One of the most influential books in my life outside of the Bible was Dietrich Bonhoeffer's, The Cost of Discipleship. In it, Bonhoeffer explains that Christ's call to discipleship is in fact a call to faith. All believers are disciples. The only reaction a believer could truly have after receiving the free grace of God is to give up everything to follow Christ. Any less of a response indicates a lack of saving faith. The following article promotes the "cheap grace" which Bonhoeffer warned about. The church I attended my freshman year in college at A&M taught a version of this gospel. This gospel is altogether different from what the Bible teaches and what Christianity has historically taught for the past two thousand years.
The proponents of this "gospel" base the meaning of passages where the literal meaning seems to clearly indicate hell, to instead a "casting out" of believers during the Millennial Kingdom. They base this premise on the assumption that only believers were present when Jesus was teaching these truths. However, we know that this was never the case during Jesus' teaching ministry. Judas was an unbeliever and was present at the Sermon on the Mount and the other sermons Jesus preached. There were probably many other "false disciples" (like Judas) in the crowd when Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount (just like there are many false disciples in the church today), and Jesus knew that. His warnings about Hell were not for the believer, but for the unbeliever who had all the external qualities of a true Christian but lacked true faith. We know that Judas went to Hell, as do other false disciples. So to say that Jesus is referring to "hell" as a punishment for believers in the Millennial Kingdom based on this premise is wrong.
The proponents of this "gospel" interpret "work-oriented" passages in Matthew differently from their most natural meaning so as to try and maintain their view of "free grace." They assert that these passages apply to the believer in the Millennial Kingdom instead of the nonbeliever in Hell. There is not one place in Scripture where I have seen it stated that believers that do not obey Christ will be cast out of the Millennial Kingdom to be refined later for Heaven. In fact, I do not see anywhere in Scripture where someone can claim to be a Christian and not obey Christ's commands. John said, "And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says "I know him" but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in Him (1 John 2:3-4)." Furthermore, Paul said that for believers he was sure that "neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 8:38-39)." So why would believers be separated from Christ in the Millennial Kingdom? Paul said, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him (Eph. 1:3-4)." So if believers have been given every spiritual blessing in Christ in the heavenly places, then why would a believer be cast aside in the Millennial Kingdom to a place of "weeping and gnashing of teeth?" That doesn't sound like a spiritual blessing. Again, in Colossians Paul writes, "We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven (Col. 3:3-5)." So how could believers have the assurance of a hope for their future in heaven if there is the possibility that they will be separated from God and be in a state of mourning for a thousand years? That doesn't sound hopeful.
Jesus did not teach a works salvation in passages such as Matthew 5 and Luke 9. He was teaching salvation by faith alone through grace alone (and this true faith does work and does give up everything for the sake of the gospel). So the proponents of this "free grace Gospel" are working with a hermeneutic that is skewed by trying to interpret what Jesus called true faith into something else entirely. The outcome of this hermeneutic is that all of Jesus' calls to discipleship (which are a call to faith) are understood as a call to strive for rewards and a position in His coming Millennial Kingdom. The natural outcome of this is that the gospel is reduced down to the point where faith is equated with merely believing the facts of the gospel intellectually. This gospel is called the "Kingdom Gospel" or "Free Grace" by its proponents. Dietrich Bonhoeffer simply called it "Cheap Grace." It makes Christ's high call for us to pick up our "cross daily and follow Him" a call for rewards and not a call for saving faith. It tries to make grace less than what it really is by focusing on an assurance of salvation instead of the means by which we enter into a relationship with God. In claiming to promote the true meaning of grace, grace becomes nothing more than a ticket to heaven instead of the life-giving, life-altering sanctification that it is. I'm simply saying that true faith, the type of faith that Jesus talked about, gives up everything to follow Him. In the following of Christ, and in knowing Christ and His sufferings we really begin to understand the greatness and the richness of the grace that we have been given in Christ! The grace that Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked about!
