A Comfortable Christ

The constant struggle for Christians is to look upon Christ as he really is.

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About five years ago, I had the opportunity to view the film A Hidden Life, a biopic of Franz Jägerstätter, who refused to swear a loyalty oath to Hitler during World War II and was subsequently executed. The film is full of important questions, riveting acting, and gorgeous cinematography, but one scene stood out to me above all others, to the extent that I still think about it often.

In the scene, Jägerstätter visits a local church, where he finds a painter restoring the images of biblical characters and saints that adorn the church’s ceiling and walls. As Jägerstätter quietly observes, the painter goes on a monologue about the nature of his craft.

I help people look up from those pews and dream. They look up, and they imagine that if they lived back in Christ’s time, they wouldn’t have done what the others did. They would have murdered those who they now adore. I paint all this suffering that I don’t suffer myself. I make a living of it. What we do is just create sympathy. We create admirers. We don’t create followers. Christ’s life is a demand. We don’t want to be reminded of it, so we don’t have to see what happens to the truth. Darker time is coming, and men will be more clever. They won’t fight the truth. They’ll just ignore it. I paint their comfortable Christ with a halo over his head. How can I show what I haven’t lived? Some day I might have the courage to venture. Not yet. Some day I’ll paint the true Christ. (emphasis added)

While his meditation upon the task of the artist is certainly interesting to me, I am more fascinated by the theological theme. Notice the two phrases I have placed in bold.

“Christ’s life is a demand.” This was the message of that famous German theologian of the World War II period, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was also executed by the Nazis. In his book Nachfolge (Discipleship), Bonhoeffer focused on perhaps the most gut wrenching of Christ’s recorded commands. “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.” (Matthew 16:24b) Bonhoeffer’s explication of this command reveals the extent to which Christ’s life and sacrifice demand something of mankind.

“The call to follow implies that there is only one way of believing on Jesus Christ, and that is by leaving all and going with the incarnate Son of God,” Bonhoeffer wrote,¹ later adding, “The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise godfearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”²

The demand that Christ places on men is not to suffer and die in achievement of one’s own salvation, but to find fellowship in the suffering and death of Christ, with which we are united and by which we are justified. As Bonhoeffer also wrote, “Obedience to the call of Jesus never lies within our own power,”³ “Salvation through following Jesus is not something we men can achieve for ourselves,”⁴ and, “In the last resort what matters is not what the man does, but only his faith in Jesus as the Son of God and Mediator.”⁵ In Jesus Christ, “the law is at once fulfilled and cancelled.”⁶

Bonhoeffer’s understanding of justification is therefore thoroughly Protestant, but he does not conceive of saving faith which does not direct itself toward Christ in love and obedience. The fulfillment of the divine law and cancellation of its penalty does not alter the fact that to be a Christ follower is to take up a cross. We take up that cross not to justify ourselves, but as pilgrims on the path of sanctification, performing good works for the sake of our neighbors. This is theology straight out of Martin Luther’s The Freedom of a Christian.

Returning to that scene from A Hidden Life, the painter uses another phrase that is deeply profound, lamenting that he only paints a “comfortable Christ.” What is a comfortable Christ? From the context of the painter’s full monologue, I conclude that it is a Christ who creates admirers but not followers. It is a Christ whose sufferings are seen not as the source of our salvation, but as a nice story to create sympathy.

This was the chief sin of the German Church that Bonhoeffer identified in Nachfolge. “Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church,”⁷ he laments in the opening line, by which he means grace that is claimed without contrition or any true desire to be freed from sin.

“That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.”⁸

Bonhoeffer goes on to contrast this cheap grace with the costly grace of God, which “cost God the life of his Son.”⁹ Such grace is absolutely free to sinners (rather than merely cheap), but it comes at greatest expense to the Savior. “Costly grace is the Incarnation of God,” Bonhoeffer argues, attempting to draw his readers back to the true Christ upon a cross.¹⁰

Again, this is in line with the theology of Martin Luther, who opened his famous Ninety-Five Theses by proclaiming, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’, he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”¹¹ It was also Luther who contrasted the theologian of glory with the theologian of the cross in his theses for the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation.

19. “That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened.”

20. “He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.”

21. “A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.”¹²

What Luther meant is that one ought not look at how the world operates and then reason from that back to God. Rather, one should begin by looking at the cross, where one will understand that the goodness and glory of God are found in Christ’s suffering. This is what causes a theologian of glory to confuse good and evil, while allowing the theologian of the cross to call the thing what it actually is.

With that in mind, I would say the “comfortable Christ” is the one who does not call us to repent or depart from sin. He is looking for admirers, not followers. This comfortable Christ is beloved by theologians of glory.

A comfortable Christ will not criticize your personal sins. He will not demand your dearest treasures. He will never ask you to reconsider an opinion, or deny you earthly glory, or confront you with the darkness within. A comfortable Christ takes you “just as I am” and then leaves you that way, because a comfortable Christ has no interest in setting you free from sin, death, and the devil.

This comfortable Christ does not pick up a cross, and thus he cannot be raised from the dead. The cross itself is twisted in this reimagining to become a banner for earthly conquest, a justification for sin, a final suffering that frees you from earthly suffering. Those who follow the comfortable Christ are theologians of glory who will never know him or the fellowship of his suffering or the power of his resurrection, for they have never truly understood the gospel.

Therefore, the question is, what is my comfortable Christ? Where am I choosing to pursue earthly glory rather than the eternal glory of the cross? What am I unwilling to sacrifice or suffer? The answers to these questions will reveal my idolatry.

This matter is pressing at the moment, for we like Jägerstätter and Bonhoeffer live in a time when the Church is admiring a comfortable Christ rather than following the true Christ. While this criticism is often leveled at members of the Christian nationalist movement (to the extent that it is a coherent, unified movement), nearly all of the American Church is, I believe, in love with a comfortable Christ.

Success in Christian ministry is measured in the number of church plants, books sold, donations received. The strength of the Church is measured in how many of the president’s advisors are Christians (notably the right kind of Christian), how many of our privileges are protected, how much the economy is working for us. We want access, power, influence. We want our freedom of action maintained along with our standard of living. The slightest amount of hardship or discrimination is believed to be persecution on the level experienced by Bonhoeffer or Jägerstätter.

When the story of the American Church is written, I believe it will say we sat on an island of wealth in the middle of an ocean of poverty, that we fought to the death for our rights but kept our mouths shut when the rights of others were violated, and that we balked when any of our comforts were taken away. This will serve as proof positive that we chose the comfortable Christ. What’s more, a similar verdict will be rendered for churches around the world: the idolatries somewhat different, but the end result the same.

The task for me is to be a follower of Christ rather than an admirer. I must not paint for myself a comfortable Christ and say to him, “Lord! Lord!” I must do justice and righteousness unto the least of these, accepting the cross of suffering, pursuing the true Christ to the end of my days. By God’s grace, may I do it! For the only comfort I need in life and in death is the knowledge that I belong to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

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1. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R.H. Fuller (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 62.

2. Bonhoeffer, 89.

3. Bonhoeffer, 84.

4. Bonhoeffer, 85.

5. Bonhoeffer, 82.

6. Bonhoeffer, 83.

7. Bonhoeffer, 43.

8. Bonhoeffer, 44.

9. Bonhoeffer, 45.

10. Bonhoeffer, 45.

11. https://www.luther.de/en/95thesen.html

12. https://thebookofconcord.org/sources-and-context/heidelberg-disputation/