The Cheap Word, Cheap Grace & Freedom

The Cost, and now THE COST

Yes! this site is named " The Cost of Prime Ministership" after Dietrich Bonhoeffer's great work "The Cost of Discipleship"

In "The Cost of Discipleship" Bonhoeffer writes about the modern cheapness of idealogy, spirituality and political being as Cheap Grace.

What we heard and saw in Kevin Rudd's acceptance speech seemed to come without cost, to be all about tolerance and affordability.

But as real grace has a cost, and fair dinkum truth has a cost, our spiritual and political freedom has a cost. We aquiesce to cheap words at our peril.

Something seems to have us by the balls! Is it comfort that smothers us at the gonads?

Is it 'fun' that renders us less than endowed with the high freedoms for which our ancestors broke their shackles? Is it the addication to Australian Idols? the seduction of reality TV? or our joining in the emasculating addiction to the cult of celebrities? When we want everything to be fun we become slaves.

As speech hearers we need to be more than blather bathers. If we consent to a political failure to speak with clear principle, to nail definite acts in terms of policy, to make clear statements of concrete differentiation, lulled into agreement with the soft-option toys of policy which lean on the verandahs of centrism, ease and tolerance, then we consent to the cheapening of language, the cheapening of the freedoms and graces which have driven the truth-telling of fair dinkumness in Australia, yes, even in the politics of Australia.

Bonhoeffer writes in " The Cost of Discipleship"

"Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian "conception" of God." p.45

" 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. "All for sin could not atone." Well, then, let the Christian live like the rest of the world, let him model himself on the world’s standards in every sphere of life, and not presumptuously aspire to live a different life under grace from his old life under sin…." p.46