What is the difference between cheap grace and costly grace?

Question 07064

Cheap grace is a phrase coined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to describe grace that has been stripped of any consequence, and costly grace is his term for the real thing. The distinction is genuinely useful, and it also needs handling carefully, because it can be pushed until it turns grace into a purchase.

Let me set out what Bonhoeffer meant, why the phrase caught on, where I find it helpful, and where I would want to be more careful than the phrase sometimes allows.

What cheap grace means

Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship that cheap grace is “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.” His summary line is that it is “grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

He was writing in Germany in the 1930s, watching a state church that could pronounce forgiveness over anything and confront nothing. Cheap grace in that setting was not an abstract theological error. It was the mechanism by which a church made itself harmless while a nation went mad.

Costly grace, by contrast, “is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.” Bonhoeffer paid for that sentence with his own life in 1945.

So the phrase carries weight because of where it came from. It is not a theoretical distinction made in a study; it was made under pressure and tested to the end.

Bonhoeffer put it sharply: cheap grace is “grace we bestow on ourselves.” That phrase is the sting of the whole idea. It is not grace received from God at all but a comfortable arrangement we make with ourselves and then label with a Christian word.

Why the phrase is useful

It names something real. There is a version of Christianity, common in comfortable countries, which offers forgiveness as a product and asks nothing whatever of the recipient. It produces congregations full of people who have made a decision and never made a disciple, and it has done immense damage.

Cheap grace also shows up in the way sin is handled. Where nothing is ever confronted, where church discipline has quietly disappeared, where the Lord’s Table is spread without any thought of self examination, the practical message is that what Jesus did on the cross cost nothing much and changes nothing much.

And it shows in the vocabulary. When forgiveness is described as God overlooking things, or as sin not really mattering to Him, we have drifted a very long way from a cross. Cheap grace is not generous. It is dismissive of what forgiveness actually required.

So I use the phrase, and I use it about churches and preachers rather than about individuals whose hearts I cannot see.

The phrase also has a way of exposing our own preaching. It is easy to announce forgiveness and never mention what forgiveness cost, easy to invite people to Jesus and never mention that He is Lord. Cheap grace of that kind is rarely deliberate. It is what happens when we try to make the message easier to accept.

Where the phrase needs care

Here is my caution, and I hold it firmly. Grace is free to the sinner. It cost God everything and it costs us nothing, because if it cost us anything at all it would not be grace, as Romans 11:6 insists: “if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace.”

If cheap grace is understood to mean grace that is free, then the phrase is being misused. The dying thief received grace at no cost to himself whatever, and nobody would call his salvation cheap. What made it costly was what it cost Jesus, not what it cost him.

The danger is a subtle slide in which discipleship is smuggled back in as a condition of salvation rather than a consequence of it. Bonhoeffer himself was not always careful here, and some who use his phrase are considerably less careful than he was.

So I would put it this way. Grace is free and it is not cheap. Free means you cannot pay for it. Cheap means it did not cost anything, and it cost the Son of God His life.

There is a related distortion worth naming. Some people hear the phrase and conclude that assurance itself is the problem, as though a settled confidence in forgiveness must lead to carelessness. My experience runs the other way. The believers I know who are most sure of God are the ones most willing to face their own sin, because they are not frightened of what they will find.

What Scripture actually says about the danger

Paul faced the cheap grace objection head on. Romans 6:1 raises it exactly: “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” His answer is not to add conditions to grace but to point out that the question misunderstands what has happened. “How can we who died to sin still live in it?”

That is the New Testament pattern throughout. The remedy for cheap grace is never to make grace conditional. It is to explain what grace actually does to a person. Someone who has genuinely been made alive does not want to go on living in the graveyard.

Jude 4 warns about people “who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality,” and 1 Peter 2:16 tells believers not to use their freedom “as a cover up for evil.” The abuse of grace is a real and named danger, and the apostolic response is instruction rather than the withdrawal of assurance.

So Scripture takes the concern behind cheap grace entirely seriously while refusing the solution that many people reach for. I have set that out further in the article on easy believism.

Insecure Christians hide. Secure Christians confess. If you want to see the difference between cheap grace and the real thing, watch what happens in a church when somebody fails publicly, and notice whether the room moves towards them or away.

Free but not cheap

The Greek word for grace, charis, means favour freely given, and the whole point of the word group is that it is unearned. Whenever we attach conditions to it we are working against the vocabulary itself. Cheap grace is a criticism of shallow preaching, and it should never become a criticism of free forgiveness.

Paul goes so far in Romans 4:4-5 as to say that “to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due,” and that God “justifies the ungodly.” Justifying the ungodly is a scandalous phrase, and any use of the cheap grace critique that makes us flinch at it has gone too far.

The NET Bible notes on Romans 6 are helpful on how Paul answers the abuse of grace without ever qualifying it, which is the model I would want any preacher to follow.

Grace and discipleship

Discipleship really is costly. Jesus said in Luke 14:27 that whoever does not bear his own cross and come after Him cannot be His disciple, and He told people to count the cost before starting. None of that is soft, and none of it is a payment for salvation either.

The cost is the cost of following, not the price of entry. A person is saved by trusting Jesus and then spends a lifetime discovering what that trust costs. Those two things are constantly collapsed, and collapsing them is how legalism gets in through the back door.

There is also a real assessment of the believer’s life at the judgement seat in 2 Corinthians 5:10, where what we have done with our years is examined for reward. That is where the seriousness of discipleship lands biblically, and it is not the same as putting salvation in doubt.

It is also worth remembering who Bonhoeffer was writing to. His readers were not people agonising over assurance. They were comfortable churchgoers in a country sliding into atrocity, and the book was aimed at complacency rather than at anxiety. Applied to a tender conscience it does damage the author never intended.

That is generally true of prophetic writing. It is medicine for the comfortable and poison for the frightened, and knowing which of those two you are is half the work of reading it well.

So, now what?

Ask what your Christianity has actually cost you in the last year. Not to earn anything, and not to feel wretched, but because a faith that has never cost anything may not have been asked much of, and that is worth noticing.

At the same time, refuse to let anyone put a price on your acceptance. It was paid in full, and cheap grace is a criticism of preaching that empties the cross, never a reason to doubt the sufficiency of what happened there. Which of those two errors are you nearer to?

But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace.

Romans 11:6, ESV

Whatever else the phrase does, let it drive you back to the cross rather than into your own performance. That is where the cost was actually paid.

Bonhoeffer was right that discipleship costs. He was also right that what it purchases was never for sale.