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

by Reggie L. Williams

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