Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran theologian who was hanged by the Nazis for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler, has been much on my mind since we learned in 2018 of concentration camps for Immigrants.

In the last six months, I have often whispered his name when learning of new depredations by the administration that have cost more than 150,000 American lives. Since the end of May, of course, Bonhoeffer has been on my mind daily.

Last night, I embarked on a four-month study of Christian Ethics and Racism offered by Bexley Seabury Theological Seminary and using as a main text Reggie Williams’s book, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus. Though written in 2014, it has much to teach us today.

Dr. Williams’s thesis is that Bonhoeffer would never have been hanged at Flossburg Prison in April 1945 if not for his meeting Black Jesus in the culture of Harlem and particularly at the Abyssinian Baptist Temple under the tutelage of the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. Harlem is a short walk up the street from Union Theological Seminary, where Bonhoeffer was a Sloane scholar in 1930-31.

I’ve read some of Bonhoeffer’s books over the years and waded through a very long biography by Eric Metaxas. If not for Dr. Williams, though, I would not know that before Bonhoeffer’s experiences in Harlem, he himself had begun to take on the nationalist fervor of post-World War I Germany.

For example, writes Dr. Williams, ”Bonhoeffer’s third lecture [to ex-pat Germans in Spain] , entitled ‘Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic,’ emphasized German patriotic discipleship, with Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on loyalty to the superior German peoples, or Vὅlker:”

Then he quotes Bonhoeffer himself: “Should not a Volk experiencing God’s call on its own life in its own youth and in its own strength, should not such a people be allowed to follow that call, even if it disregards the lives of other people?” The emphasis is mine.

To say this was a shock to me is putting it mildly. How was it that years of book study groups and a 1,000+-page biography never mentioned this?

When I’d calmed down, I thought of the parallels of Germany in that era with the Confederate States post-Civil War. Germany was in a shambles after World War I. Instead of searching its national conscience to reflect on its own responsibility and what it had reaped from its own bellicosity, though, the country doubled down on its nationalism. Nationalism is based on looking out for number one and to hell with the “other.” With the rise of uber-nationalism in the form of Hitler and the Nazi Party, the majority of German citizens were easily persuaded that the others in their midst, the Jews, the Romas, the gays, the developmentally disabled, could be erased from the Fatherland.

Since the South had already decided that those they had enslaved were subhuman, it wasn’t difficult for people to be reconciled to the now freed slaves being lynched after the First Reconstruction failed. Even the “well-meaning whites” that Howard Thurman describes in The Luminous Darkness weren’t moved to go outside of the pattern of Jim Crow laws. Tragically, the Great Migration unveiled the hidden bigotry of the North and so up to this present day we see physical and cultural lynchings in all parts of the country.

Learning about Black Jesus transformed Bonhoeffer’s earlier theology from one that sees God as favoring certain groups of people to a God who, by the Cross and by the Incarnation, endows all people with the mystical body of the Christ. A suffering Black Jesus is the Cosmic Christ that calls out to suffering people of all faiths and traditions or no faith at all. The incarnational Jesus of the Gospels reaches out only to the oppressed and/or marginalized, really. He does not minister to the Pharisees or the other elites, but to the peasants held in thrall by Caesar’s yoke.

It was the Black Jesus that opened Bonhoeffer’s eyes to the pure evil of Hitler’s progression to the Final Solution. To say that what he had learned also brought him to a place where he would face the fires of Hell to rid the world of that pure evil may seem an anomaly, but we know that it did.

Harlem’s Black Jesus gave Bonhoeffer and his co-conspirators the strength to draw a line in the sand.

Hmmmm.

Note: The featured image is a painting by Harlem Renaissance painter William H. Johnson

My John Lewis

Though I use the word “my,” this is not about me but about the extraordinary human being John Lewis was.

When I first went to the National Book Festival in Washington, DC, I was more than excited to see that Mr. Lewis would be one of the featured authors because March #1 came out that year.

My sister had been going for years when the Festival was held on the Mall. This was the first year it would be held in the Walter Washington Conference Center.

I posted on Facebook that I was determined to meet Mr. Lewis. Sally, my sister, laughed and said, “Do you know how many people there will be at this event? There’s no chance you’ll meet him.”

I didn’t exactly stalk him, but I made sure I would be scoping out the area around the ballroom where he would be speaking at least a half-hour before hand.

As I trotted up the final staircase, I just happened to look to my right and there was Mr. Lewis surrounded by young people from his district!

I joined them, trying to fit in despite my having at least 40 years on any of them and, in most cases, being much shorter than anyone else – except Mr. Lewis.

I finally made my move and threw my cellphone to one of the young people and asked them to take a picture of me and Mr. Lewis. By then I had no idea what to say to him, until I blurted out, “Mr. Lewis, I thank God for the day you were born!”

With a sort of sigh, he threw his arms around me and hugged me in the most beautiful embrace. I would say I had been touched by an angel, but in fact, according to Time Magazine, I was being hugged by a saint.

The magazine called Mr. Lewis a living saint in the 1960s. It was not a casual comment in an article, but a carefully thought-out homage to a very young man in his 20s. Can you imagine having to live up to that? And yet he did.

Recently, on my once-a-week return from the grocery store, I noticed a billboard with giant figures of meerkats. It was an advertisement for a pest control company. My very first reaction was to say aloud to myself, “They’re not the pests; we are.” How much destruction and violence and horror have we humans brought to this beautiful creation that the Bible says we are stewards of? Genocide, “ethnic cleansing,” hate crimes, out-of-control wars and human-caused famines, babies in cages, the crimes of humankind are so many.

And yet. And yet, there is John Lewis. There is Elijah Cummings. There is CT Vivian and MLK Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt and Ida B. Wells and Fannie Lou Hamer and Oskar Schindler and Elie Wiesel and Abraham Heschel and Howard Thurman and more who spent their lives, and risked their lives, to show us that yes, there are better angels of our natures out there.

I heard historian Jon Meacham, who wrote a biography of Mr. Lewis, say twice over the weekend that, though he could not agree with him, Mr. Lewis truly believed that God’s kingdom could come on earth as it is in heaven. Since Jesus told us this was so, many Christians still don’t believe it. It’s only in recent years that I began to understand the profundity of what Jesus said and to believe it with my whole heart.

Mr. Lewis’s extraordinary life was a living out of the desire to bring the Kingdom of God to earth. As people contemplate who will carry the torch farther, I say it is up to each and every one of us to fight the good fight every day to bring God’s commonwealth of peace and freedom to our fragile island home, this blue marble that spins around the sun.

To repeat Mr. Lewis’s words, “If not now, when?”