All I want for Christmas is… Dietrich Bonhoeffer?
If you pay attention to Christians online (and good for you if you don’t!), you know that 20th-century German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer is all the rage right now. There are two reasons for this, which are related to each other:
There is a new movie (from a conservative evangelical perspective) about him called Bonhoeffer.
For a scathing review of this movie, read this Christian Century essay by Mac Loftin.
There is a tumultuous political moment in the US, and since Bonhoeffer was morphed into some sort of moral hero after his execution, people on all sides of political and religious spectrums are claiming him as an exemplar.
For a more fair and realistic assessment of Bonhoeffer’s legacy, read this Christian Century essay by Victoria Barnett.
As for me, I tried reading some of Bonhoeffer’s writings years ago. Maybe I was too immature then, or maybe something was lost in translation, or maybe the guy is boring AF, but for whatever reason I just couldn’t get into it.
What I could get into was a book by theologian Reggie Williams called Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus. In this book, Williams closely examines the two years in the 1930s when Bonhoeffer lived in the US while visiting Union Theological Seminary in NYC. During that time, Bonhoeffer became immersed in a Black church in Harlem (Abyssinian Baptist Church, which still exists). Williams contrasts Bonhoeffer’s writings before and after these two years and finds that he had some profound shifts in his faith perspective.
One major shift that Williams describes is that Bonhoeffer’s Christology came to embrace a Black Christ, one who suffered alongside and resisted alongside the Black Americans who were living under systemic racial injustice. Bonhoeffer scholar Victoria Barnett, in the article linked above, quotes a letter the pastor wrote 10 years after his stint in New York: “We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short, from the perspective of the suffering.”
I have shared at Harbor a few times how my journey was transformed by my friendship with two Black men in Pittsburgh. After the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, they shared with me about the sorrow, the rage, the trauma tied up in their bodies and minds in the aftermath of police brutality against Black people. What happened for me, to paraphrase Bonhoeffer, is that I for once learned to see the events of US history from below. From the perspective of the oppressed and the suffering.
So I hope that as Bonhoeffer continues making the rounds on social media and bookshelves and movie theaters, we might set aside the fake version of him and the hero-worshiping. Instead may we focus on his earnest attempt to live faithfully in a time of intense evil. And on the transformative value of friendships and communities that transcend and transgresses boundaries of privilege, race, class, religion, gender, and sexuality.
