On April 9, 1945, the German Lutheran pastor, theologian and dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging in a concentration camp for association with a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

Bonhoeffer and others founded Germany’s Confessing Church in opposition to the unification of all Protestant churches into a single church compatible with Nazism.

The first paragraph of his book The Cost of Discipleship* reads:

“Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting to-day for costly grace.”

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* Initially published in German in 1937 as Nachfolge