CHEAP GRACE: Disengaging from the Church of Personal Peace and Prosperity

A sad fact about modern day Christian faith is the general lack of interest in those disciples throughout modern history who gave so much of themselves and yet remain so little known. A perfect example is the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who defied the Nazi regime during World War II and paid for it with his life. Yet even on the day of his hanging, he was comforting other prisoners with little or no faith, providing faithful witness to the very end. He had opportunities to escape from Germany, and was often urged by friends and family to do so, yet he remained, fully aware of the possible fate that awaited him. There was nothing weak or uncertain about his faith or how he practiced it.

On a very personal level, Bonhoeffer is a hero of mine, and I’m a person with very, very few heroes. Bonhoeffer understood and took to heart the words of the Apostle James (1:22–25, 2:14–26) who spoke of faith without works being dead faith, a useless faith. Without action, without striving to be followers of Christ, without attempting to walk as He did, we show no faith at all. Our faith cannot be made complete without works. We can speak of Godly things and claim that our faith is strong, but if we do not follow Christ and engage in the work God so clearly calls us to do, our words are hollow and empty. We’ve accepted the gift of salvation and eternal life, yet rejected the call to put our trust in Him by doing the work He calls us to do.

I should note here that this lack of action doesn’t negate our gift of salvation, but it certainly cheapens it. This problem is never more evident than in American Christianity today, where so much of what passes for Christianity appears, at least on the surface, to be inward-looking and self-seeking. I have made it a point in my life to read and reread the Gospels and the Epistles several times a year, and I learn more and more with each reading. What concerns me is that so many Christians I know are becoming increasingly enamored with the new prosperity gospel, a gospel that is so at odds with the Gospel I’ve come to know.

Turn on any Christian TV channel these days and you’ll find a good deal of their programming devoted to preachers who tell us about giving as a means to get back, telling us to invest money in God and He’ll return it to us a hundredfold, telling us that we need to sow more money into their ministries so that God can bless us in return with material rewards. And if it doesn’t happen that way? Well, your faith just isn’t strong enough...so keep praying, and keep sending that money.

And that’s the biggest catch of all. Not a single one of these shows ever suggest that you just sow that money anywhere, to any worthy cause. No, it must come to them, so that they can bless it, pray over it, and ensure a good return on your godly cash investment. Furthermore, if what these people say is true, how can they account for devout Christians throughout the world who suffer oppression, hunger, poverty, rape and genocide? Do they suffer these things because of weak faith? Or because they don't have enough money to sow into false ministries? Apparently, people who take this self-centered approach don't consider anything outside of their own field of view.

This particularly warped view of Christian faith (among many) is what Bonhoeffer calls “cheap grace,” or grace without discipleship. The whole point of this warped faith is simply to confess your belief in Jesus and give as much money as you can to these online ministries, and in return God will provide you with perfect health and perfect wealth. This isn’t remotely true, of course, and isn’t to be found anywhere in Scripture without taking it wildly out of context. In fact, when we read the Gospels and the Epistles as a cohesive body of work, we're repeatedly told that we may have to endure great hardships and undergo tremendous suffering, no matter how devout our faith. Furthermore, Christ calls us to serve others first, not to seek for ourselves, and we'll find our just rewards in Heaven.

As Bonhoeffer writes in his classic The Cost of Discipleship, cheap grace “is the deadly enemy of the Church. The essence of this grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing. Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything, they say, and so everything can remain as it was before. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow upon ourselves; cheap grace is grace without discipleship.”

It is costly grace we must seek, Bonhoeffer tells us. “Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. Costly grace is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him. It is costly grace because it costs a man his worldly life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. And above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His Son, because "we were bought at a price," and what has cost God cannot be cheap for us. This grace is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ; yet it is still grace because Jesus tells us "My yoke is easy and my burden is light."

I recently picked up Jim Wallis’s new book The Great Awakening, and read a short dust-jacket review on the back by Bono, lead singer of U2. He coined a phrase that struck a chord with me, and perfectly described a trend I see growing ever more prevalent in our American Christian society...the tendency to confess our belief in God as a means to attain personal peace and prosperity while largely turning our backs on the needs of the poor and oppressed of the world, those who Jesus calls "the least of these." That won't cut it, says Bono. His exact quote reads as follows: "I had always been a skeptic of the church of personal peace and prosperity...of righteous people standing in a holy huddle while the world rages outside the stained glass. But I’ve learned that there are many people of the cloth who are also in the world—from debt cancellation to the fight against AIDS, to human rights, they are on the march."

These people Bono speaks of (Wallis and others) take the key phrase of the Lord’s Prayer very seriously. Our salvation, our admittance to the Kingdom of God, is only part of God’s will, a will that must be done on earth as well as in Heaven. How easy it is to overlook that part. As members of the Kingdom, we’re God’s hands here on earth. We are here on this planet as flesh-and-blood human beings to do His will.

And there it is. It’s really that simple. We were bought at a price, and although the gift of salvation is free, God calls us to follow Him through the example of Christ, calls us to walk into the world and transform it, and not walk away from it and just hang around for our salvation when it's over. In Isaiah 58, God tells us to do away with the yoke of oppression, and to spend ourselves on behalf of the hungry, the naked and the poor, and He will raise us up and cover our backs. Christ repeats these commands again in the New Testament, in Matthew 25 (as noted above).

In thanking God for our salvation, we should also ask Him to best show us how to serve. I’ve heard so many Christian friends lament to me that they don’t know what God wants them to do, and they look surprised (and possibly annoyed) when I tell them that I know exactly what He wants them to do. God has a personal plan for all of us, but He also has a "group plan," and it’s spelled out very clearly. We’re called to discipleship, called to serve, and how we answer the call to do God’s will on earth as in Heaven, will determine how well we realize our faith through Godly works. We can start by stepping away from our "holy huddles" and refusing to settle for cheap grace.