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The following is my final paper for the Bonhoeffer Seminar I took with Rev. Dr. Katie Day at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia!
Enjoy!
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Josiah R. Armstrong
Dr. Katie Day
The Bonhoeffer Seminar
28 April 2015
Who
is Jesus Christ for Us Today?:
Bonhoeffer’s “Theology of Ferguson”
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), perhaps the most influential Protestant theologian and
pastor of our time, has been claimed by many different communities. He has been
claimed as a patriotic martyr and war hero, as an Anabaptist-type progressive
pacifist thinker, as a champion of youth, as a “death of God” theologian, a
fundamentalist Evangelical preacher, an orthodox Lutheran theologian, etc.
Bonhoeffer has been the unfortunate victim of “pedestal theology” and Christian
hero worship, an insidious form of idolatry that claimed such giants as C.S.
Lewis, Bob Dylan, Mel Gibson, and Jesus Christ himself. With the continued
insistence of the Western Church to claim, mold, and shape Bonhoeffer into a
tool for our own theologies and self-serving agendas, we have drowned out the
question Bonhoeffer is repeatedly asking from beyond the gallows of the
Flossenburg concentration camp. We are unable to hear the question Bonhoeffer
asks in the face of our ivory tower theologies, our comfortable Western
sensibilities, and our insistence on shoving him into a theological and
ecclesiological mold that is simply not his. We
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are unable to hear
Dietrich Bonhoeffer ask contemporary Christian persons of the West and all over
the world, “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?”
Bonhoeffer’s
question possesses a certain sense of urgency to it. It is an urgency that
reflects his own faith journey.
“What
keeps gnawing at me is the question, what is Christianity, or who is Christ
actually for us today? The age when we could tell people that with words – whether
with theological or pious words – is past, as is the age of inwardness and of
conscience, and that means the age of religion altogether. (DBWE 8, III/137)”[1]
We must remember that
Bonhoeffer’s own Christianity was a “work in progress” throughout his life, and
he did not sense himself to be a “true Christian,” so to speak, until he
witnessed the oppression of God’s marginalized children. Whether the Jews of
Germany, the black community of New York, or even the Christian pastors and
seminarians of Finkenwalde, Bonhoeffer
encountered Karl Barth’s “wholly Other” God in their weaknesses and
vulnerability. His dear friend, the Frenchman Jean Lassere who he met while
doing his Sloane Fellowship at Union Theological Seminary, introduced him to a
pure, fresh reading of the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of St. Matthew. It
was through this unfamiliar reading of our Christ’s Sermon on the Mount as a
call to pacifistic discipleship, the Barthian view of the wholly Other, the
experience of truly human community at Finkenwalde, his underground seminary of
which he was founder and devoted leader, and his exposure to Albert Franklin
Fisher’s black church that forced him to
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quite simply ask the
question, “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?” and begin actually living that
question in the flesh and blood experiences of the everyday.
The
question is a question for the ages, and it is the very question we can hear
screaming in desperation in the voices of black mothers and children from the
streets of contemporary Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland. It may be
that this question is more than just a “who” question. Perhaps it has become
more of a “where” question, reflecting Bonhoeffer’s own period of despair in
the Tegel prison in Germany. The double-question of “Who is Jesus Christ for us
today?” and “Where is Jesus Christ for us today?” is the question Bonhoeffer
found central to the life of faith as it is lived in this world, concretely and
tangibly. The question remains and it
does not gently ask, but strongly demands a response of the Christian,
especially in the face of repeated systemic and ecclesial injustice, racism,
and violence.
After many years of study and formation as a pastor,
theologian, and human being, Bonhoeffer eventually developed what some would
refer to as a “new theology”[2]
that was responsible for what he would later call “religionless Christianity.”[3]
I will contend that Bonhoeffer’s new theology, birthed in Tegel prison and
revealed in his writings in his Letters
and Papers from Prison, has its roots in a deeper sense of formation gifted
to him in the streets of Harlem, New York City and the sanctuary of Abyssinian
Baptist Church. The young scholar and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer entered
New York City in 1930 on Sloane Fellowship to study at Union Theological
Seminary, a place he would criticize for not possessing any theology
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at all and devoting
themselves to “time-wasting chatter.”[4]
While studying at Union and serving a couple of white American parishes,
Bonhoeffer became disenchanted and disturbed by the secular, humanistic
theology of glory he saw disguised as Christianity. It was Al Franklin Fisher,
a black seminarian and fellow student at Union, who introduced him to Harlem
and its culture and it was that friendship and experience that gave him a
clearer understanding of a living Christian faith that connects Jesus with
suffering.
In
the whirlwind of thunderous applause, a call and response homiletic, and the
spirituals of the suffering black community, Bonhoeffer was forced to see a
Church that worshipped TWO separate “Jesus Christs,” the Black Jesus and the
White Christ. Reggie L. Williams, author of the tremendously revelatory book Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus and whose work
inspired this very paper topic, asks his own readers to see that it is this
very encounter with the Black Jesus and the White Christ in Harlem that forces
Bonhoeffer to examine his own Christian theology and make a choice to become
more than just a theologian, but a truly faithful Christian disciple.[5]
Bonhoeffer is pushed by his encounters in the white American parish and in the
black American church to compare the vulnerable, fluid, and relational
character of the Gospel versus the analytical, evaluative, and domineering
Christianity of empire and colony. “The empathy the Christian needs is an
empathy that is a prosocial and inductive encounter with the other.”[6]
Bonhoeffer’s own Christology becomes centered in this encounter with “the
Other.” His description of Jesus
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was Stellvertretrung or empathic, vicarious
representation. The way the Christian experiences this Christ is in the social
encounter. The Christian disciple must enter their neighbor’s context.
Bonhoeffer, a true student of Karl
Barth, sees the challenge of Christ in his own life to begin making concrete
DECISIONS with his life in the world, a word that tends to make confessional
Lutherans quite anxious. “It is not by chance that the word ‘decision’ was one
of the most important words in Bonhoeffer’s life and theology.”[7]
It is with this Christian matter of concrete decision-making that Bonhoeffer
wishes to concern himself, and he does, thus pushing back on the Barthian
theology of the Christian God as wholly Other and grounding the God who IS
Other in human life, but only as it is lived in our world and in our time.
Bonhoeffer’s God is NOT some deity who “plays about” outside of time and space.
Bonhoeffer is, in a sense, the greatest of the modern Protestant theologians
because he is a “theist’s theist,” so to speak. For Bonhoeffer and (hopefully)
for the Church, God is simply, fully, and even complexly Jesus Christ and Jesus
Christ alone. A life lived in Jesus Christ is a life lived in constant
decision.
Decision-making makes disciples of
the Jesus Christ of the Sermon on the Mount who are only truly of Christ and in Christ if they are entering into concrete, broken, human
community. Oftentimes, for Bonhoeffer, this community WAS the community of the
Other, but not in the Barthian sense. This is the Other in the sense that black
Americans are the Other (you will notice I did not use the word “were.” This is
intentional.), Jewish persons are the Other, and for our sensibilities, women,
queer-bodied persons, and Muslim persons. Human community is, by Bonhoeffer’s
account, the only context in which Christian people can make actual, concrete
decisions. In his monumental work about Christians living in community, Life Together, written
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concerning the
community he built with the Confessing Church seminarians of Finkenwalde,
Bonhoeffer says,
“It is not simply to be taken for
granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians.
Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. At the end all his disciples
deserted him. On the Cross he was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and
mockers. For this cause he had come, to bring peace to the enemies of God. So
the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes. There is his
commission, his work” (emphasis added).[8]
Bonhoeffer’s
claim, in a nutshell, might read like, “If you divorce the gospel from
Christian community, it ceases to be the gospel.” Reggie L. Williams highlights
the vital importance of Fisher and Lassere, in particular, in Bonhoeffer’s own
journey to understanding the Christian living in “the thick of foes.” Fisher
had experienced the poverty and racism inherent in the American race struggle
and in Jim Crow. Preaching the gospel, for Fisher and his community at
Abyssinian Baptist Church, was a means of resistance and survival. For Fisher,
white American supremacy was something that the Church, above all others,
needed to be addressing, but the privileged white liberals did not care to
shift their attentions. Fisher introduced Bonhoeffer to a style of Christian
worship that had, at its core, a different view of society itself. The
awareness of human suffering within the worship itself drew Bonhoeffer’s
attention immediately to the urgency of the suffering Christ and the problems
inherent in white apathy and terrorism. When the threat of death is constant
and real, it is hard for the true Christian disciple to ignore it. Bonhoeffer
witnessed the white terrorism aimed at one of Fisher’s
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friends, blaming
him, due to his race, of raping a white woman. The response was lynching –
something Fisher and his community denounced as terrorism. In America, there
was “a white racist fiction of subhumanity”[9]
that Bonhoeffer did not experience in Harlem. The black Church of the Harlem
Renaissance was living out a counter-narrative to white American racism.
The
“fiction of subhumanity” was not completely new to the young Bonhoeffer, as he
had just come from the quickly growing glorification of the one pure Volk in Germany. The Christianity of
Germany was also becoming centered in and on the concept of a pure Volk. This lined up actually quite
nicely with the traditional theology of orders
of creation, taught to Bonhoeffer by his German teachers. But, Bonhoeffer
came to argue that the Volk
absolutely could not be the center of Christianity, but rather Jesus. This
wasn’t just a recommendation on Bonhoeffer’s
part. He stressed its urgent significance. Williams contends that this
argument of Bonhoeffer, however, was missing “critical substance.”[10]
In the beginning, contrary to what the current church may wish to believe about
him, Bonhoeffer defended the Volk of
Germany, and it was his journey into Harlem that helped him see Luther’s
explanation of an anti-Christian “theology of glory” at the center of German
Christianity’s Volk. Bonhoeffer’s
exposure to the Black Jesus aka the Jesus who suffers and is wounded while
worshipping with Fisher at Abyssinian forced him to make a firm decision about
the kind of Christian he was actually going to be. In other words, was he willing
to finally answer the question “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?” with his
life? Bonhoeffer’s firm decision to choose the Black Jesus and to live a life
devoted to being a disciple of the Black Jesus and NOT the White Christ was a
huge step for
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him. This
decision is the kind that makes Christian disciples, those who will abandon all
to love and serve the preached Christ of faith within the context of sinful
human community.
“At the same time, Bonhoeffer
acknowledged that following Christ in unstinting obedience to the gospel call
is to endure suffering patterned after Jesus’ own experience. He cites Jesus’
searing reminder to would-be followers: ‘If any want to become my followers,
let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’ (Mark 8:34,
NRSV). In sobering, unforgettable words, Bonhoeffer tells his readers that
every Christian worthy of the name must bear the Cross: ‘Whenever Christ calls
us, his call leads to death.’ This ‘death’ of the Christian assumes all the
forms one finds in belonging to a Christian church community… ‘Discipleship,’
he wrote, ‘is being bound to the suffering Christ.’”[11]
The
Gospel-centered language of sin and salvation was present at Abyssinian Baptist
Church and the “white liberal modernist hope for human achievement”[12]
was not. Jesus Christ was truly worshipped and praised and black suffering was
identified with the suffering of Jesus. There at Abyssinian, Bonhoeffer found
Christ existing as community where Jesus was “cosufferer and the gospel spoke
authoritatively”[13]
into the lives of the people gathered to worship. To be the truly decisive
Christian disciple, then, was to share in Christ’s sufferings for the whole
world, and perhaps especially where
Christ was the suffering Other. While Bonhoeffer’s sensibilities are certainly
rooted in Laserre’s interpretation of the Sermon on the
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Mount, they are
most firmly founded in Luther’s theology of the cross as it is articulated in
the Heidelberg Disputation of 1519. One imagines that even the pioneer of
liberation theology, Gustavo Gutierrez, is simply echoing Bonhoeffer’s call to
suffer as Christ in community for the sake of the other in his “preferential
option for the poor.”
The
true Jesus Christ of faith, then, for Bonhoeffer is the Jesus who suffers for
the sake of the world, in the world, and with the world. This proclamation
about our Lord and Savior is a “game-changer,” so to speak, because it forces
the Christian person to acknowledge that it is not that we simply encounter the
weak, vulnerable, suffering, present Jesus within
the community of Christian sinner-saints, but, this broken, wounded Jesus is the community of Christian
sinner-saints.
So, then, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s answer
to his own question, “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?” is that Jesus Christ
is the human being existing solely for the other. It
is not, as some would suggest, that Bonhoeffer is calling the Christian
disciple to “do what is right, do good works, and lead a moral life” because,
when he looked at the Church and how it existed in the world and for the world
as the broken Christ, the concept or idea of a “Christian ethic” terrified him.
A Christian ethic would put the ownness on the Christian apart from Jesus
Christ to “do good” and live morally. For Bonhoeffer, dividing the Christian
life into ethical categories was detrimental to the Church and its witness
within the human community. In the spirit of Luther, Bonhoeffer’s concern about
corrupt human sinfulness and the Augustinian notion of in curvatus in se kept him from trusting ethical ideals, for it was
these very ideals that had lead the “Christians” of Germany to put the one pure
Volk at the center of Christianity
and the white American Christians to put humanistic achievement at the center.
Christian ethical ideals and
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ethical
categories, for Bonhoeffer’s sensibilities, do a certain kind of violence to
the gospel and push the Christian away from discipleship and decision. “Men of conscience fend off all alone the
superior power of predicaments that demand decision” (DBWE 6, II/79).
Bonhoeffer
feared, deeply, that ethical ideals and principles would push the Christian
away from the broken, sinful human community, the very heart of decision,
because, ultimately, brokenness and sinfulness terrify the Christian who
fancies him/herself a moralist. The Christian ethical idealist wishes to flee
reality.
“The will of God, as it was revealed and
fulfilled in Jesus Christ, embraces the whole of reality. There is access to
this wholeness, without being torn apart by manifold influences, only through
faith in Jesus Christ, ‘in whom the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily’
(Col. 2:9; 1:19), ‘through whom everything is reconciled, whether on earth or
in heaven” (Col. 1:20), whose body, that is, the church-community, is the
fullness of One who fills all in all (Eph. 1:23). Faith in this Jesus Christ is
the single source of all good” (DBWE 6, I/75).
A Christian
ethic, if there even is such a thing, is Jesus Christ and him crucified for our
sins. Anything outside of this is NOT Christianity, because it is not human and
it is not Christ. In this sense, then, Jesus Christ IS reality itself. To be a
Christian disciple is to be fully human in the reality of our present world.
Jesus
Christ as reality, Jesus Christ as church-community, Jesus Christ as suffering,
wounded Other. This Lord and Savior, this God that Bonhoeffer worships and
proclaims, is the same God who was persecuted, tortured, gassed, starved,
burned alive, and executed by the Nazis, who was lynched by mobs of angry white
Christians, and who
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depressingly
wished to “end it all” in the cells of Tegel prison. THIS God, this Christ, is,
in Williams’ words, “Bonhoeffer’s
Black Jesus.” This Jesus changed the lives of not only black Christians, but,
coupled with Lassere’s philosophy of Beaditudinal peace and justice, Bonhoeffer
was able to make this the core of all he believed about Jesus, his gospel, and
the vital importance of Christian theology as resistance, and not for glory’s
sake, but resistance in the midst of suffering, because this new Jesus, the
Black Jesus, was wounded.
In
our efforts to better answer Bonhoeffer’s ageless question, “Who is Jesus
Christ for us today?” we must NOT disregard one of the primary differences
between the Black Jesus and the White Christ that Bonhoeffer encountered in New
York. One of them is, in fact, black. Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, at the risk of
sounding tacky, is, in a word, the precursor to the current #BlackLivesMatter
movement through social media. #BlackLivesMatter is Jesus Christ as empathic,
vicarious representation. #BlackLivesMatter is Jesus Christ as Kollektivperson[14],
#BlackLivesMatter is Jesus Christ as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric
Garner, and Freddie Gray, all names we recognize. #BlackLivesMatter is Jesus
Christ as Baltimore. #BlackLivesMatter is Jesus Christ as Ferguson. “Reasonable”
white Christians have said that #BlackLivesMatter is a problem and it should be
#AllLivesMatter for the sake of the whole world. This is morality and a
sensible ethic. But, as Bonhoeffer says of reasonable Christians,
“The failure of reasonable people is appalling; they cannot manage to see either
the abyss of evil or the abyss of holiness. With the best intentions they
believe that, with a little reason, they can pull back together a structure
that has come apart at the joints. In their
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defective vision they want to be fair to
both sides, and so they are crushed between the colliding forces without having
accomplished anything at all. Bitterly disappointed that
the world is so unreasonable, they see
themselves condemned to ineffectiveness. They withdraw in resignation or fall
helplessly captive to the stronger party” (DBWE, 6, I/78).
This was
precisely the problem with the Nazi party of Germany. The reliance on a
reasonable Christian ethic drove the Reich Church to stand by and watch as
Kristallnacht unfolded around them. The reliance on a reasonable Christian
ethic keeps clergy, seminarians, and comfortable Western parishioners behind
their white picket fences and Twitter feeds, refusing to get their “hands
dirty,” so to speak, when violence and need erupts around them. When injustice
comes knocking in the form of LGBTQIA inequality, the silencing of women, and
local bus ads depicting anti-Muslim sentiment, do we do that which is most
“reasonable” and silently contribute funds to local campaigns or food to local
drives or sign petitions and then return to our comfortable lives, or, like
Bonhoeffer, are we willing to make the decision to encounter Christ in the
“abyss of holiness” by entering into relationship with members of suffering,
wounded communities? Jesus Christ of reality and for the world calls those who
would follow him to make the decision to enter the abyss of holiness and die.
The death of Cross and Resurrection is one that demands a disciple “gets her
hands dirty.”
#BlackLivesMatter dictates that
embodied lives matter to God and these bodies are black. To turn the campaign
into #AllLivesMatter is to turn our backs, comfortably so, on the blackness of
our neighbors. So, yes, while #AllLivesMatter is reasonable and true, it is not
representative of the embodied Jesus Christ of reality existing solely for the
other. I confess, even now, that as I write this academic paper for a seminary
grade, I am a young, white, Christian American male
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sitting in my
comfortable apartment feeling outrage about the violence perpetrated against my
black brothers and sisters, and yet, I have done nothing about it. Bonhoeffer’s
word “decision” is heard from beyond his grave and it haunts me daily.
“In flight from public controversy this
person or that reaches the sanctuary of a private
virtuousness. Such people neither steal, nor murder, nor commit adultery,
but do good according to their abilities. But in voluntarily renouncing public
life, these people know exactly how to observe the permitted boundaries that
shield them from conflict. They must close their eyes and ears to the injustice
around them. Only at the cost of self-deception can they keep their private
blamelessness clean from the stains of responsible action in the world. In all
that they do, what they fail to do will not let them rest” (DBWE, 6, II/80).
George Zimmerman shoots and kills
Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. Darren Wilson
shoots and kills Michael Brown on August 9, 2014. Daniel Pantaleo chokes the
life out of Eric Garner on July 17, 2014. Caesar Goodson, Garrett Miller,
Edward Nero, William Porter, Brian Rice, and Alicia White arrest Freddie Gray
and beat him into a coma. He dies not long after from spinal cord injuries on
April 19, 2015. Sanford, Flordia. Ferguson, Missouri. Staten Island, New York.
Baltimore, Maryland. All real people and all real communities created and loved
by God. Make no mistake, the very thing that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
died for and the very thing that Frank Fisher resisted with his black brothers
and sisters at Abyssinian Baptist Church is still thriving in our country with
an evil that is incomprehensible and repugnant. Is this the Black Jesus
Williams speaks of so boldly in his book? Is this the Christ that Bonhoeffer is
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talking
about? Are these the communities where this Christ is found, in “the thick of
foes?” As Bonhoeffer beautifully says in his Ethics:
“Ecce homo – behold, what a
human being! In Christ the reconciliation of the world with God took place. The
world will be overcome not by destruction but by reconciliation. Not ideals or
programs, not conscience, duty, responsibility, or virtue, but only the
consummate love of God can meet and overcome reality. Again this is
accomplished not by a general idea of love, but by the love of God really lived
in Jesus Christ. This love of God for the world does not withdraw from reality
into noble souls detached from the world, but experiences and suffers the
reality of the world at its worst. The world exhausts its rage on the body of
Jesus Christ. But the martyred one forgives the world its sins. Thus
reconciliation takes place. Ecce homo” (DBWE, 6, II/83).
It is
in Jesus Christ that this reconciliation between human beings takes place. This
is the reconciliation at the heart of God and it is experienced in the
prosocial context where Jesus is “cosufferer” and his “gospel speaks
authoritatively.”[15]
Bonhoeffer is writing his Ethics as a
way to finally say all that he has attempted to say throughout his short life
and ministry. It is his magnum opus. It is his manifesto. It is where we find
tremendous gospel and a heart broken open for the world as it REALLY and TRULY
is. He is sick and tired, as is made clear throughout Ethics, of the attempt by Christian idealists to wish for, pray
for, and attempt to make a world that isn’t the one we live in presently. Jesus
Christ does not love and save ideals and virtues, he loves and saves real human
people, even when they are experiencing or at their absolute worst. Those
listed above are “the world exhausting its rage” on Trayvon Martin, Michael
Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray, and, in so doing, they have exhausted
that rage “on the body of Jesus
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Christ”
himself. This is the very Black Jesus Bonhoeffer discovered suffering,
resisting, worshipping, and wounded in Harlem and his name just so happens to
be Trayvon, Michael, Eric, and Freddie.
The decision the Christian disciple
makes then, is ALWAYS a decision for Jesus, and if it is a decision for Jesus,
it is a decision for the other. But, Bonhoeffer’s “decision” was not merely an
intellectual exercise. It was not an exercise in thought or words, it was pure
act. It was the Sermon on the Mount embodied. It is, for us, the love and hope
of Jesus Christ proclaimed to the oppressed and downtrodden. “But faith is
never alone. As surely as it is the genuine presence of Christ, so surely love
and hope are with it. Faith would be a false, illusory, hypocritical self-invention,
which never justifies, were it not accompanied by love and hope” (DBWE, 6, V/148).
How, then, do we in our contemporary Church make the decision to proclaim the
love and hope of Jesus Christ in the midst of the racism and violence
perpetrated by our brothers and sisters in government, the church, and in law
enforcement? Bonhoeffer might ask us to begin with ourselves. Where and in what
ways in our lives are we ignoring our privilege and exercising anti-social,
“private virtue?” Where is the “death” that Jesus Christ calls us to present in
our lives of faith? Does our reality look like Christ, that is to say, does our
reality look like the Black Jesus who is wounded? I fear that our parishes,
seminaries, and ministries look more like the White Christ of the “white
liberal modernist hope for human achievement” than the Jesus Christ of the
Gospels, who takes sin and salvation for human people seriously.
What have contemporary churches done
in the face of the racial injustice in places like Ferguson and Baltimore? @FaithinFerguson
is a Ferguson-based Tweeter writing about the intersections of race, religion,
and social justice. He/She calls the Twitter
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feed “Theology
of Ferguson.” One blogger wrote that white churches did absolutely NOTHING to
respond to the racial injustice and violence in Baltimore until the violent
riots started to inflict thousands of dollars of property damage to their homes
and churches.[16]
Is this what it takes to act on behalf of the helpless, suffering Other?
Property damage? @FaithinFerguson Tweets, “Do I believe in Christ? It depends.
Do you mean a white capitalist Christ who supports your hierarchies? Then, no.”
He/She also Tweets, “I don’t want Christ to have died for me. Christ should
have died for you and us.”[17]
Too many Jewish names to mention are
silenced by Nazis on Kristallnacht[18],
November 9 and 10, 1938. Various locations throughout Gemany and Austria. The
German Lutheran church stands by and does absolutely nothing. Frank Fisher’s
friend is lynched by an angry white mob in New York after being falsely accused
of the rape of a white woman. Bonhoeffer sees the pictures. Something deep
within Bonhoeffer, the safe, white, privileged, male intellectual, is stirred
to action. The precise difference between worshipping the Black Jesus and
worshipping the White Christ is the difference between following and remaining
immobile. Those who worship the Black Jesus, the suffering Jesus Christ of
reality, also follow the Black Jesus into the abyss of evil AND into the abyss of holiness. There is no other
way for Bonhoeffer. We either choose to believe in the Jesus Christ who saves
us and suffers in our reality or we don’t. The evidence is in the DECISION, or
indecision, to FOLLOW. There are no extremes. There are no separate realms. The
radical idealist wishes for a world that does not exist. The compromising
humanist wishes for security that does not exist. Bonhoeffer tells us, rather
directly, that
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“Radicalism
hates time. Compromise hates eternity.
Radicalism
hates patience. Compromise hates decision.
Radicalism
hates wisdom. Compromise hates simplicity.
Radicalism
hates measure. Compromise hates the immeasurable.
Radicalism
hates the real. Compromise hates the word” (DBWE, 6, V/156).
The Christian’s (particularly the
Lutheran Christian) tendency is to follow Luther’s call to live in a world
divided into Two Kingdoms, Two Swords, or Two Realms. Bonhoeffer is deeply
concerned with ideas of divided realms. The common critique of Luther’s Two
Kingdoms doctrine is that it quite easily lends itself to insidious forms of
quietism. This is the very thing that terrifies Bonhoeffer. When the Christian
moves to extremes or differing realms, things can easily become static. It is
the quietist Christian that is, in a sense, not a Christian at all, but rather
a theologian of glory.
“As long as Christ and the world are
conceived as two realms [Raume] bumping against and repelling each other, we
are left only the following options. Giving up on reality as a whole, either we
place ourselves in one of the two realms, wanting Christ without the world or
the world without Christ – and in both cases we deceive ourselves…There are not
two realities, but only one reality, and that is God’s reality revealed in
Christ in the reality of the world. Partaking in Christ, we stand at the same
time in the reality of God and in the reality of the world. The reality of
Christ embraces the reality of the world in itself” (DBWE, 6, I/57, 58).
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Bonhoeffer’s
Christology is never lofty and it is never unattainable. Bonhoeffer’s
articulation of Jesus Christ is concrete, tangible, in reality, the whole of
reality, the church-community itself, namely, Jesus Christ FOR THE WORLD and
nothing else. Bonhoeffer will own that Karl Barth’s articulation of God as
“wholly Other” is reliable and sound theology, but, Bonhoeffer insists that the
Christian disciple take it a step further. The true Christian disciple always
sees God as wholly Other in the world,
that is to say, God as Jesus Christ as concrete, broken, human community in the
reality of the world.
The most important component,
perhaps, for Bonhoeffer’s own “Theology of Ferguson” is an understanding that
the Christian disciple is called to see things “from below” in the very way he
articulated in his tremendously powerful and deeply impacting essay “After Ten
Years: A Reckoning Made at New Year 1943” from Tegel prison.
“There remains an experience of
incomparable value. We have for once learnt to see the great events of world
history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the
maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled – in short, from the
perspective of those who suffer. The important thing is that neither bitterness
nor envy should have gnawed at the heart during this time, that we should have
come to look with new eyes at matters great and small, sorrow and joy, strength
and weakness, that our perception of generosity, humanity, justice and mercy
should have become clearer, freer, less corruptible. We have to learn that
personal suffering is a more effective key, a more rewarding principle for
exploring the world in thought and action than personal good fortune. The
perspective from below must not become the partisan possession of those who are
eternally dissatisfied; rather, we must do justice to life in all its
dimensions from
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a higher satisfaction, whose foundation
is beyond any talk of ‘from below’ or ‘from above.’ This is the way in which we
may affirm it.”[19]
The embracing of our reality, as
Christian disciples, is to embrace it in ALL of its fullness. Under no
illusions, Bonhoeffer was very aware that a large and sizable portion of that
fullness was the place he called “from below.” It is this Below that is the
place from which Jesus Christ preaches his Sermon on the Mount, probably the
text of Christian Scripture that had the greatest impact on Bonhoeffer’s life
and ministry, more than any other.
“Blessed
are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those
who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed
are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and
thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they
will receive mercy. Blessed are
the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed
are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted
for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you
and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my
account. Rejoice and be glad, for
your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the
prophets who were before you.”[20]
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The voices,
faces, and names from Below. The poor in spirit. Those who mourn. The meek.
Those who hunger. The reviled and persecuted. Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown,
Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray. This is only the tip of a larger “iceberg,” and
we know it.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s question for
the ages, “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?” sheds the words, doctrines, and
theologies of “religion” and enters into a deeper relationship of
understanding. The aforementioned answer to Bonhoeffer’s question is that Jesus
Christ is the human being existing solely for the sake of the Other. Thus, the
life of the Christian involves decision and risk. It involves death and
relationship within the context of God’s reality aka the concrete Christ of
faith. It demands a choice, again a decision, between the Black Jesus who
suffers and gives life to the world or the White Christ who promotes and
succeeds and gives emptiness to the world. Bonhoeffer’s “Theology of Ferguson”
is a call to the Christian to make a decision to get their “hands dirty” in this world for the sake of the poor
in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the hungry, and the reviled and persecuted
who live and work from Below. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s haunting, stirring, and
empowering voice calls to us from beyond the Flossenburg gallows to stop simply
speaking privately and act and be and live publicly, within the context of
Christ. Christ the church-community. Christ from Below. The Black Jesus. The
one who suffers for the world and in the
world.
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Works
Cited
Bonhoeffer,
Dietrich. Life Together (Harper &
Row Publishers, Inc.: New York, 1954).
Bonhoeffer,
Dietrich. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works,
Volume 6: Ethics (Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 2009).
Bonhoeffer,
Dietrich “After Ten Years: A Reckoning Made at New Year 1943”
from Letters
and Papers from Prison (Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.: New York, 1971).
Gibson,
Katie. “White Christians Respond to Baltimore”
from Keep
Your Eyes on the Prize
Kelly,
Geffrey B. “Christlike Responsibility: Grace Abounds, But It Doesn’t Come
Cheap”
from Weavings,
July/August 2008, XXII: 4.
The Holy Gospel According to St.
Matthew 5.3-12
from The
New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version,
Fourth Edition ed.
Michael Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Schlingensiepen,
Ferdinand.
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance
(T & T Clark: New York, 2010),
351.
Williams,
Reggie L. Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus:
Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance
(Baylor University Press: Texas, 2014).
[1]
Ferdinand Schlingensiepen. Dietrich
Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance
(T
& T Clark: New York, 2010), 351.
[2]
Ibid.
[3]
Ibid, 350.
[4]
Ibid, 63.
[5]
Reggie L. Williams. Bonhoeffer’s Black
Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance
(Baylor University Press:
Texas, 2014).
[6]
Ibid.
[7]
Schlingensiepen, 324.
[8]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Life Together
(Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.: New York, 1954), 17.
[9]
Ibid.
[10]
Williams.
[11]
Geffrey B. Kelly. “Christlike Responsibility: Grace Abounds, But It Doesn’t
Come Cheap”
from Weavings, July/August 2008, XXII: 4.
[12]Williams.
[13]
Williams.
[14]
Humanity combined in one. (German)
[15] Williams.
[16]
Katie Gibson. “White Christians Respond to Baltimore”
from Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
[17]
@FaithinFerguson. Theology of Ferguson (https://twitter.com/FaithInFerguson).
[18]
“Night of broken glass” (German).
[19]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer. “After Ten Years: A Reckoning Made at New Year 1943”
from Letters and Papers from Prison (Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.: New
York, 1971).
[20] The
Holy Gospel According to St. Matthew 5.3-12
from The
New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version,
Fourth Edition ed. Michael Coogan
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
