the moral, loving universe was in Christ, in his ‘delivery of love’ across all human boundaries. Christ existing as community, Bonhoeffer wrote in Sanctorum Communio, is the response to the destructive power of sin. Taking Bonhoeffer’s social ethics back to Luther, ethicist Patrick Nullens argues that sola fide affirms the believer’s place among others, with all the moral demands that comes with this: “For if it is through faith that we identify with the crucified Christ, it means that we should be willing to face the needs of others in the real world.”[35] For Bonhoeffer, this gift of grace was an ontological phase shift which trawled all social relations in its wake, and injected them with a renewed moral expectation on us. The gift of grace needed to be embraced by faith, and once embraced, good works toward our neighbour proceeded as its fruits. Faith, centrally, meant participation:

the moment a person accepts responsibility for other people—and only in so doing does the person live in reality—the genuine ethical situation arises… The subject of the action is no longer the isolated individual, but the one who is responsible for other people. The action’s norm is not a universal principle, but the concrete neighbour, as given to me by God.[36]

[15] Cheap grace severs faith from that responsibility. This distortion has direct political consequences. When grace is abstracted from relational responsibility, it enables moral disengagement on which authoritarian movements flourish. The believer, assured of their own righteousness or divine favour, is no longer bound to account for the harms borne by others; responsibility is narrowed to the in-group, while outsiders recede from moral concern—or become targets of scapegoating, blame, vilification and other forms of ire.

[16] During the launch of Trump’s re-election campaign in Orlando, pastor Paula White-Cain prayed for grace, and urged that “right now, let every demonic network that has aligned itself against the purpose, against the calling of President Trump, let it be broken, let it be torn down in the name of Jesus! Let the counsel of the wicked be spoiled right now.”[37] Cheap grace corrodes Bonhoeffer’s vision of human relationality in Christ’s reality. It replaces mutual accountability and costly solidarity with moral exemption and the narrowing of concern to one’s own group. The rhetoric quickly becomes polarising, confrontational, bigoted and inflammatory.[38] Bonhoeffer saw this happen in 1930s Germany. What remained was a form of Christianity that could coexist comfortably with coercive power precisely because it no longer expected grace to interrupt, expose, or transform—only to affirm one’s own self-obsessed sense of righteousness and a licence to expunge all others who didn’t think, sound or look alike.

Humans and Their Leaders

[17] Bonhoeffer rejected both withdrawal from politics and blind obedience to power. Leaders have a limited, penultimate mandate, and when they overreach, they must be called out, resisted, and, if necessary, obstructed. Hanne Amanda Trangerud of the University of Oslo documents how Trump was set up as a national saviour already in 2015. This then merged with other, mutually reinforcing narratives, which, others show, coalesced into a divine mandate:

Trump as the modern-day Cyrus: an anointed one chosen by God to deliver the United States from the grip of secularism and to annihilate all opposition against Christians. … nothing can change the course of history: God mocks his adversaries, having sovereignly chosen his ‘anointed.’ The same would be true for Donald Trump, according to Paula White-Cain, as she claims that God ‘raised President Trump up for such a time as this.’[39]

Set up like that—specifically chosen for a specific task at a specific time—the leader is an instrument of divine order and moral restoration. This typically has eschatological resonances, as it did in 1930s Germany.

[18] Bonhoeffer recognised this pattern early and named it with theological precision. In his 1933 radio address, delivered days after Hitler’s ascent to the chancellorship, he warned against the transformation of political leadership into an object of religious devotion. Where a leader is elevated beyond their penultimate mandate, Bonhoeffer argued, authority becomes idolatrous: loyalty to the Führer displaces loyalty to Christ, and political obedience is mistaken for faithfulness. The danger was not merely that Christians supported a strong leader, but that they sacralised him. They confused divine providence with national destiny and mistook historical success for theological legitimacy. Political power is absorbed into a salvific narrative, and grace equals uncritical allegiance rather than costly discipleship.

[19] Bonhoeffer, of course, detested this kind of Führer Principle.[40] What lubricates its idolatry is that cheap grace functions as moral outsourcing: discernment and responsibility are delegated upward to a divinely anointed leader. Ostentatious displays of national restoration take the place of costly discipleship.[41] Should a leader like that be removed?

[20] Bonhoeffer’s own trajectory might seem to trouble the distinction I draw, given his eventual participation in the conspiracy to remove Hitler. In Bonhoeffer, I don’t read an endorsement of ‘costly grace violence’ as a moral counter-model to cheap grace. On the contrary, I argue that Bonhoeffer’s decision highlights the difference between violence putatively authorised by grace (as called for by White-Cain above) and action taken in the complete, terrifying knowledge of the absence of any such authorisation. Bonhoeffer carefully documented his torment and never claimed divine sanction, moral righteousness, or historical necessity for his act; nor did he imagine that grace would purify or justify it. Rather, he understood his action as a tragic arrogation of responsibility under conditions where all available options were morally compromised, and the less violent ones appeared exhausted.[42]

[21] Costly grace, in this sense, did not absolve him or his co-conspirators in advance. In fact, it stripped them of moral certainty. It forced Bonhoeffer to bear guilt without a pathway to appeal. He had to entrust judgment to God alone. The decisive difference is not the presence or absence of forceful resistance in human-human relationships, but the refusal of moral self-exoneration. Cheap grace enables resistance with a clean conscience, whereas (as Bonhoeffer’s torment shows) costly grace confronts the perpetrator with the unbearable weight of acting without innocence, moral certainty, or redemptive assurance.

Discussion and Conclusion

[22] By using Lutheran ethics, refracting Bonhoeffer’s theology of costly grace through four relationships—between God and humans, Christ with humans, humans among one another, and humans and their leaders—I have tried to argue that cheap grace systematically loosens the bonds of responsibility that constitute faithful life in Christ.[43] Cheap grace is detached from obedience; Christ is retained as redeemer but not Lord; the neighbour is rendered morally optional; and political leaders are elevated beyond judgment. In each case, cheap grace functions to relieve believers of the burden of discernment and accountability that Bonhoeffer regarded as intrinsic to discipleship in a fallen world. Bonhoeffer helps explain how an alliance between Christianity and authoritarianism is rendered theologically permissible, and what might be done instead.

[23] For example, embracing cheap grace, leaders experience themselves as being fundamentally ‘in the right,’ validated by results, theatres of decisiveness, rank or other mandate, and act entitled. This produces intolerance of critique, bad news and moral certainty in the face of harm (‘we had no choice…’). In contrast, embracing costly grace means a disciplined acceptance that a human’s authority is always penultimate, answerable and never self-justifying.[44] Legitimacy needs to be renewed through listening: being in charge doesn’t mean being morally insulated. Leaders must invite judgement—not as punishment but as reality check.

[24]  When leadership values are used only on propaganda, they don’t bind decision-making or constrain expediency. Ethical drift disguised as pragmatism is a real possibility. Costly grace means the discipline to develop habits of the heart—forming virtues of integrity, compassion, safety and respect—and knowing that these (and their resilience and authenticity) are best revealed under pressure.

[25] Embracing cheap grace, leaders talk about people, wellbeing and culture while pushing morally injurious decisions down into specific groups whose lives or livelihoods are increasingly squeezed. Costly grace would imply a refusal to delegate the blame of difficulties onto scapegoated groups, and to accept that leaders set people across a nation up for success or failure by creating pertinent conditions for everyone.

[26] Under authoritarianism, resistance against unethical leadership can be framed as disloyalty, while leaders enjoy cover from their base, or hide behind a crisis narrative with a claim of necessity. Costly grace, in contrast, would require leadership that expects and even invites resistance, understanding that dissent is not disloyalty but responsibility—and that this leads to better, safer outcomes for everyone.[45]

[27] Cheap grace claims the language of faithfulness and divine favour, and co-opts the resources by which Christianity might otherwise resist authoritarianism. Bonhoeffer’s insistence on costly grace can inspire us to reappropriate those resources.

[1] R. Kuttner, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? (New York: Norton, 2018).

[2] M. S. Brocker, “For Love of the World: Bonhoeffer’s Resistance to Hitler and the Nazis,” Word & World 38, no. 4 (2018), H. A. Trangerud, “The Trump Prophecies and the Mobilization of Evangelical Voters,” Studies in Religion 51, no. 2 (2022), P. Wehner, “The Deepening Crisis in Evangelical Christianity: Support for Trump Comes at a High Cost for Christian Witness,” The Atlantic 324, no. 1 (July 5 2019).

[3] A. Gagné, and L. Shanahan, American Evangelicals for Trump: Dominion, Spiritual Warfare, and the End Times (London: Routledge, 2024), H. Willenbrink, Performing for the Don: Theaters of Faith in the Trump Era (London: Routledge, 2023).

[4] M. Hasan, “The Trump Administration Has a Nazi Problem,” The Guardian (London), 22 January, 2026.

[5] L. B. Hale, and R. L. Williams, “Is This a Bonhoeffer Moment? Lessons for American Christians from the Confessing Church in Germany,” Sojourners 47, no. 2 (2018).

[6] D. Bonhoeffer, Nachfolge (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1937).

[7] Where wood gets chopped, splinters fly.

[8] H. Lehmann, “Fatal Coincidences in 1933: Nazism’s Triumph and Marin Luther’s 450th Birthday,” STK 1, no. 2 (2017). Page 2.

[9] J. T. Mauldin, “Interpreting the Divine Mandates in a Bonhoeffer Moment,” Political Theology 20, no. 574-594 (2019).

[10] Bonhoeffer’s resistance thinking focused on the church as the engine and agent of defiance—at least initially. This did not (necessarily) mean churchgoers marching in the streets to protest fascism. Rather it meant resistance through the word (consistent with Reformation’s insistence on ‘God’s word alone,’ see van der Westhuizen, 2018), through concrete obedience to God’s grace and Christ’s calling. Bonhoeffer’s involvement with family members and others in the plot to assassinate Hitler started brewing early, but his doubts and misgivings peeled away only reluctantly as he realised that all other, more ordinary forms of resistance had been exhausted. See: M. DeJonge, Bonhoeffer’s Reception of Luther (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), H. van der Westhuizen, “‘Whatever Became of That Earlier Time of Grace?’ Luther, Bonhoeffer and the Quincentennial,” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 74, no. 1 (2018), M. Mawson, “Lutheran or Lutherish? Framing Bonhoeffer’s Reception of Luther,” Modern Theology 35, no. 2 (2019), S. Haynes, The Battle for Bonhoeffer: Debating Discipleship in an Age of Trump (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018).

[11] E. van ’t Slot, ed., De Politieke Bonhoeffer: Kerk En Overheid Toen En Nu (Utrecht: Uitgeverij Boekencentrum, 2018).

[12] J. Rehwaldt-Alexander, “Avoiding Cheap Grace: Luther and the Need for Moral Despair,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 45, no. 4 (2006).

[13] Authors who lived through the same times as Bonhoeffer have much to reflect on in this regard, for example H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Third Edition) (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1967), E. Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941).

[14] To be sure, this is not the case for all of Bonhoeffer’s ethical thinking, nor is it as much the case for Bonhoeffer’s engagements with social theory (such as in Sanctorum Communio) or phenomenology (like in Akt und Sein). More modern figures such as Hegel and Nietzsche show up there in addition to traces of Luther. But Bonhoeffer cites no theologian in his ontological commitment to the relationship between God and humans as often as he does Luther—some 870 times, and basically always approvingly. See DeJonge, P. Frick, Understanding Bonhoeffer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), T. Greggs, “Pessimistic Universalism: Rethinking the Wider Hope with Bonhoeffer and Barth,” Modern Theology 26, no. 4 (2010).

[15] R. Haight, A. Pach, and A. Avila Kaminski, eds., Grace and Gratitude: Spirituality in Martin Luther (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022).

[16] First the gift, then the obligation. H. Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Vol. 1) (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1966). Page 42.

[17] J. F. Keenan, Moral Wisdom: Lessons and Texts from the Catholic Tradition (Lanham, MD: Sheed and Ward, 2004).

[18] Bonhoeffer. Page 45 and 50.

[19] Bonhoeffer’s account of cheap grace stands in close—if critical—relation to Barth’s neo-orthodox emphasis on the sovereignty and freedom of divine grace. Like Barth, Bonhoeffer rejected any natural theology that would ground ethics, politics, or religious authority apart from God’s self-revelation in Christ. Grace, for both theologians, is God’s unmerited, interruptive act, not a human achievement. Yet Bonhoeffer observed that, in practice, an emphasis on divine sovereignty could be misappropriated in ways that evacuated human responsibility from historical and political life.

[20] At the heart of this sit (among other propositions) Luther’s theses 19 and 23 which separate theologians of glory (who use human terms and get it all mixed up as a result) from theologians of the cross. A theologian of glory is speaking of God in terms that live on our human side of the ontological divide. This disposition is marked by our confidence and even hubris—that we can understand who God is and how God is present and active in the world by us reaching out to Him with our thinking, our concepts and terms, our language; our assumptions and resources. A theologian of the cross acknowledges that reality is God’s reality (theologia crucis quod res est); that any genuine knowledge we have of God is tied to and revealed through God’s Word. God, as Barth said, is indeed ‘wholly other:’ we can know Him only on His initiative, terms and revelation.

[21] Phenomena of drift into failure have been studied in various contexts—analytically both complexity science and various sociological theories have helped illuminate the mechanisms by which normalisation of deviance and practical drift happen. See for instance S. W. A. Dekker, Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2011), S. G. Mandis, What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider’s Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences. (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2013), S. A. Snook, Friendly Fire: The Accidental  Shootdown of Us Black Hawks over Northern Iraq (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), D. Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at Nasa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/uchi051/95039858.html

http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/uchi051/95039858.html

http://www.h-net.org/review/hrev-a0a3o8-aa.

[22] Rehwaldt-Alexander. Page 379. Sociologist Emile Durkheim was one of the first to theorise this problem adequately: Emile Durkheim, On Morality and Society; Selected Writings, The Heritage of Sociology (Chicago,: University of Chicago Press, 1973).

[23] S. G. Dempster, Micah (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2017).

[24] C. Holmes, “‘The Indivisible Whole of God’s Reality’: On the Agency of Jesus in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 12, no. 3 (2010).

[25] D. K. Williams, The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2021).

[26] Bonhoeffer was executed on the charge of treason in April 1945. It took the German courts until 1996 to overturn it. Whereas this demonstrated that Germans had come to the conclusion who the real patriot was, it can be argued that removing the charge also weakens Bonhoeffer’s witness: if what he was doing (and risking his life for) got deemed to be lawful after all, then what was so special about his theological and humane poise?

[27] That reality is Christ’s reality—the only one existing, the one we all inhabit, where Christ takes hold of humans in the midst of their lives D. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Wiederstand Und Ergebung) (London: SCM Press, 1953). This-worldliness was Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of what it meant to respond in faith to the presence of Christ in the midst of life with all its pain, failures and perplexities; and where there is no fixed formula for showing compassion or plotting resistance against evil. Brocker.. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Wiederstand Und Ergebung).

[28] In return he encountered vicious opposition (and eventually martyrdom) at the hands of people who identified chiefly as Christian and law-abidingR. L. Williams, “Christ-Centered Concreteness: The Christian Activism of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr.,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 53, no. 3 (2014), S. Plonz, “‘The View from Below:’ Some Approaches from a German Perspective” (paper presented at the Bonhoeffer Lectures on Public Ethics, Washington, DC, 11-13 October, 11-13 October, 2004).. Plonz.

[29] D. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (Augsburg: Augsburg Books, 2003).Yes, Villafañe admits, “being faithful to God’s call to Christian discipleship is costly business!” E. Villafane, Beyond Cheap Grace: A Call to Radical Discipleship, Incarnation, and Justice (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006). Page 1. See: Holmes.

[30] Cheap grace empties the relationship between Christ and humans of that call for discipleship. It renders Christ into a symbolic figure whose cross no longer interrupts the abuses of power, the inflicting of violence, or exclusion of fellow humans—and into a figure who might even be deployed in the name of a particular (putatively Christian) cause. R. J. Sider, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why Are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the World? (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2005).

[31] T. F. Torrance, God and Rationality (Oxford, UK: Oxford Scholarship, 2000).

[32] M. Luther, Disputatio Pro Declaratione Virtutis Indulgentiarum, Project Gutenberg (Champaign, IL: 1517).

[33] Bonhoeffer wasn’t the first to recognise these risks and call them out. Methodist preacher William Booth (1829-1912), founder of the Salvation Army, had similarly feared for the future of the church. He saw as its chief danger a failure to emphasise personal holiness and life transformation, with people counting on forgiveness without repentance, conducting politics without God, and seeking salvation without any effort at humanitarianism, moral self-regeneration or achieving social justice.

[34] Holmes. Page 293.

[35] P. Nullens, “Luther and Bonhoeffer and the Social Ethical Meaning of Justication by Faith Alone,” International Review of Economics 66 (2019). Page 279.

[36] D. Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). Page 221.

[37] Gagné, and Shanahan. Page 53.

[38] Wehner. Research on high-profile incidents, such as Kirk’s assassination, show that majorities in the U.S. perceive harsh political rhetoric as a contributor to political violence. This subtle but consequential dynamic resembles historical patterns where rhetoric that marries authoritarian leadership with fundamentalist religiosity lowers moral barriers to hostility, even without explicit calls for violence.

[39] Gagné, and Shanahan, Trangerud. Page 52.

[40] E. Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2020).

[41] Willenbrink. The in-group is absolved while outsiders are rendered expendable. In this way, cheap grace operates not merely as theological error, but as an ethical mind-twist.

[42] Mauldin, M. Mawson, “The Weakness of the Word and the Reality of God: Luther and Bonhoeffer on the Cross of Discipleship,” Studies in Christian Ethics 31, no. 4 (2018), Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Wiederstand Und Ergebung).

[43] J. Yang, “Faith and Obedience in Bonhoeffer and the Communicatio Idiomatum,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 60 (2021).

[44] M. U. Walker, Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

[45] A. C. Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1999), J. J. Kish-Gephart et al., “Silenced by Fear: The Nature, Sources, and Consequences of Fear at Work,” Research in Organizational Behavior 29 (2009), A. C. Edmondson, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2019), S. W. A. Dekker, and A. Edmondson, “Psychological Safety,” Restorative Just Culture in Practice: Implementation and Evaluation  (2022).