Which Comes First?

Sunday afternoon I was flying on United to Jacksonville, when I thought to myself, "I can read a couple of chapters of The Cost of Discipleship before we land!" Well. Reading this book in your quiet study in the privacy of your home is one situation. However reading this book as you head south from the dreary cold on vacation is quite another. It is difficult and to be frank, tedious at times.

I was actually tempted to close the book but I looked out of the window at the clouds and thought of my mother when I was a young girl in college reading Paradise Lost by John Milton, bemoaning the fact that I found the material to be less than interesting. My mother, who would cringe because I was going through a Maeve Binchey phase at that time in my life, gave me her exacting stare over her cup of tea quipped sharply, "Well perhaps, Kathryn, not every piece of literature in this world was written for your personal enjoyment."

Well. For those of you reading along Chapter 2, in classic form, made me think of this conversation throughout the chapter. Dietrich introduces the discourse by talking to us about the call of the disciples and breaks down for us the act of the call. He begins with Levi's call (Mark 2.14) and points out that Levi receives no praise, no recognition for his decision to follow Christ. He is simply obedient to the Son of God. He also contrasts this with the law where one does an act in adherence. He says simply, "Christ calls, the disciple follows."

Bonhoeffer then suggests that the obedience to the call must come first and it is then the faith that follows, not the other way around. In other words, he seems to say; look, you can't say you 'have faith' in an abstract ideal out of context with your life. It does not work that way. He suggests that the call from Christ is not a mental academic exercise, but a union of the act of obedience in your life in concert with faith. He uses as the example the parable of the rich young man (Matt: 19 16-22)He argues that the young man is pandering to Christ and perhaps using him as an academic exercise like any good student who wanted to have an intellectual conversation with their teacher might. He contrasts this with Christ's encounter with the lawyer  and the Good Samaritan parable, where the lawyer instead is trying to trap Christ, and Christ turn the table and says "you are the neighbour".

So, what is my overview of this chapter? It was not written for my personal enjoyment! Instead it was written to make me think about the difference of thinking about following Christ in the abstract versus actually doing the hard work that involves truly following the call of Christ. I mean isn't this something we see all of the time in our feel good, me me me society? Me talking to a high school student last month: What do you want to do with your life? "I want to be a writer?" Yes. And what do you think about Earnest Hemingway? F. Scott Fitzgerald?  " I don't read those kinds of books Ms. Gemmer. Those people were drunks and they are boring. It was stupid writing."

I think that this attitude is exactly what Dietrich Bonhoeffer was trying to approach in this first chapter. He is saying that a first step is to put yourself in church, or reading the bible, or meditating on a long walk. He suggests that following the call must happen with the faith, and unfortunately that an act of obedience, an act of discipleship does not always involve our own personal entertainment. It is hard work.