RACE & THE GOSPEL
When you think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, what immediately comes to mind? Perhaps costly discipleship, the German resistance, or the Confessing Church. Only rarely would someone associate him with the Black church in America, Black theology, or Harlem. Yet, Bonhoeffer became the hero and discipleship leader we know today precisely because of his time worshiping, serving, and learning within the Black church. In fact, when reflecting later on his spiritual state prior to his sojourn in New York, he bluntly stated, “I had not yet become a Christian.”
Bonhoeffer spent a year of his theological training at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where he became close friends with Al Fisher, an African American classmate from a lineage of Baptist clergy. Bonhoeffer accompanied Fisher to Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and was deeply moved by the experience. He marveled that he was “increasingly discovering greater religious power and originality among the Negroes,” and noted that he had “only heard a genuine proclamation of the gospel from a Negro.” This transformative period led him to realize that Jesus and race justice are intrinsically linked.
While Bonhoeffer experienced the spiritual power of the Black church, he simultaneously made salient observations about the American church as a whole. As a foreigner, he easily identified deep-seated contradictions, warning that for American Christendom, the racial issue was a grave problem for the future. In a country that touted freedom and equality, Bonhoeffer was disturbed by the widespread blindness to the double standards facing people of color, making the race and gospel justice discussion more critical than ever.
Bonhoeffer wrote about two incompatible versions of Jesus in America—a “Black Christ” and a “white Christ” who were pitted against each other in a destructive rift. It was clear that Bonhoeffer related far more profoundly to the Black Christ—not as a recrafting of Jesus into a man of African descent, but in understanding Jesus to identify as a co-sufferer with the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed. It was in the Black church that Bonhoeffer began to understand discipleship to include costly suffering in solidarity with disenfranchised people. And it was in the Black church that one of his friends surmised that they may have witnessed “a beginning of his identification with the oppressed which played a role in the decision that led to his death.” It’s time for us to learn more about Bonhoeffer’s enlightening journey with the Black church—Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance by Reggie L. Williams is an outstanding place to begin.
We are living in a time of unprecedented racial upheaval and racial awakening. As we do, we must consider why believers should deepen their understanding of racial realities and injustices. Like Bonhoeffer, we should do so as a matter of discipleship, to experience more of Jesus Christ, who so deeply identifies with those who suffer. We also should do so to open our eyes to all kinds of injustices everywhere that we might otherwise miss.
Unlike so many of his German colleagues, Bonhoeffer applied what he learned about American racism back in Germany in a surprising way: through his advocacy for the Jewish people and his resistance to the Nazi regime. As you go deeper in your own racial discipleship journey, may you also be surprised by how God works—both to bring you closer to him and to bring greater shalom to the world.
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