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Books by Bonhoeffer
No Rusty Swords /
The Cost of Discipleship /
Letters and Papers from Prison /
Sanctorum Communio
A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings /
Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible /
Ethics
No Difference in the Fare: Dietrich
Bonhoeffer and the Problem of Racism
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First
We Take Manhattan Then We Take Berlin: Bonhoeffer's New
York
Excerpts and Notes by Scott
Holland
Bonhoeffer's Post-Doctoral Work at Union
Theological Seminary, New York (1930-1931)—"He did not understand at
the time that it would be a poetics of place and an entanglement
with people that would produce this serious theology."
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At Union, Bonhoeffer took the
course "Ethical Viewpoints in Modern Literature" from
the Detroit socialist preacher, Reinhold Niebuhr, who
came to Union in 1928 and taught "Applied
Theology." Niebuhr's course, according to Scott Holland,
"was perhaps the first class in an American seminary to
turn to literature as a source for doing applied theology."
"For Bonhoeffer, it was
the beginning of an ethics instructed by aesthetics. Bonhoeffer
did theology in conversation with James Weldon Johnson's
Autobiography
of an Ex-Colored Man, W. E. B. Du Bois's
The
Souls of Black Folks, and the collected poetry of Langston
Hughes and Countee Cullen, poets of the Harlem
Renaissance."
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"Countee Cullen's
collection Copper Sun was on the Union class syllabus and
in the poem, 'Colors,' Bonhoeffer read: 'The play is done, the
crowds depart; and see/ That twisted tortured thing hung from a
tree,/ Swart victim of a newer Calvary./ Yea, he who helped
Christ up Golgotha's track,/ That Simon who did not deny, was
black.'" Countee Cullen,
"Copper Sun," in Gerald Early, ed., My Soul's High
Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen (New York:
Anchor Books, 1991), 145.
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"Reflecting years later
on the poetry of Cullen, Bonhoeffer commented on "the black
Christ" being led into the field against "a white
Christ" by a young Negro poet revealing to us the deep
cleft in the church of Jesus Christ. Dietrich
Bonhoeffer,
No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes,
1928-1936 (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 112.
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* * *
"Indeed, Cullen's
narrative poem, 'The Black Christ," has a rather
astonishing conclusion. As the story of a racist lynching
develops, the subject position of a black man who is lynched by
whites for his love of sensuality, the spring, and a white woman
is assumed, in the end, by Christ." Countee
Cullen,
The Black Christ and Other Poems
(New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1929).
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Bonhoeffer formed several
close friendships at Union with Franklin Fisher, an
African-American divinity student"
"Franklin Fisher grew up
in Birmingham, Alabama. He was the son of a Black Baptist
minister who was also dean of the theology department of
Alabama's Selma University. Franklin, or Frank, as his friends
called him, did his B.A. at Howard College, now Howard
University. There he became interested in the Harlem
Renaissance. He came to New York to study theology, but also to
explore Harlem, and he took his new German friend Dietrich along
with him. Bonhoeffer became a regular attender of Harlem's
Abyssinian Baptist Church and for six months taught the boys
Sunday school class and helped with various youth clubs there.
Once, Pastor Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. yielded his pulpit to this
young, German Lutheran pastor.
"At Abyssinian,
Bonhoeffer sat under the ministry of Powell almost weekly for
over six months. Powell's culturally engaged sermons blended the
artful rhetoric and congregational, noncreedal style of the
black Baptist church with the best of American social
pragmatism. Powell had learned to appreciate John Dewey through
their work together at the NAACP. We have recently learned
through the research of Ralph Garlin Clingan that some of
Bonhoeffer's theological vocabulary was borrowed from the pulpit
work Pastor Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. For example, Powell
complained that the problem of the Euro-American church was
'cheap grace'." Ralph Garlin
Clingan, "Against Cheap Grace in a World Come of Age: A
Study in the Hermeneutics of Adam Clayton Powell, 1865-1953, in
His Intellectual Context." A Drew University Ph.D.
dissertation (UMI Microfilm 9732791, Ann Arbor, Mich. 1997).
* *
* * *
"The phrase, 'world come
of age,' a familiar and frequently debated concept in
Bonhoeffer's prison letters was used by Powell in his preaching:
'The world come of age asks only one question: What can you do
to make the world happy? What can you do to uplift
humanity?'" Adam Clayton Powell,
Palestine
and Saints in Caesar's Household (New York: Richard and
Smith, 1939), 187.
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"Frank Fisher introduced
Bonhoeffer to both sacred and secular Harlem, not that the two
could always be easily pried apart. As a pastor, Bonhoeffer
spoke of the Black church with uncharacteristic feeling. As a
classical pianist, Bonhoeffer was very interested in the music.
He found it strange and other yet he was fascinated by it. At
Harlem, it seems, Bonhoeffer began to learn about the
improvisation of jazz, the contingency of the blues, and the
liberation of black spirituals. Much later in his intellectual
and spiritual development he applied a musical rather than a
biblical or ethical metaphor to the task of theology: polyphany.
Theology, Bonhoeffer suggested, is neither a neat harmony nor a
mere symphony, but it is a polyphony. A polyphony in this
context is a musical piece in which two or more different
melodies come together in a satisfying way. According to
Bonhoeffer, the church's cantus firmus, its fixed traditional
melody, must remain in place yet invite the addition and
innovation of other voices into the flow of the music. The
introduction of this metaphor into his theology marked a
movement in his thought from the imitation motif of The Cost of
Discipleship or Nachfolge to the more improvisational style of
his later works, such as Ethics
and Letters
and Papers from Prison." Bonhoeffer
discusses his application of polyphony to theology, ethics, and
indeed life with great enthusiasm in his correspondence with
Bethge. See Bonhoeffer,
Letters and Papers from Prison,
Enlarged Edition (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 302-12. The theme
of improvisation (and polyphony) in music and how this musical
method and metaphor can inform other disciplines is explored in
an important special issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 58:2 (Spring, 2000).
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"Bonhoeffer was intrigued
by the music and culture of New York but he hated its racism. He
became a smart and sensitive critic of American racism and this
attention to racism seemed to deepen his critiques of German
anti-Semitism. He discussed this problem freely with his brother
Karl-Friedrich, who had studied at Harvard on a physics
fellowship. Karl-Friedrich concluded that the problem of racism
in the United States was so terrible that he could never imagine
raising a family in America. Hitler had of course not yet
ascended to power in Germany. Racism was the American problem
for any person of conscience, Dietrich's older brother
concluded. Dietrich seemed to agree. It was in New York that
this German Lutheran theologian first began to truly understand
the issues of racism and nationalism as serious theological
problems.
"Josiah Ulysses Young III
has recently published the first book-length study of Bonhoeffer
and the problem of racism. No Difference in the Fare
brings Bonhoeffer's theology into very creative conversation
with African-American theology and culture. Young shows how the
attention to alterity, otherness or difference in Bonhoeffer's
theological work, contributed to a profound social understanding
of the relationship of the self to the other that fostered
respect in spite of radical difference. Josiah
Ulysses Young III,
No Difference in the Fare: Dietrich
Bonhoeffer and the Problem of Racism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1998). Bonhoeffer began the development of his theology and
sociology of the social category of the I-Thou relationship in
his dissertation.
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"The other, Bonhoeffer
suggests, in the I-Thou relationship presents us with the same
problem of cognition as does God. The Thou of the other -- the
neighbor, the friend, the stranger -- is analogous to the divine
Thou. Thus, one must resist projecting an easy sameness or
harmony upon the other and encounter or receive him or her as a
'Thou,' outside of any centered or self-present conception of
the 'I.' This I-Thou or I-You encounter becomes crucial not only
for understanding the other but also for understanding the self.
Authentic relationality must be grounded in the recognition of
uniqueness and separateness, Bonhoeffer argues. He then asserts,
"The individual becomes a person ever and again through the
other, in the moment." Dietrich
Bonhoeffer,
Sanctorum Communio: The Theological Study of the
Sociology of the Church (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998),
55-56. This is the first volume in the newly translated works of
Bonhoeffer, Wayne Whitson Floyd, Jr., General Editor. This
philosophy of self and other of course makes one think of Martin
Buber's I and Thou. Those familiar with the philosophy of
Emmanuel Levinas will note possible correlations. See especially
Levinas,
Alterity and Transcendence (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999).
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"Bonhoeffer's
experience in Harlem helped him translate the heavenly
categories of transcendence into relational expressions of
worldly holiness."
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By 1935 in Germany it was
necessary for the Confessing Church opposing Hitler to establish
a seminary in exile. Bonhoeffer was called from London by the
Confessing Church to return to Germany and head the resisting
seminary at Finkenwalde. His book Life Together recalls this
experiment of viewing the church as an alternative,
counter-cultural community at a time when the German church and
society were marching to the music of the Nazism. Bonhoeffer's
students at Finkenwalde found his spirituality and theology
challenging yet wondered about his strange musical tastes as
they listened to the unfamiliar voice of Paul Robeson on the
Victrola lament, plead, and prophesy: "Go down. Go down
Moses! Way down in Egypt's land. Tell old, Pharaoh, Let my
people go!" Bonhoeffer wrote
of his love of the Negro spirituals in
No Rusty Swords
109. Then he observes in dismay, "Negro singers can sing
those songs before packed concert audiences of whites, to
tumultuous applause, while at the same time these same men and
women are still denied access to the white community through
social discrimination."
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In the Spring of 1939 Bonhoeffer caught a steamer back to New
York, to the safety of Manhattan. As he revisited New York, his
Babylon, his Jerusalem, the world came of age and in his—
words, he "gathered up the past." He spent time with old
friends and met new ones, including the poet W. H. Auden. He
spoke with them about the fate of the German Jews. He spoke with
them about the fate of all German people under Fascism, his
people. We have no record of his conversations with Auden but
several years later Auden wrote a poem dedicated to Bonhoeffer
entitled, "Friday's Child."
(See Edward Mendelson,
Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999),
425-27.)
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We do know this was the year that Auden was
questioning his own politics and pacifism in face of the
evolving European totalitarianism. He was keeping a notebook of
aphorisms and reflections after his meditations on William
Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (This
"notebook" was later published as W. H. Auden,
The Prolific and the Devourer
(Hopewell, N.J.: The Ecco Press,
1976).)
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Their conversation likely turned to models of
resistance and to pacifism. One must wonder if Auden didn't
raise the Blakean question of "fearful symmetry" with Bonhoeffer:
"Did he who made the Lamb make thee [the Tyger]?"(William
Blake,
The Complete Poetry and Prose, Newly rev. ed., ed. David
V. Erdman with commentary by Harold Bloom (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1982), 24-25.)
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Indeed, there was little tiger in the Jesus
of Bonhoeffer's Christology (and therefore neither in his
theological anthropology) and there was much of the obedient,
sacrificial lamb. As the poet and the pastor talked, one must
wonder if Auden didn't confess to Bonhoeffer privately what he
said in public over a year later, "I have absolutely no patience
with Pacifism as a political movement, as if one could do all
the things in one's personal life that create wars and then
pretend that to refuse to fight is a sacrifice and not a
luxury." (Auden,
The Prolific and the Devourer, x.)
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He would later write these words to Eberhard Bethge
describing his decision to enter fully and responsibly into the
dramas of history on behalf of the other:
There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have
for once learnt to see the great events of 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. . . This
perspective from below must not become the particular possession
of those who are eternally dissatisfied; rather, we must do
justice to life in all its dimensions from 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. (Bonhoeffer,
Letters and Papers from Prison, 17.)
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One can discern a movement in Bonhoeffer's
religious and intellectual formation from the mimesis of
discipleship to a more innovative poetics of obligation. In this
worldly holiness Jesus truly becomes "the man for others." There
has been much debate on precisely what Bonhoeffer really meant
by his famous celebration of the advent of "religionless
Christianity,"(The most recent
study of this theme is Ralf K. Wustenberg, A Theology of
Life: Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Religionless Christianity (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).) but there is little
disagreement that there was an aesthetic turn in his life and
work. (The most interesting
piece I have seen on this aesthetic turn is Carolyn M. Jones,
"Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison:
Rethinking the Relation of Theology and the Arts, Literature and
Religion," Literature and Theology 9, no. 3 (September
1995): 243-59.)
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This can be seen in the texts of Bonhoeffer
written between 1939 and 1945: the fragments of his incomplete
Ethics which explore human desire alongside of Christian
duty, his drama and fiction from prison, his love letters, and
his many moving letters, papers, and poems from prison. Defining
aesthetics as the artful, sensuous perception of reality, this
turn is indeed striking and satisfying in Bonhoeffer's final
works.(Within the past year
new translations of both Bonhoeffer's poetry and fiction from
prison have been published. See Edwin Robertson, ed. and trans.,
Voices in the Night: The Prison Poems of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1999) and Clifford J. Green, ed.,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Fiction from Prison (Minneapolis:
Fortress, 2000), in the new series, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Collected Works, vol. 7. Also see Ruth-Alice Von Bismarck
and Ulrich Kabitz, eds.,
Love Letters from Cell 92: The Correspondence Between Dietrich
Bonhoeffer and Maria Von Wedemyer (Nashville: Abingdon,
1992).)
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This aesthetic turn opened him to a faith
that was polyphonic and multi-dimensional. Bonhoeffer celebrated
its multiplicity in a letter to Bethge:
Christianity puts us into many different
dimensions of life at the same time; we make room in ourselves,
to some extent, for God and the whole world. . . [Life] is kept
multi-dimensional and polyphonous. What a deliverance it is to
be able to think, and thereby remain multi-dimensional.(Bonhoeffer,
Letters and Papers from Prison, 310-11. A good discussion
of the evolution of the term aesthetics and its use in
philosophy and theology can found in Richard Viladesau's new
work,
Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty and Art
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).)
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* * *
This kind of artful thinking led Bonhoeffer's
theological reflections beyond the sacred text into the world of
material culture. As the Greek term aisthesis implies,
aesthetics takes one into the whole embodied realm of sensation
and perception. (Bonhoeffer,
Letters and Papers from Prison, 339-40.)
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* * *
Aesthetics signals the body's long rebellion
against the tyranny of static systems and totalitarian
ideologies, even any attempted totality of theology and ethics.
I love this expression of Bonhoeffer's incarnational desire from
the Letters:
I should like to be tired by the sun, instead
of by books and thoughts. I should like to have it awaken my
animal existence-not the kind that degrades a man, but the kind
that delivers him from the stuffiness and artificiality of a
purely intellectual existence and makes him purer and happier. I
should like, not just to see the sun and sip at it a little, but
to experience it bodily.
(Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 347-48.)
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"Art, like its closest analogue religion,
must be both world confirming and world disconfirming. It must
seek meaning and understanding by means of the exception and not
merely by means of the rule. It must confront one as "other" yet
also touch deeply some analogy of seeing, hearing, feeling, or
thinking because human consciousness requires the art of
connecting. It must probe both the dialectial imagination and
the analogical imagination. In Bonhoeffer's life art possessed
the sacramental power to turn theology into theopoetics:" Who Am I?
On
the 9th of April, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed at
Flossenburg Concentration Camp only days before its liberation.
He was hanged by the Nazis. He was thirty-nine years old. I
would like to think that in the end there was no great chasm to
cross. I would like to think that in the end, in the dark beauty
of worldly holiness, for Bonhoeffer the Infinite and the
intimate became one.
Source: Cross Currents, Fall 2000, Vol.
50 Issue 3. * * *
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updated 4 November 2007 |
