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

by Reggie L. Williams

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.