Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus by Reggie Williams

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 If you didn't know, Bonhoeffer was in NYC as a Sloan Fellow at Union Theological. He was 24, post doctoral. It was 1930-31. He actually got involved at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and taught Sunday School there. "On Jan 12, 1931 ... an African American man was accused of rape in Maryville, Missouri, chained to a schoolhouse roof, and burned to death by a white mob. Bonhoeffer read the story of that lynching and viewed the graphic photographs." (22)


I knew some of this from other biographies, but what Williams does is dive deeper into what Bonhoeffer was reading and where he traveled, as well as what was going on in Harlem -- Alan Locke's New Negro and what James Weldon Johnson called the Harlem Renaissance. Williams even sought and spoke with Albert Fisher's family for more insight. (Fisher was an black theology student who introduced Bonhoeffer to Harlem). 

Williams also introduces us to Harlem and the movements taking place there (I am so excited that is the next project Williams is working on). This book introduced me to Willie Jennings who writes about colonialism and the West's "diseased social imagination." With it they "discovered" new lands. Really they remade the world with Europe-as-center and so in their imagination they were brining "geography and populations into existence by writing them into history as they corresponded with Europe." (45)

"Christian redemption became synonymous with assimilation into the community of God's chosen people--the European body of Christ ... As a result of this distortion, God's gift of salvation was now commingled with a social principle and a racial optic; social value and moral proximity to God were radicalized and measured by the likeness to an idealized humanity, the white European male body. Israel was replaced by Europe as the community of God's chosen people, and Christ became a European white man." (47)

Williams further comments: "This was not only theology tailored for colonial domination; it was also theology constructed for an identity that resisted the practice of incarnation, empathy, and transformation." (47)

Williams also introduced me to Darkwater by WEB Dubois, the sequel to Souls of Black Folks. Similar to Souls it is a mix of essays, fiction and poetry. Williams tells at some length the short story of Jesus in Waco, Texas. In it DuBois imagines Jesus coming to visit Waco Texas, first a prison, then a dinner party as one of the guests and finally witnessing a lynching. 

Williams shares the poem by Langston Hughes called Christ in Alabama which begins "Christ is a N*****/Beaten and black ..." Williams walks us through Countee Cullen's The Black Christ, Claude McKay's poem The Lynching. He also introduced me to Eric Lincoln who writes about the Black Church. Lincoln puts it as various dialectics/tensions ... dialectic between priestly and prophetic roles; otherworldly and this-worldly; universalism and particularism (universality of the Christian message AND the particularity of black history); dialectic between resistance and accommodation. 

Ultimately what Williams shows us about Dietrich Bonhoeffer is that he came from wealth and elite German university and this was setting him down a path of Euro-centric vision. But "the hermeneutical process that was set in motion by [his] formative German nationalist environment had been disrupted by his immersion in a different community ..." (105)

In conclusion, Williams writes: "Bonhoeffer remains the only prominent white theologian of the twentieth century to speak about racism as a Christian problem." (139)

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