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
The Moral Universe 