Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance

by Reggie L. Williams

But Bonhoeffer’s argument for the urgent significance of Christ and Christ’s ethical imperative was missing critical substance. At this point in his theological career, Bonhoeffer did not refer to the Bible for Christian discipleship. As a result of that glaring omission, it was easy to blend the way of Jesus with German nationalism and to consider patriotism an element of Christian discipleship. With the Bible omitted as a source of concrete guidance for Christian moral living, the popular Lutheran language of the two kingdoms, replete with the nationalist notion of orders of creation, filled the void.

The implications of Bonhoeffer’s pairing of Jesus and culture were significant; Christians were virtually invisible in German society, absorbed into the German culture of Protestantism, with its liberal Christian language of human achievement and of nationalism. A good Christian looked no different than a patriotic German, tethered firmly to Volkish, or German-centered, loyalties.

The content of theology in America was different, making it difficult for him to see the broader implications of Christ as Stellvertretung. Rather than the dogmatic theology of Bonhoeffer’s formative German theological environment, he found that in America “pragmatism [had] expelled dogmatics . . . and the question of truth [had] been supplanted by utility.”38 That difference communicated to Bonhoeffer that critical content from the gospel and about Christ was missing in the classroom and the pulpit. In an end-of-the-year report about his Sloane Fellowship prepared for the Church Federation in Germany after he returned home, Bonhoeffer wrote about students in practical theology seminars asking whether one really must preach about Christ.39 He reported how students laughed at a passage from Luther’s Bondage of the Will about sin and forgiveness that was shared during a public lecture.40 Significant features of Bonhoeffer’s academic training were mistreated, belittled, or completely missing in New York.

Cheap grace presupposes a sinful life as the justification of sin but not the sinner.108 Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without repentance: It is baptism without the discipline of the community; it is the Lord’s Supper without the confession of sin; it is absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without the living incarnate Jesus Christ.109 Cheap grace describes the Christian life that Bonhoeffer formerly knew, as a Christian with divided loyalties.

Until the fifteenth century, Jerusalem was the center of the Christian world.36 From the fifteenth to the early twentieth century, Europeans recognized their community of empires as the center of the world and the hope for humanity, culturally, geographically, and religiously.37 In the process of colonial expansion, the Spanish “discovery” of the extreme Western continent, the Indias Occidentales, followed three centuries later by the invention of the Middle East and the Far East through Orientalism, Europe became the geographical, philosophical, political, economic, and spiritual center of the world.38 What some European cartographers demonstrated on world maps was also a lived reality; the world was re-created from a perspective that established Europe as the central or fundamentally pre-eminent location on earth. The Eurocentric perspective gave to some imperialist nations the concept of “discovery,” which was descriptive of a world with one history and a Christian social imagination that racialized continents as it “discovered” them, defining humanity according to the European ideal norm, as explorers came into contact with native “others” in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Fundamentally, the Eurocentric worldview saw Europe as more than a geographical location; the language of discovery turned Europe into a peoplemaking process. The theological element of the Europe-as-center worldview was a Christian social imagination that was diseased by its blending with the moder...

Prior to the war, the color line established the “barbarous” and the “civilized” as human categories that corresponded to the Europe-as-center, white supremacist, colonizing worldview. After the war, the label “barbaric” that Germany and other imperialists used to describe the dark-skinned colonized world became a label to describe Germany as well. In the eyes of Germany’s imperialist neighbors, it became a nation of uncivilized, uncultured barbarians, now figuratively residing on the periphery of a community of civilized European nations. Since Germany was no longer considered among the world’s civilized, the emerging League of Nations deemed it necessary to confiscate Germany’s colonial possessions.55

At the heart of race terror in America, and in the European colonies, was a modern notion that Europeans represented ideal humanity and the center of civilization, while the natives and indigenous inhabitants in the colonies represented the periphery of civilization and inferior humanity. The notion of inferior humanity was fueled by a distorted theological identity that made European civilization and Christianity synonymous with one another.

The white Christ of the modern colonial construct was complicit in race terror as an opiate Jesus who sedated black people, convincing them to accept racism and subhumanity as divinely ordained by God. But the intellectual architects of blackness in Harlem portrayed Jesus in a way that decentered Europe and whiteness as the source of all saving knowledge.

Du Bois’ notion of the veil describes a mechanism of racialization. The veil operates like a projector screen for the forced attribution of racial identity by white people upon black bodies. Du Bois argues that real black selves are hidden “within” or behind “the veil.”10 That is also the reason for what Du Bois describes as double consciousness in Souls; blacks hold in tension the knowledge of how whites see them within the veil and the self-knowledge of who they know themselves to be behind the veil. In Souls Du Bois describes “double consciousness” and “the veil” as hermeneutical keys to the interpretation of the black/white encounter. But Du Bois did not encourage black voyeurism from behind the veil; Du Bois was an advocate of resistance inspired by theological convictions.11

White power structures created a racist Jesus. The man-made white Jesus disallowed them from recognizing the real Christ, whom they wanted to avoid, as Blum describes: Du Bois suggested that southern whites’ racial phobias and their ignorance of human diversity led them not only to confuse African Americans with Middle Easterners, but also to overlook the Son of God. Du Bois believed that white Americans would consider a messiah of Middle Eastern descent as unthinkable as one of black heritage.15 Racism turns white Christians into idol worshippers, and disallows authentic Christian discipleship.

To disclose this Jesus, Du Bois favored biblical references to a global family in Christ and Jesus’ emphasis on peace in the Sermon on the Mount: There comes a priest of the meek and lowly Jesus—a Servant of the Servant who said Blessed are the Meek, Blessed are the Poor, Blessed are the Merciful, Blessed are the Peace-makers, Blessed are the Persecuted.16 Du Bois’ use of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount was a rebuke of dominant political authorities who saw no incongruity between domination of the poor, white supremacy, and Christianity.

New devotion to the way of Jesus inspired advocacy for peace and social justice, as he later described to Karl Friedrich: “Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself.”8

The group of pastors that made up the Young Reformation movement sought to distinguish their genuine faith from that of the German Christians by way of the Bethel Confession,54 coauthored by Bonhoeffer, George Merz, and Herman Sasse.55 But twenty other resisting pastors were involved in editing the confession, and Bonhoeffer’s effort to rebuke Nazi racism by including a section on the Jewish question was edited out of the final version. The pastors intended to formulate a statement of pure Christian doctrine that would filter the German Christians out of the church by making their non-Christian intentions apparent. But they did not see racial oppression as a problem for Christians to address, and that omission so deeply disturbed Bonhoeffer that he refused to sign it.

The exclusion of Jewish Christians from our communion of worship would mean: The excluding church is erecting a racial law as a prerequisite of Christian communion. But in doing so it loses Christ himself. . . . A Christian church cannot exclude from its communion a member on whom the sacrament of baptism has been bestowed, without degrading baptism. . . . With exclusion of the Jewish Christians from the communion of worship, he who realizes the nature of the church must feel himself to be excluded also.61

Reasoning in the abstract is a moral practice that is subject to the problem of privilege that Bonhoeffer criticized in the fellowship of his colleagues in the church resistance; it traps one’s moral reasoning within a feigned universal objectivity while remaining narrow-minded. Abstract moral reasoning is especially pernicious toward historically marginalized people, who are typically rendered invisible in the process. Universal reasoning boasts of a “one-size-fits-all” morality that is at best undetected egoism and at worst intentional domination that pushes the minority to the margins and disregards their experience of domination by the community in its dreaming of an ideal society. It is an ethical failure in disguise: Here no genuine encounter with life, with actual people, has taken place. Indeed, in this kind of failure, something alien, inauthentic, contrived, fictitious, and at the same time highly tyrannical is cast off [let loose on society] without human beings themselves, in the core of their being, really having been touched, transformed, and forced to make a decision.76 Bonhoeffer describes this tyrannical cast off as a “failure to engage.”77

Bonhoeffer writes from prison, “The church is the church only when it is there for others.”82 Hence, there is no disregarding the injustice that the Jewish neighbor experiences that does not include disregarding the suffering of Christ and being in bondage to isolation from him. Finally, privileges that guard some Christians from experiencing oppression may also keep them from seeing oppression or suffering as matters within the scope of Christian moral responsibility.

In light of his developed theologia crucis, Bonhoeffer highlights the privilege that his colleagues had in order to ignore suffering and racial oppression as he confronted them for their inattention to the plight of the Jews in the struggle against the German Christians: The German Christians’ demands destroy the substance of the ministry by making certain members of the Christian community into members with lesser rights, second-class Christians. The rest, those who remain privileged members, should prefer to stand by those with lesser rights rather than to benefit from a privileged status in the church. They must see their own true service, which they can still perform for their church, in resigning from this office of pastor as a privilege, which is now what it has become.89 Bethge explains that this reference to pastoral privilege was a characteristic argument that Bonhoeffer made about “fatal privilege.”90 It was fatal because it prohibited Christians from seeing that their pastoral privileges rested on a deeper set of insidious privileges, namely ethnic pride and Aryan privilege.

Bonhoeffer was reported to have stood and quoted these few words from the nineteenth-century German poet Theodor Storm and returned to his seat: One man asks: What is to come? The other: What is right? And that is the difference Between the free man and the slave.

The Aryan Clause was a status confessionis for the church, and faithful Christians had to be made aware of the “the difference between the free man and the slave” to recognize oppression as evil and to serve Christ in the lives of suffering and marginalized people.

Bonhoeffer was puzzled by the isolation caused by his radical convictions: I felt that, in some way I don’t understand, I found myself in radical opposition to all my friends; I was becoming increasingly isolated with my views of the matter, even though I was and remain personally close to these people. All of this frightened me and shook my confidence, so that I began to fear that dogmatism might be leading me astray—since there seemed no particular reason why my own view on these matters should be any better, any more right, than the views of many really able pastors whom I sincerely respect.93 The radical convictions that Bonhoeffer displayed during the church struggle were not the product of his German theological and ecclesiological environment; they were imported goods. His entry into the social context of African Americans in Harlem was the reversal of a theological hermeneutic that typically flowed from Germany to the United States. In Bonhoeffer’s case, the flow of essential theological content moved across the Atlantic from Harlem to Germany.

Bonhoeffer reasoned that suffering must be borne for it to pass and Christ bears his own in the practice of vicarious representative action bearing neighbors’ burdens.94 That is Christian discipleship, and it is a Christ-inspired motivation for justice.

Christlikeness is determined in concrete daily interaction with and for others. One cannot claim to know Christ and ignore injustice. As Bonhoeffer indicates, Christ is hidden in suffering and marginalization. To see the world from the perspective of those communities where outcasts are labeled and shunted grants vision of the nature of God in Christ. To volunteer as one who shares the load of suffering and marginalization creates participation in what God is doing in the world, and, thus, the burden-bearer becomes a disciple of Christ.

Keith Clements explains orders of creation as “the doctrine that certain structures of human life are not just incidental biological or historical phenomena but are deliberately ordained of God as essential and immutable conditions of human existence, without which humanity is not humanity as created by God.” Clements claims that the term was in broad usage but it took a definitively pernicious turn in its use by emerging German National Socialists, who claimed, “Above all the supreme order of creation is the people, race, or nation to which one belongs and owes loyalty.” The use of “orders” language here is protonationalist, speaking of loyalty to Volk in a way that presaged the National Socialist usage that was on the horizon. See de Gruchy, Cambridge Companion, 163. A similar usage of orders of creation language was appropriated in the slave-owning south to argue for the innate superiority of men over women and of white people in general over other “inferior” races, in accordance with God’s divine created order. See Beth Barton Schweiger, Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003) 285–91; and Richard Furman’s “Defense of Slavery,” in Exploring the Christian Heritage: A Reader in History and Theology, ed. C. Douglas Weaver, Rady Roldán-Figueroa, Brandon Frick (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2012), 154–57.

The language of Völker is translated as folk, peoples, or nation, but its meaning is more complex in the German, as the excerpt from “Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic” illustrates. It has connotations of a national essence, or people’s spirit. In the eighteenth century, Johann Gottfried Herder developed the concept of a German Volksgeist (national spirit) to describe the natural, hereditary, or ethnic grouping to which every people belongs as a reason for political distinctiveness. His argument also spoke of the pride of the distinctive German Volksgeist within the German Völker. Bonhoeffer’s language in these two lectures espouses this language of loyalty to Völker as it is appropriated within popular nationalist theology.

The notion that God calls peoples, a notion that has biblical roots, was a means of countering the humiliation and distressing conditions in post–World War I Germany. The terms of peace agreed upon within the 1919 Treaty of Versailles were perceived with deep indignation as the “pushing aside” of the German people. The distress of one’s own people became a recurring, common theme. See DBWE 10:373n34, 339–42.

See also Willie James Jenning Christian Imagination that talks about colonialist theolgy as Essentially capitalist and not focused on loving the neighbors

This European Christian geopolitical construct provided a connection among the continents where there was no natural connection. It was a pseudo-Christian connection that was based on a theological understanding of continents and their inhabitants—an order of creation—primarily paying attention to the roles of Ham and Japheth. According to Augustine, Shem was important as the ancestor of Semitic peoples, through whom Christ was born, while the destiny of Ham was marked by a curse, and Japheth was destined to expand. 49