Nachfolge (The Cost of Discipleship)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer developed the book in lectures to candidates for the ministry of the Confessing Church at Zingst and Finkenwalde from 1935, as the publisher’s account of the critical edition relates. Its opening chapter says that cheap grace, forgiveness taken as a principle that leaves life unchanged, is the deadly enemy of the church, and that grace is costly because it calls a person to follow Jesus Christ. Seven years later, in a letter from prison of 21 July 1944, he wrote that he still stood by the book but now saw its dangers. See the Execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.