Intellectual Butchery
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Butchered by Kevin D. Roberts PhD, President of The Heritage Foundation
“Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks' wares…”
“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” -Dietrich Bonhoeffer1
The Cost of Discipleship 1937
I took some time tonight to reread the Heritage Foundation’s president Kevin D. Roberts’ foreword for the Project 2025 Mandate For Leadership: The Conservative promise.
Now I have read quite a few pieces of writing by Roberts and some interviews he gave in my efforts to understand the how, whys, and whats of his thinking so as to be able to discern the true battle objectives of the White Christian nationalist movement as they are coded into the Project 2025 agenda.
When it comes to protestant biblical Christian practices and theologies I am most definitely not a stranger to the worldviews of this uniquely American demographic, having spent many years during the younger adult married years of my life in fellowship with more than a handful of churches and their members with welcoming arms on their parts.
So tonight when I got to page eleven wherein Roberts sets forth his, and by extension, all who support Project 2025 and its numerous board member organizations, visions and plans for their “PROMISE #3: [to] DEFEND OUR NATION’S SOVEREIGNTY, BORDERS, AND BOUNTY AGAINST GLOBAL THREATS” this time I had a visceral reaction to his grossly distorted misappropriation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s well known concept of “Cheap Grace”.
Roberts in his characteristic manner is leaning into a textual diatribe against the evil leftists and equally evil globalist elites, as usual always conveniently omitting the fact that by definition he too is an elite individual, when he produces the following piece of intellectual butchery:
Like the progressive Woodrow Wilson a century ago, the woke Left today seeks a world, bound by global treaties they write, in which they exercise dictatorial powers over all nations without being subject to democratic accountability.
That’s why today’s progressive Left so cavalierly supports open borders despite the lawless humanitarian crisis their policy created along America’s southern border. They seek to purge the very concept of the nation-state from the American ethos, no matter how much crime increases or resources drop for schools and hospitals or wages decrease for the working class. Open-borders activism is a classic example of what the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”—publicly promoting one’s own virtue without risking any personal inconvenience. Indeed, the only direct impact of open borders on pro-open borders elites is that the constant flow of illegal immigration suppresses the wages of their housekeepers, landscapers, and busboys.
“Cheap grace” aptly describes the Left’s love affair with environmental extremism. Those who suffer most from the policies environmentalism would have us enact are the aged, poor, and vulnerable. It is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue. (Pg.11)2 [Emphasis added, RJR]
As someone who has enjoyed reading Bonhoeffer’s works for his unique perspective and has an appreciation and respect for his sincerity, and struggles he underwent when trying to reconcile reality with religion, I understand how Bonhoeffer intended “Cheap Grace” to be understood.
What follows are some of Bonhoeffer’s own words about Cheap Grace:
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting to-day for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace is represented as the Church’s in¬ exhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost!
The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing. Since the cost was infinite, the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite. What would grace be if it were not cheap?
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. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins. The Church which holds the correct doctrine of grace has, it is supposed, ipso facto a part in that grace. In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin. Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God. 3
Roberts conflation of modern-day activism efforts with an orthodox Lutheran Pastor’s call to live compassionate lives that mirror the “historic” renditions of the story of a carpenter from Galilee who sacrificed his own very human passions upon the altar of service to his fellow human beings, is a far cry away from what Pastor Bonhoeffer taught.
Interestingly enough while Bonhoeffer was known to be a pacifist which was in keeping with his personal beliefs and faith, having endured the rise of Nazism by remaining focused and committed to his work as a Pastor and a teaching-seminarian of homiletics among other subjects, in time as the war expanded beyond the European continent he found himself enjoined with the German resistance movement; this led to his arrest due to suspicions of having “close ties to the resistance” which “could not be proven initially” he was eventually executed on the pretext of being involved in the last failed assassination attempt on Hitler’s life at his field command headquarters “The Wolf’s Liar” (There were more than forty different attempts to kill Hitler during the Nazi era 1933-1945 according to historians’ study findings).
In 1936, Bonhoeffer was forbidden to teach, in 1940, to speak in public and was required to report his activities regularly to the police. In 1941, he was forbidden to print or to publish. Beginning in 1938, he had knowledge of resistance activities. In 1940, he was enlisted in the military intelligence service (Abwehr), working for the resistance group of General Ludwig Beck, General Hans Oster and their collaborator Hans von Dohnanyi. Bonhoeffer’s task was to communicate the continuation of the German resistance to the Allies while he was travelling abroad, and to spread information about plans for a coup.
On 5 April 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested along with his sister Christine and her husband, Hans von Dohnanyi, and they were brought to the prison in Berlin-Tegel. Because his close ties to the resistance could not be proven initially, it appeared that Bonhoeffer was not in any real danger. But the assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944 failed and documents implicating Bonhoeffer surfaced in the investigation. In October 1944, he was transferred to the Gestapo cellar in Prinz-Albert-Strasse, then on 7 February 1945 to Buchenwald, where he was held in the SS detention cell building, and from there, on 3 April, via Regensburg and Schönberg in the Bavarian Forest, he was brought to Flossenbürg Concentration Camp.
On the night after his arrival on 8 April 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was sentenced to death at a drumhead court-martial and hanged.4
The only way to understand Roberts distortion of Bonhoeffer’s timeless concept can be be seen in this one line from The Cost of Discipleship—”Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God.”—essentially Roberts is saying that leftists/liberals and activists and anyone else who disagrees with his worldview are in essence God-deniers.
If you have not realized it by now, Project 2025 is the tip of a spear that is designed to breach and destroy the separation of Church and State. This has been an objective and goal of movement-conservatism for decades now:
Robertson and the school’s dean, Jeff Brock, are not shy about seeking to control the government. Brock first explains how the wall separating Church and State is purely institutional and surmountable through a strategy of placing professionals with a dominionist worldview in positions of authority. Pat Robertson later argues, “There was never any intention that our government would be separate from God almighty.” Robertson founded Regents to “change the law to reflect God’s law.” Because lawyers and justices are needed for that revolution, Robertson also founded the law school 20 years ago [1986]. Pages 28-29. [Emphasis by RJR]5 6
The White Christian nationalists are coming for your civil rights!
Are you prepared, ready, and willing to defend your civil rights?!
I know I am; Whatever it requires.
If you learned anything new or of interest to you or if you think someone you know whether it be an individual or a larger audience might benefit from reading my writings, then please take the time to cross-post, restack, or share this essay or any of my other writings. The more people know about what is happening with our Democracy the better are our chances of defending our freedoms and civil rights against the scourge and destitution of the MAGA-Republican movement and its defacto dictator convict-Trump.
Thank you for reading,
Robert J. Rei, Fall River MA, July 17, 2024
"There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self." -Aldous Huxley
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, undated, The International Bonhoeffer Society, https://bonhoeffersociety.org/about/bonhoeffer/biography/
“Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a German pastor, theologian, ecumenist, and peace activist. He wrote profoundly about Christian faith, community, grace, and ethics, centered in one way or another on the question, who is Christ for us today? The atrocities of the Nazi Regime, which resulted in unspeakable human suffering, compelled him to participate in a conspiracy that tried unsuccessfully to assassinate Hitler and install a new government that would end the war and those atrocities. Imprisoned during the last two years of his life, Bonhoeffer was executed just weeks before the end of the war.”
Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Kevin D. Roberts PhD., Foreword, Page 11, The Heritage Foundation, https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Germany, 1937; Digital copy located at The Internet Archive, page 45-46, https://archive.org/stream/DietrichBonhoefferCostOfDisciples/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer-Cost_of_Disciples_djvu.txt
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: 4/2/1906 (Breslau, German Reich) – 9/4/1945 (Flossenbürg concentration camp), undated, The Buchenwald Memorial, https://www.buchenwald.de/en/geschichte/biografien/ltg-ausstellung/dietrich-bonhoeffer
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