Discipleship

If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.

— Luke 9:23

Discipleship is the lifelong process by which one who is united to Christ is conformed to him: denying self, taking up the cross daily, and following Jesus in place of every other claim on life.¹ The New Testament word for “disciple” names both a follower and a learner,² and the apostles more often describe this relationship as being “in Christ” than merely following him, since following understates how completely a disciple’s identity is now bound up with Christ’s own.³

Confessional Witness

No confession in the Reformed family, the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith included, has a chapter titled “discipleship.” The closest confessional locus is the shared chapter “Of Sanctification,” where the 1689, the Westminster Confession, the Savoy Declaration, and the Philadelphia Confession all state substantially the same position. Those united to Christ, effectually called and regenerated, are “further sanctified, really and personally… to the practice of all true holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.”⁴ Sanctification issues, over a lifetime, in what the confession calls “evangelical obedience to all the commands which Christ as Head and King, in His Word hath prescribed”⁵ - the confession’s own language for what an article titled “Discipleship” describes.

This obedience is not the ground of the change but its fruit: sanctification follows a believer’s prior union with Christ and the Spirit’s indwelling, and “men do not make themselves holy” - their holiness, and its growth, is the Spirit’s own work through that union.⁶

Biblical Basis

Jesus described discipleship in terms of comprehensive, costly allegiance rather than casual admiration. He called Simon, Andrew, James, and John to leave their nets and their father’s boat immediately (Mark 1:16-20), and later restated the terms plainly: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me” (Luke 9:23; cf. Mark 8:34; Matt. 16:24). Following him takes priority over family and self-preservation alike (Matt. 10:34-39; 8:21-22).³

Jesus pressed the same point through two short parables: no one building a tower or a king marching to war fails to first count the cost, and Jesus applies the comparison directly to the cost of following him⁷ - “whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26-33). These are not casual metaphors; they are Christ’s own warning against professing allegiance without reckoning what it costs.

Jesus also gave discipleship a positive, identifying mark. On the night before his death he told the Twelve, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you… By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:34-35).⁸ Love for other disciples, not merely correct belief, is what makes discipleship visible to onlookers.

The call to make disciples also reaches beyond personal formation. In the Great Commission, the risen Christ commanded the church: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19-20).⁹ Discipleship names what a believer is conformed into, and what the church is commissioned to produce in others.

Historical Development

Patristic period: practice before doctrine

In the earliest centuries of the church, before the great doctrinal controversies forced systematic reflection on the person and work of Christ, “analytic reflection on the fundamentals of the Christian gospel… was secondary to the practical questions of discipleship,” Bavinck observes; the early church’s concern was “more to convert Christian truth into the practice of a life lived under the sway of the gospel,” with its accent on a holy life rather than speculation.¹⁰

Medieval monasticism: a second, “more perfect” discipleship

By the medieval period, discipleship had come to be understood, in much of the Western church, as a two-tiered calling: an ordinary rule for the laity and a stricter, “more perfect” rule of poverty, chastity, and obedience for those under monastic vows. Calvin summarizes and rejects the position directly: monasticism as it then existed rested “on an idea which all pious men ought to execrate - namely, the pretence that there is some more perfect rule of life than that common rule which God has delivered to the whole Church.”¹¹ Its proponents appealed to Christ’s word to the rich young ruler, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor” (Matt. 19:21), as grounding a higher, vowed state of discipleship beyond what was asked of ordinary believers.¹¹

Reformation: one common rule for every believer

Calvin’s own answer, from the same passage, became the Reformation’s alternative: Paul makes charity, not the renunciation of goods, the standard of Christian perfection (1 Cor. 13:3; Col. 3:14),¹¹ and Christ’s commands bind the whole church without a special class of the more perfectly discipled. Self-denial and cross-bearing were every believer’s ordinary calling, not a specialist’s vocation reserved for those under vows.

Post-Reformation practical divinity

The Puritan tradition that followed treated this ordinary, universal call to self-denial as hard, expected labor rather than an abstraction. Thomas Watson lamented that many who profess Christ know “they should deny themselves; but the Work of Self-denial is hard, so that the Plough stands still, and nothing of the practick part” of their knowledge is ever carried out.¹²

Twentieth century: “cheap grace” and the recovery of cost

Writing under the Nazi regime’s pressure on the German churches, Dietrich Bonhoeffer challenged what he called “cheap grace” - an easy discipleship that requires merely believing certain things and accepting God’s favor without any answering cost.³ “When Christ calls a man,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “he bids him come and die.”¹³ His account of costly discipleship, set against a nominal Christianity content with cheap grace, renewed the older Reformation-era insistence that self-denial belongs to every disciple, not to a specially devoted few.

Opposing Views

In its monastic and religious orders, the Roman Catholic tradition holds that some believers are called to a state of counseled perfection - vowed poverty, chastity, and obedience - beyond the common precepts binding all Christians, grounded in Christ’s own counsel to the rich young ruler (Matt. 19:21).¹¹ Reformed theology holds instead that Christ’s call to deny self and take up the cross binds every believer equally, with no vowed state constituting a higher class of discipleship than ordinary sanctification produces in any Christian united to Christ.⁴

Objections and Responses

Costly, self-denying discipleship amounts to earning salvation by works. If following Christ requires renouncing family, possessions, and self-preservation, the objection runs, then a disciple is working for a standing with God rather than receiving it as a gift. The confession answers this by placing sanctification, and the evangelical obedience it produces, strictly after union with Christ, effectual calling, and regeneration, never before or apart from them: those who “are further sanctified” are first “united to Christ, effectually called, and regenerated.”⁴ Discipleship’s cost is the fruit of a prior, gracious, and supernatural change worked by the Spirit, not a price paid to obtain it. “Men do not make themselves holy,” Hodge writes; their holiness and its growth come from union with Christ and “the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.”⁶

Related Doctrines

References

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 3, chap. 15, 90-97: “The whole is expressed at once, when Christ thus describes his disciples, ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.’ He who has denied himself has cut off the root of all evils… he who has taken up his cross has prepared himself for all meekness and endurance.” ↩
Donald S. Whitney, “Chapter 12: Learning … for the Purpose of Godliness,” in Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, anniversary ed. (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2024): “an examination of the New Testament word disciple reveals that it means to be not only ‘a follower’ of Christ but also ‘a learner.’” ↩
Ken Magnuson, “5. Aspects of Biblical Ethics: New Testament,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020): being a mere follower is “an insufficient metaphor to describe Christ’s impact upon our identity. The apostles prefer to describe people as being ‘in Christ.’” ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 13, “Of Sanctification,” para. 1. ↩ ↩² ↩³
1689 LBCF, chap. 13, para. 3. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter XVIII. Sanctification,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 212-257: “All that the Scriptures teach concerning the union between the believer and Christ, and of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, proves the supernatural character of our sanctification. Men do not make themselves holy.” ↩ ↩²
Ken Magnuson, “15. Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: “when teaching about the cost of following him, Jesus used this war analogy. He asks, ‘What king, going to war against another king, will not first sit down and decide if he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand?’” ↩
Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: Restoring the Eldership to Its Rightful Place in the Local Church, 4th ed. (Littleton, CO: Lewis and Roth Publishers, 2017), chap. 1, “New Principles for Leadership,” 21-30. ↩
Whitney, “Chapter 6: Evangelism … for the Purpose of Godliness,” in Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩
Calvin, Institutes, book 4, chap. 13, “Of Vows,” 472-490: “monasticism, as it now exists, [is] founded on an idea which all pious men ought to execrate - namely, the pretence that there is some more perfect rule of life than that common rule which God has delivered to the whole Church.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity: Consisting of Above One Hundred and Seventy-Six Sermons on the Lesser Catechism (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1692), 997-1007. ↩
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R. H. Fuller (1937; New York: Macmillan, 1963), 99, quoted in Whitney, “Chapter 7: Serving … for the Purpose of Godliness,” in Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life. ↩