Work Classification Layer
Compare Works
Pick two or more works to set their attribute fingerprints, dimension-by-dimension passages, and shared school embodiments side by side. Especially useful for author-stage comparisons (Wittgenstein early vs late) and for setting a single tradition's foundational texts against each other.
The Cost of Discipleship
When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die — and the distinction between cheap grace and costly grace
Attribute Fingerprint
Rows where works disagree are highlighted in gold. The full ontology grid is shown.
| Attribute | The Cost of Discipleship (Early) |
|---|---|
| Time · Extent | Both |
| Time · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Time · Grain | Continuous |
| Time · Freedom | Both |
| Time · Traversability | Linear |
| Time · Dimensionality | One |
| Time · Direction | Uni-directional |
| Space · Extent | Finite |
| Space · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Space · Curvature | Flat |
| Space · Dimensionality | Three |
| Space · Locality | Local |
| Matter · Extent | Finite |
| Matter · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Matter · Conservation | Conserved |
| Matter · Dimensionality | Three |
| Matter · Locality | Local |
| Observer · Time Instance | Multiple |
| Observer · Space Instance | Single |
| Observer · Knowledge Extent | Immediate |
| Observer · Knowledge Retainment | Total |
| Observer · Physicality | Embodied |
| Observer · Agency | Active |
| Observer · Number | Plural |
| Observer · Metaphysical Agency | Personal |
| Observer · Moral Authority | Scripture |
| Observer · Theological Method | — |
| Energy · Extent | Finite |
| Energy · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Energy · Conservation | Conserved |
| Energy · Dispersibility | Irreversible |
| Information · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Information · Cosmic Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Personal Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Granularity | Continuous |
Dimension-by-Dimension Evidence
What each work's passages reveal about its stance on each of the six dimensions.
Time
The Cost of Discipleship
1937 first publication. Bonhoeffer was 31, in the third year of his Finkenwalde seminary directorship.
Space
The Cost of Discipleship
Finkenwalde (Pomerania), the Confessing Church preachers' seminary Bonhoeffer directed 1935-37. The Gestapo closed the seminary in late 1937; the book was published months before the closure.
Matter
The Cost of Discipleship
Single pastoral-theological monograph (~340 pages). Form is verse-by-verse commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, framed by the introductory chapters on cheap and costly grace.
Observer
The Cost of Discipleship
Middle Bonhoeffer. The observer-pastor-theologian is the director of the Finkenwalde seminary, training pastors for the German Confessing Church under increasing Gestapo pressure.
Energy
The Cost of Discipleship
Pastoral-theological-resistance energies. The book combines pastoral instruction (for Bonhoeffer's seminarians) with implicit political-theological critique of the cheap-grace Christianity of the German Christian Reichskirche.
Information
The Cost of Discipleship
Single substantial book. Part I (chs. 1-3) on cheap and costly grace; Part II (chs. 4-21) the Sermon on the Mount commentary.
Internal Tensions
Where each work's argument pulls against itself.
The principal pastoral-theological work of Bonhoeffer's middle period; foundational text of twentieth-century Christian pacifism and the costly-grace tradition. Continuously read by the post-war German Confessing Church inheritors, by the American civil rights movement (King cited it), by the Stanley Hauerwas / Duke Methodist tradition, and by the broader Christian pacifist movement (Walter Wink, John Howard Yoder).