What is the difference between cheap grace and costly grace?
Question 7064
In 1937, the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer published Nachfolge, translated into English as The Cost of Discipleship. Writing against a German church that had largely surrendered its integrity in the face of National Socialism, Bonhoeffer drew a distinction that has echoed through Christian thinking ever since. Cheap grace, he argued, is the preaching of forgiveness without repentance, the granting of absolution without confession, grace without the cross. Costly grace is the grace that calls a person to follow Jesus, that cost God His Son and demands, in response, genuine self-denial and obedience. Whatever reservations one might reasonably hold about aspects of Bonhoeffer’s broader theological framework, this particular distinction maps directly onto concerns the New Testament itself raises.
Cheap Grace: What It Looks Like
Cheap grace is the offer of forgiveness with no genuine reckoning with what sin is or what it cost. It is the proclamation of a grace so permissive that repentance becomes optional, obedience becomes secondary, and the cross becomes a theological transaction that carries no claim on daily life. It says, in effect, that a person may receive God’s forgiveness as a standing provision without any genuine turning of the will, any serious change of direction, or any cost to the self.
Jesus addresses this tendency with considerable directness. Matthew 7:21-23 records His warning that many will appeal to their association with Him, their religious activity, even their miracles, and hear the devastating response: “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.” The issue is not sinlessness but the absence of a genuine relationship marked by obedience to the Father’s will. Luke 14:25-33, where Jesus speaks of counting the cost before following Him, presupposes that discipleship has a cost, and that a person who has not reckoned with that cost has not genuinely followed Him. A builder who begins without calculating whether he can finish is not admired; he is an illustration of the wrong approach to commitment.
A Necessary Clarification
Before going further, it is important to be clear about what this does not mean. Grace is, by definition, unearned and undeserved. Salvation is not achieved through effort, sacrifice, or the quality of one’s repentance. Ephesians 2:8-9 is not negotiable: “by grace you have been saved through faith… not a result of works.” The warning against cheap grace is not a backdoor introduction of works-righteousness. A person who brings their best moral efforts to God as a condition for His acceptance has not grasped grace at all; they have replaced it with a transaction. The Reformers were right, and the New Testament is clear: it is Christ’s merit, not ours, that justifies.
The distinction, properly understood, is not about the ground of salvation but about the nature of genuine faith. A faith that produces no change, that carries no cost, that makes no demands on the self, and leaves the person’s life essentially undisturbed is not the faith the New Testament describes. James 2:14-26 makes this with characteristic bluntness: faith without works is dead. Abraham’s faith and Rahab’s faith were genuine because they expressed themselves in action consistent with what was believed.
Costly Grace: The Grace That Transforms
Costly grace is the same grace, properly understood. It is grace freely given, entirely unearned, not dependent on human performance, the very grace that Ephesians 2:8 describes. What makes it “costly” in Bonhoeffer’s usage is not that we must pay something to obtain it, but that genuine reception of it costs the self. It involves the kind of ongoing self-denial Jesus describes in Luke 9:23: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” The cross is not merely a symbol; it is an instrument of execution, and Jesus uses it as an image for the deliberate putting to death of self-will.
Paul’s language in Romans 6:1-4 captures this precisely. Having argued in Romans 5 that grace is more than sufficient to cover sin, he anticipates the obvious question: “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” His response is not gentle: “By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?” The person who is genuinely united to Christ in His death and resurrection has something decisive happen to them at conversion. Grace does not leave a person unchanged; it brings them into a new reality.
The Practical Test
1 John provides what amounts to a series of practical tests for whether grace has genuinely been received. The person who says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar (1 John 2:4). The person who claims to be in the light but hates their brother is still in darkness (1 John 2:9). This is not perfectionism; 1 John also says that if we claim to have no sin, we deceive ourselves (1 John 1:8). It is the direction of travel that matters, the genuine orientation of a life that has been genuinely turned by grace, not a performance standard to be met for continued acceptance.
The person whose profession of faith produces no evidence of changed affections, no genuine sorrow over sin, no love for God or for fellow believers, and no growth in any direction over an extended period of time is in a different category from the genuine believer who struggles, fails, and returns. The former has reason to examine whether they ever genuinely received anything at all.
So, now what?
The call is not to earn your salvation but to examine whether you have genuinely received it. Grace that has actually been received transforms the one who receives it. That transformation is neither instantaneous nor smooth, and it involves the normal mess of genuine Christian life. But it is real, and its absence over the long term is a legitimate concern. Take the grace you have received seriously enough to follow the One who gave it.
“For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” Galatians 5:13