Last week, I was pleasantly greeted by a piece in Chimes by my classmate Robert Hine, who responded to one of my previous articles, titled What is church?, with an excellent article of his own, Hope and grace. While the article in its entirety is a thought-provoking, well-written work by Hine, I was left pondering something in particular that he referenced at the end of the article — “cheap grace.” Specifically, I was reflecting on how Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s concept of cheap grace applies to us here at Calvin University. 

Bonhoeffer himself, in The Cost of Discipleship, makes a distinction between “cheap grace” and “costly grace.” Simply put, cheap grace is preaching forgiveness without expecting repentance, being baptized and yet rejecting church discipline or reciting the confessions on Sundays and forgetting them for the rest of the week. There is no cost involved. There is really no Christ involved. Costly grace, on the other hand, is a call to follow Christ and deny yourself — all the way to the cross if necessary. Costly grace confronts us with the real demands of the gospel, and leaves no room for things such as perverse yet culturally fashionable ideologies.

I wonder if we at Calvin are increasingly tempted by cheap grace. Many want a grace that affirms rather than reforms, a grace that comforts without correction, a grace that celebrates our desires — however questionable they may be. That sort of grace is easy, palatable and leaves us very much within our comfort zone. However, as one of my professors often says, “If your religion doesn’t make you uncomfortable, it ceases to become that religion. It is now a religion of you.” How right he is. Here at Calvin, we often hear the phrase, “You belong.” If “belonging” requires little more than affirmation of the self as it already is, without a call to “die to self,” our grace has become cheap. 

Costly grace is different. It insists that Christ loves us as we are but never leaves us as we are. It is not the job of Calvin to soften the edge of discipleship or to bend the demands of the gospel so that we might avoid offense. Rather, Calvin must be the kind of community that proclaims and lives costly grace. It must be a place where repentance and renewal are real and modeled, where the cross is not avoided but where it is embraced. 

At Calvin, we proclaim Martin Luther’s “Sola Gratia” — grace alone. Yet, if we are honest, we must ask ourselves if we are content with grace that does not show itself in our works — Luther surely would not have been. We must ask if we will dare to proclaim and embody the grace that costs us everything — our comfort, our desires, our self-definition, sometimes even our lives — in order that we might really gain Christ.

Bonhoeffer once wrote, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” That death is the condition of true life. For Calvin, the question is whether we will seek that costly grace, or settle for the easy, cheap imitation.Luke 14: 34-35 reads, “Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is neither fit for the soil nor the manure pile; it is thrown out. Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.” 

Let us hear.