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

by Reggie L. Williams

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...