Dietrich Bonhoeffer is widely celebrated by mainline Protestant (mostly white) Christians because he’s one of the rare public instances in which a white Christian has been on the right side of history. In standing up to the Nazis, Bonhoeffer is considered a modern day martyr.
But what’s not as publicly known is that Bonhoeffer found the strength to resist the Nazis during his time in Harlem. Studying at General Theological Seminary, located in nearby Morningside Heights, Bonhoeffer worked in the famous Abyssinian Baptist Church. It was at these places that Bonhoeffer first encountered the power of Black theology, the need of Black churches to liberate the image of Jesus Christ from their racist oppressors and to rebuild the institution into a haven for the marginalized.
Less a history text and more a theological one, Dr. Reggie L. Williams does an excellent job breaking down not just the transformation of Bonhoeffer’s theology (and personhood) but the theological witnessing of the Harlem Renaissance from such luminaries as Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., Langston Hughes, and W.E.B. Du Bois. In fact, I didn’t even know the title of the book came from Du Bois’ personal theology.
And while Williams doesn’t make Bonhoeffer to be the hero of the story, he shows how the man’s theology was gradually transformed from the wounded volkisch Christian nationalism of post-WWI Germany to the defiant resister of a man who came to find that Christ’s presence was with the least of these, especially but not limited to his Jewish siblings.
Yet just as Williams does not venerate Bonhoeffer, he also does not dismiss him. His emphasis on the man’s theological evolution is that Bonhoeffer was open to growth, to empathy, to change, to (as he was a Lutheran) reform. And this is a lesson in the book for white Christians like myself: our theology can always evolve, can adapt, can grow beyond just the nationalist underpinnings and tranquilizing drug of gradualism on which it has historically been fed.
This is a scholarly text but it is also a divine one. Williams’ words meet the feel of the urgent moment both Bonhoeffer and the Black residents of Harlem found themselves in, though their experiences are much different. It’s an urgency that can be felt today.