Bonhoeffer and the Racialized Church

Ross E. Halbach

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781481312783
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia ed etica sistematica

How do we remain faithful to and work within a Christian church that has been historically complicit in racism and that still exhibits racist actions in its communal life? While there have been numerous recent accounts addressing why the Christian church of the West is marked by racism and whiteness, there has been less attention given to how we reconcile the church's racial inequities with the belief that God works through God's people.

In Bonhoeffer and the Racialized Church, Ross Halbach seeks to reframe the question within Dietrich Bonhoeffer's conception of the "ultimate and penultimate." Bonhoeffer's acute sense of God's continual speaking offers a prophetic challenge to the church: instead of masking the realities of racial sin or pursuing easy resolution, we must confront the full consequences of whiteness in repentant expectation of Christ's coming. Halbach places the writings of Bonhoeffer into dialogue with the contemporary writings of Willie Jennings, J. Kameron Carter, and Brian Bantum, allowing these various perspectives to augment one another. This approach gives new clarity to present theological discussions of race through a consideration of God's regenerative work.

Discussions of race must move from seeking a diagnosis to exploring a dialogue that delves deeper into the issue. Racism is not a question to be answered but a resistance that hinders the church from hearing God's present call, which is given to the body of Christ through baptism and Eucharist. The church's response to God's call is found not in the assurance of a solution but in the obedient act of the church's participation with Christ in preparing the way for the church to hear how the triune God has already spoken and continues to speak today.

I

Words Already Spoken

1

Discerning Surprise

Bonhoeffer and Theological Race Discourse in America

There are both benefits and challenges that come with relating Bonhoeffer’s thought to contemporary theological race discourse in the United States. One benefit is that, in being largely removed from the American context, Bonhoeffer’s writings offer an unfamiliar voice that can interrogate the underlying presuppositions present in contemporary discussions about race. The challenge, though, is how to connect Bonhoeffer’s foreign thinking to the contemporary situation of race in the United States without introducing anachronism or domesticating his voice.

The question of how we are to listen to Bonhoeffer’s voice today relates, in part, with the central question examined in this project: how does the triune God speak through a historical community that is sinful, and specifically inundated with the modern racial distortions of whiteness, and how does God speak through this community without capitulating to the devastating language of whiteness? Bonhoeffer’s motif of the ultimate and penultimate offers a unique lens for thinking through this question, and even in bringing us to this question in the first place. Through evaluating Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the ultimate and penultimate in relation to the overarching question of this study, this chapter demonstrates how the unfamiliarity of Bonhoeffer’s thought contributes novel insights for theological discourses on race in the United States today. In this way, the course will be charted for bringing Bonhoeffer’s writings into dialogue with Willie Jennings, J. Kameron Carter, and Brian Bantum in part 2.

The question faced in this chapter is not how to resolve the problem of whiteness but how to discern God’s working in a fallen world marked by whiteness. This framing relies on Bonhoeffer’s conceptual scaffolding of the ultimate and penultimate. Bonhoeffer’s account of the ultimate and penultimate works from the surprise that God’s Word has already arrived in the living person of Jesus Christ (ultimate) and that, based on this arrival, a community of faith is publicly formed through discerning its contours in creaturely time as Christ’s body on earth (penultimate). This approach of a discernment drawn from the surprise of Christ’s arrival is developed through an examination of (1) Bonhoeffer’s life in relation to race, (2) his specific account of the ultimate and penultimate from Ethics, and (3) how his account of the ultimate and penultimate provides a unique approach to race in comparison to two common theological approaches to race. Through these three sections, the benefits and challenges of hearing what Bonhoeffer’s voice may contribute to contemporary theological race discourses are brought to the fore, beginning with his own life.

Beyond Saint or Sinner

The challenge of applying Bonhoeffer’s life to the contemporary issue of race not only involves accounting for contextual differences but also how to honestly remember a life such as Bonhoeffer’s that reflects a mixed portrait, with strokes both of brilliance and of bewilderment. There is an acute danger that comes with the impulse to search Bonhoeffer’s life and his writings for principles for addressing racism.1 Without care, Bonhoeffer’s life can be reduced to an end in itself that is formed into dead principles for either racial righteousness or racial condemnation. The following exploration presents two divergent images of Bonhoeffer’s dealings with race to illuminate the limitations and dangers of applying Bonhoeffer’s life and his statements on the topic of race directly to contemporary race issues. These two portraits of Bonhoeffer reveal that the motif of the ultimate and penultimate is not simply a theory to follow but a tense reality lived out in participation with Jesus Christ, allowing for the valences of saint and sinner to often appear side by side.

Bonhoeffer as Saint

The first portrait that may be drawn from Bonhoeffer’s engagement with race is a saintly one. This portrait gains support from a diverse array of interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s time in Harlem and his work with the renowned Abyssinian Baptist Church during his post-doctoral year at Union Theological Seminary in 1930–1931. As a prime example, the late James H. Cone suggested that Bonhoeffer “showed an existential interest in blacks” and even stands as one of the few exemplary white theologians “to empathize fully with the experience of black people.”2 Josiah Young offers a theological explanation for Cone’s gleaming remarks. Young speculates that Bonhoeffer’s early theological anthropology (offered in Sanctorum Communio) “equipped Bonhoeffer to socialize with blacks in a way that defied American racism.”3 Along similar lines, Mark Ellingsen presents Bonhoeffer as a “multi-culturist before his time” and someone whose anthropology and ecclesiology are “suggestive of the agenda of contemporary Black Liberation Theology.”4 These positive reviews of Bonhoeffer, specifically focused on his time in Harlem, are fortified by a number of biographies of Bonhoeffer’s life that offer detailed accounts of how he was impacted by the African American community in Harlem during his yearlong stay in New York.5

This documentation of Bonhoeffer’s experiences in Harlem has led many to seek connections between his time in Harlem and his struggle against anti-Semitism in his homeland.6 Clifford Green argues that “the encounter with racism in America paved the way for [Bonhoeffer’s] opposition to the racist anti-Semitism of National Socialism.”7 In Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, Reggie Williams offers compelling evidence that demonstrates how Harlem transformed a young intellectual and German nationalist into a concrete disciple of Christ who was prepared to address the anti-Semitism of Hitler’s Germany. Williams writes, “Bonhoeffer remains the only prominent white theologian of the twentieth century to speak about racism as a Christian problem.”8 Drawing on Williams’ work, Ken Wytsma, the founder of the Justice Conference, describes Bonhoeffer as an example of one who used his privilege on behalf of others.9 Part of what contributes to a saintly portrait of Bonhoeffer, in relation to race, is the connection drawn between his time in Harlem and his actions that followed shortly after.

Thus, Bonhoeffer’s rise to sainthood gains further support based on accounts of his activity in the resistance movement during the later years of his life. The saintly attributes of Bonhoeffer’s life during this time have been catalogued meticulously: his bold challenge of the Führer;10 his participation in the ecumenical movement;11 his appreciation for Mohandas Gandhi and his desire to visit him in India;12 his outspoken Lutheran defense of Jewish Christians leading to a claim of status confessionis;13 his assistance of Jewish and political refugees while pastoring in London;14 his eulogizing of his grandmother’s empathy toward Jews;15 his description of viewing “history from below”;16 his involvement in “Operation 7” and the conspiracy against Hitler;17 and, finally, his imprisonment and death.18 These remarkable events and accolades form an inspirational storyline out of Bonhoeffer’s life, a life that appears worthy of emulation for those seeking racial justice today.

Bonhoeffer as Sinner

There is, however, a second, less charitable portrait of Bonhoeffer’s dealings with race that may also be sketched. This second image of Bonhoeffer’s life raises problematic features surrounding many of the same events accounted for above. Take Bonhoeffer’s time in Harlem, for instance. Ruth Zerner points out that Bonhoeffer himself claimed that he learned more during his one-month stay in America in 1939 than he had during his yearlong stint in 1930–1931,19 the very year intensely focused on by biographers to highlight Bonhoeffer’s transformative change in Harlem. To cement her point, Zerner reports that, during this second short visit to the United States in 1939, Bonhoeffer “did not visit a black church.”20 Josiah Young, offering both perspectives of Bonhoeffer, takes this line of argument one step further when he suggests that Bonhoeffer’s attraction to Black people in America was not rooted in their connection to Africa but to the extent that they “bore the impress of the West.”21 This suggestion opens up another view of Bonhoeffer that locates his interactions abroad more firmly within a restricted Eurocentric perspective of the world.

From within this more critical portrait of Bonhoeffer’s life, there are a number of reasons for arguing that Bonhoeffer never broke free from the Eurocentric and nationalistic sensibilities so clearly observed in his early Barcelona lectures.22 Thomas Day, for example, sees an elitist view at work in Bonhoeffer’s essay “Heritage and Decay” from his Ethics.23 Young makes a similar argument with race in mind by pointing out how Bonhoeffer’s reflections from prison on the “world come of age” blindly move forward without any consideration of the far-reaching effects of colonialism or the racial fissures inherent in Bonhoeffer’s account of this brave new world.24 Young substantiates this claim by referencing a number of comments from Bonhoeffer’s later writings and speeches that wholly neglect Africa and that quickly dismiss those from the East.25 This alternative view of Bonhoeffer lends itself to another examination of the racial struggles Bonhoeffer faced at home against Aryanism for the sake of the Jews.

Post-Holocaust Jewish scholars have led the charge in establishing this more suspect view of Bonhoeffer’s defense of the Jews.26 In an article published in 1981, Stanley Rosenbaum reports that he searched Bonhoeffer’s works in vain for references about the Jews that are not “ignorantly patronizing or dogmatically conversionist.”27 In Bonhoeffer’s attempts to help the Jews, Rosenbaum contends that Bonhoeffer was a tragic victim of his time. Bonhoeffer’s efforts to help the Jews, in the end, capitulated to Christian polemics against Jews. For a Jew, Rosenbaum concludes, “Bonhoeffer is no saint” but “the best of a bad lot.”28 The Jewish scholar Albert Friedlander extends this argument to place the Western Christian Church as a whole into question. Friedlander suggests that the myth of Bonhoeffer’s sainthood was “created because the Church wanted reassurance that it, the Institution, was not a sinner.”29

On the heels of these Jewish criticisms of Bonhoeffer, Christian scholars have provided similar interpretations of his life. Kenneth Barnes argues that one cannot deny that Bonhoeffer fell into the very demeanor and biases of the Nazi party despite his intentions to oppose Nazism and defend the Jews.30 Stephen Ray Jr. offers an explanation of Barnes’ claim by suggesting that Bonhoeffer found himself in an “anti-Semitic language loop.”31 Additionally, Stephen Haynes provides a more damning critique of Bonhoeffer when he contends that the majority of Christian interpreters of Bonhoeffer fail to observe the continuity of traditional Christian views of anti-Semitism running throughout his corpus.32 Haynes argues that this anti-Semitism is seen in a theology riddled with expressions of deicide and supersessionism, present even in Bonhoeffer’s later works.33 Based on these critical accounts, the mystique of Bonhoeffer’s sainthood is tarnished with the flaws of a privileged individual, negatively shaped by the racial proclivities of his own time and place.

Bonhoeffer as Witness

Having both a positive and negative portrait of Bonhoeffer’s interactions with race in view helps demonstrate the difficulty of attempting to apply his life directly to the complex and ever-evolving problem of race. Possibly the only direct application that we may draw from his life is that dealing with race, as with any complex issue, is bound to receive praise from some and disapproval from others. Simply entering into a discussion about race is filled with tension and volatility, requiring a firmer foundation than success or failure, praise or disapproval, saint or sinner. When viewed in isolation, each interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s life is shortsighted. A positive reading of Bonhoeffer’s engagement with race lends itself to heartbreak, confusion, and anger as a person enters into the painful and repentant work of unraveling whiteness. On the other hand, a negative reading of Bonhoeffer’s dealings with race can foster helplessness and apathy as a person wrestles with the systemic breadth of whiteness. Each isolated approach, in its own way, allows the pervasive powers of whiteness to continue unabated.

This is why Bonhoeffer’s life should not be read as an end in itself but as a window into Christ’s call that pulls one into the messiness of addressing complex issues (such as whiteness) in the present moment. As Bonhoeffer himself wrote at the end of his life:

If one has completely renounced making something of oneself—whether it be a saint or converted sinner . . .—then one throws oneself completely into the arms of God, and this is what I call this-worldliness: living fully in the midst of life’s tasks, questions, successes and failures, experiences, and perplexities.34

If Bonhoeffer’s life and theology offer any claim, it is that faith in Christ drives one beyond speculations of saint or sinner and into participation with the living Christ. Faith looks only to Jesus Christ: “I no longer cast even a single glance on my own life, on the new image I bear,” Bonhoeffer writes. “For in the same moment that I would desire to see it, I would lose it.”35 The externality of Christ’s call expels every glance toward one’s own self-justification or self-condemnation, freeing one to enter with Christ into the muddled turmoil of world history from one’s particular place in it.36

Bonhoeffer’s own reflections demonstrate his struggle to enter the messiness of world history from his particular place of privilege. As he looked back on his life while in prison, Bonhoeffer wrote, “I wonder whether my excessive scrupulousness is not a negative side of bourgeois existence—simply that part of our lack of faith that remains hidden in times of security.”37 It is important to note that Bonhoeffer’s main concern in this reflection is not whether his privilege makes him a saint or a sinn...