Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Friendship with Albert Franklin Fisher

F. BURTON NELSON

Franklin Fisher (1906–1960)

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived for the 1930–31 academic year at Union Theological Seminary in New York, he had encountered few blacks during his life. Early in his Union days, he met Franklin Fisher, a black student from Birmingham, Alabama. Fisher was assigned to the Abyssinian Baptist Church for his field work, and Bonhoeffer accompanied him there. During the spring term, Bonhoeffer helped teach a Sunday school class. 

Through Fisher, Bonhoeffer gained “a detailed and intimate knowledge of the realities of Harlem life,” according to Eberhard Bethge. On one occasion Bonhoeffer and Fisher were together in a restaurant, and it became clear that Fisher would not be extended the same service. In disgust, Bonhoeffer led the party outside in protest. 

After 1931, the two friends did not meet again, but Bonhoeffer spoke of Fisher to his Finkenwalde students, to his family, and others. Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann, one of those students, reports that after an evening of playing Negro spirituals, Bonhoeffer said: “When I took leave of my black friend, he said to me: ‘Make our sufferings known in Germany, tell them what is happening to us, and show them what we are like.’ I wanted to fulfill this obligation tonight.” 

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From Sin to Saint: Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Episode 3

From Sin to Saint

This is From Sin to Saint, a podcast from Patheos. In each season, we will look at the true stories of redemption of saintly figures from all faiths. Our goal is to to understand the passions that drove them and the challenges they overcame on the journey.

To watch on YouTube

Bonhoeffer’s Poem, “Who Am I?” and Omicron Variant!

DENIM SPIRIT: A powerful act of kindness

• By CAMERON MILLER
• Jan 12, 2022 

Something Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in 1943 has been haunting my thoughts as this latest wave of Covid-Delta-Omicron-Whatever pandemic rolls in.

Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor in pre-war Germany. At 24, still too young to be ordained but already having earned a Ph.D., Bonhoeffer traveled from Germany to New York City for postgraduate studies at Union Theological Seminary. His real education came from his experience with Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Through his friendship with a Black seminarian and teaching Sunday school at Abyssinian, this privileged intellectual was transformed. Later he would describe it as the time he turned from “phraseology to reality.”

Long story short, by the time the Gestapo hung him days before Hitler shot himself, Bonhoeffer had led Christian resistance to the Nazi takeover of German churches, formed a resistance church that eventually went underground, and joined the plot to assassinate Hitler. In prison, he was able to keep writing secretly and smuggle out scraps of it to friends.

A poem he wrote in prison echoes today as we live lives curtailed by the pandemic:

“Who am I? They often tell me

I would talk to my warders

freely and friendly and clearly,

as though it were mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me

I would bear the days of misfortune

equably, smilingly, proudly,

like one accustomed to win.

Am I then really all that which other men tell of?

Or am I only what I know of myself,

restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,

struggling for breath…

Who am I? This or the other?

Am I one person today, and tomorrow another?

Am I both at once…”

This poem, too long to include in full, speaks to the prisoner’s sense that life is going on without them. So too those in grief or any kind of pain who sense normality all around them but can’t participate in it. They can only act normal on the outside. That describes life within a pandemic bubble too.

As Omicron threatens to push us backward or inward, we are trying to live life as “normal” in ways both similar and different. While keeping up a good show on the outside, inwardly we feel the weight of it’s costs and losses.

There can be something liberating about saying the obvious out loud when it is otherwise living silently among us. So I’ll say it: These are still hard times.

My advice is to share what you feel with those you love, and give them grace to let their held emotions speak too.

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Who needs the church when we have the biblical worldview?

JACOB ALAN COOK  |  DECEMBER 22, 2021

After his second visit to New York in 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrestled with the character of Protestant churches in America versus those in Europe in an essay titled “Protestantism without Reformation.”

Even as he introduced his argument, which plays up history, sociology and political analysis for understanding the American church, Bonhoeffer offered some words of caution about using these modes. He expressed concern about balkanizing the global church, failing to see the single, shared office of God’s church in the world, and neglecting the real value of concrete church-communities that differ from our own. And I share these concerns.

As Bonhoeffer demonstrated, however, these fields of study can help us understand important dynamics in a clearly diverse and divided church landscape. With special reference to U.S. history, he keyed on how a land that never has seen the church unified (in confession or institutional forms) thinks differently from the start about what “the church” even is.

Origins of American church

European Protestants set out to make colonies in America as they fled, voluntarily or involuntarily, from religious battles. Among the Christians who remained in Europe, the unity of the church was remembered and presupposed. So, European Protestant energy was channeled into efforts to reform the whole church, which provoked charges of heresy, real fights and other coercive attempts to bring others to “the light.”

But the origin of the American church — already diverse in confession and existing as numerous refugee communities — engendered a spirit of toleration and manifested in formal protections of religious freedom. Over time, numerous denominations formed, split and merged as free, voluntary associations of local churches with common polity and practices. And when Bonhoeffer visited America, ecumenical organizations also had been forming, on the assumption of tolerance around confessional issues even while searching for united fronts on practical matters.

In his essay, Bonhoeffer pointed up these details to explain why Christians in America might see church unity as a goal (however remote) even if few could see any reason to think there was one church-community in America — let alone feel the fight to reform the whole. Starting from within this situation, now as then, one cannot help but see variety in the U.S. church scene and puzzle at claims to represent the one, true church.

Today I will argue that the postwar evangelical movement has reshaped this picture in the U.S., generating a new way of conceiving the whole and resuscitating the will to fight for it. Specifically, I will highlight how the biblical worldview concept has enabled visible leaders of this movement to capitalize on the individualism of American culture and raise a new, ostensibly conservative standard in American public life. This move has amplified cultural divisions and damaged many Christians’ understanding of the church and its mission, so the conclusion of this essay will point toward a more promising picture of church-community for transforming the heart of these conflicts.

“The biblical worldview concept has enabled visible leaders of this movement to capitalize on the individualism of American culture and raise a new, ostensibly conservative standard in American public life.”

Neo-evangelicals’ “New Reformation”

Within nine years of Bonhoeffer’s essay (but to be clear, with no reference to it), Harold Ockenga described what he understood as “the New Reformation” unfolding in the neo-evangelical movement. Reading these two pieces back-to-back is fascinating, not least because the first pushes us to ask: What did Ockenga imagine as the target of his reformation?

Harold Ockenga preaching

Ockenga opened his essay with a stylized account of the Protestant Reformation and the historical conditions that preceded it, including the charge that the Roman Catholic Church had not allowed, and thus not benefitted from, the kind of competition that stimulates growth. The way he told the story, the whole Reformation hinged on the Bible’s liberation from human traditions into the hands of the people. A quote might help us catch the flavor of his commentary:

The Bible revealed to the people what was wrong with the church, namely, how far it had deflected from biblical teaching. Once the people began to read the Bible, they immediately recognized the distance which the church had departed from primitive Christianity in simplicity, sacrifice, and service.

In Ockenga’s view, greater “knowledge of the Bible incited the people to discussions of principles involved in Christianity.”

A liberated Bible?

Hiding here is more of the historical reality. Rhetorically, we might like to say the liberated Bible freed the people; but, in real time, literacy rates were very low, and new expositions, interpretations and emphases were circulated in two stages — pamphlets for the readers and oral accounts for the rest, between pulpit and pub.

What exactly it means for the Bible to be liberated from tradition is, in itself, an important point of conversation. Sola scriptura is lauded as one of the primary doctrines of the Reformation. On this point, Ockenga highlighted “the authority of the Bible alone uninterpreted by traditions.” And he went on to describe the Bible’s authority as “over against the authority of the church or of reason or of experience or of the inner spirit.”

While I am interested in defending this second notion, I am concerned about the way it bumps up against the first. Getting our view of Scripture right means opening ourselves to ongoing criticism because the most important meaning of Bible freedom is found in its own freedom from us. The Bible can only be for us and with us, as human beings seeking God’s face, if we honor the reality that it stands over against us.

“The Bible can only be for us and with us, as human beings seeking God’s face, if we honor the reality that it stands over against us.”

But all too often, American evangelicals have extended the authority of the Bible — as we might imagine it standing on its own, liberated from human traditions — to their translations and interpretations of that Bible. When they are our correct interpretations, we simply call them “expositions.” Hold onto this thought.

A ‘biblical’ worldview

Surveying the American social landscape in light of the primary Reformation doctrines, Ockenga was concerned with the fruits of mainline theology and social action. He saw the liberals running off course starting with contesting the Bible’s authority. They ended up following the course of modern secular folks, enthralled by the prevailing progressivism and theologizing the kingdom of God in terms borrowed from culture. The result was, in Ockenga’s view, not only disunited in effect but, more importantly, unbiblical and pernicious.

Fuller Seminary’s founding faculty: Harold John Ockenga, Wilbur M. Smith, Carl F.H. Henry, Harold Lindsell, Everett Harrison.

So, we return to ask: What did Ockenga imagine as the target of his reformation? Neither a new institutional unity (like a denomination) nor a new confession was Ockenga’s desired product — America already had too many. Rather, the New Reformation would materialize in individual Christians and some local churches taking up their intellectual starting point in the biblical worldview, embracing its supernatural elements. From there, the rest would follow much like it did in his reading of the 16th century Reformation.

Unpacking “the challenge to individual believers,” Ockenga emphasized “biblical action to fulfill God’s program.” He outlined four priorities with an intentional order: foreign mission, personal evangelism, education under a powerful expositor of the Bible, and only then social engagement in loving service and political activism. The order of the last two elements implicitly continued Ockenga’s criticism of progressive Protestants, who got the order wrong and read their Bibles through their social context and political goals.

Speaking for his own church, Ockenga assured the reader that evangelicals do not withdraw from cultural discipleship. “We … make our voice heard on all these matters of civic and legislative affairs.” And, moreover, he concluded his article with an appeal to the Reformation leaders of yore, who “would tell us that we must meet the challenge of our day for the sake of Christ … by fearlessly applying Christian truth to situations, and by sincerely carrying through to a logical conclusion these principles which we find in the Word of God.”

“Ockenga issued an invitation to join in the wish-dream of unity under a plain biblical worldview.”

To the many individuals dissatisfied with their own local church-communities, Ockenga issued an invitation to join in the wish-dream of unity under a plain biblical worldview. And he suggested they be prepared to sacrifice other loyalties and particular commitments when necessary to support this vision. The effects included weakening local ecclesial ties, engendering suspicion of real-world church-community, and underwriting libertarian, free-enterprising views of moral individuals in unvoiced multitudes.

Evangelical entrepreneurship

What neo-evangelical leaders aimed to “reform” was first the minds of individual believers. Ockenga’s vision for an evangelical Reformation cut across denominational lines to recover a unifying spirit. He decentered forms of religion and played up the feelings of common cause and core values at stake.

Focused as they were on individuals, early leaders did not anticipate strictly man-to-man operations so much as they imagined their audience to a silent majority of individuals. And even as they cast a “conservative” vision, they sought progress in the form of new associations, educational institutions, media outlets and the like. This stream of American evangelicalism always has been, as George Marsden famously observed, an entrepreneurial endeavor.

As Americans know well, entrepreneurship is inextricably linked with the free market virtue of competition. Ockenga explicitly made this link while criticizing the “monopolistic” Roman Catholic Church of the pre-Reformation era.

Churches often tailor worship to attract Millennials. That can be insulting to Millennials. (Photo/Catholic Archdiocese of Boston/Creative Commons)

When competing in a free and open market, success is measured by the literal, ongoing buy-in of everyday folks, who vote with their feet and their wallets. Thus, for decades pastors and consultants have talked about churches, particularly in densely populated areas, in terms of a marketplace. And on the supply side, evangelicals see few barriers to “church shopping,” whether moving to a new town or just growing wary of their local church’s message.

Moving in a slightly different direction, we can see how thought leaders, not least in evangelical circles, are platformed and canceled based on market dynamics more than movements of the Holy Spirit. Leaders are free and unconstrained as they attempt to gain ground or throw their weight around with appeals to an idealized worldview and its commonsense applications. And popularity and public opinion matter more than a fair amount in who gets to use such rhetoric and feel successful doing it, on whom the burdens of proof rest, and who gets to dismiss whom out of hand.

We need not read all this cynically. Competition and entrepreneurial endeavors are descriptively in the warp and woof of American evangelicalism. That fact does not mean everyone with a platform is merely self-interested or power-hungry or that no one really cares about what the Bible says. But to those who would see the biblical truth, as they have “exposited” it, shape more minds and cover more territory within their imagined audience of individuals — even to the end of a global reformation — temptations are prowling around like a roaring lion.

Market dynamics and moral outcomes

It is axiomatic that market dynamics are not always the best motivator or determiner of moral outcomes. For those who like an example, large numbers of followers, whether online or in the pews, can lend voice and influence to leaders with significant defects of character and judgment. This is one lesson from the popular “Rise and Fall of Mars Hill” podcast. But this is also how postwar American evangelicalism rolled onto the scene covered in unspoken assumptions based in worldly categories (history, sociality, politics) and not the Bible itself — even if visible leaders defended these ideas as if they were merely the biblical worldview.

For another example, we might consider the current data on how multiracial churches do (and do not) improve the overall problem unfolding in this series. This picture is coming through in books like Korie Edwards’ The Elusive Dream, numerous articles and reports on the most recent wave of the National Congregations Study. Citing these sources, Kevin Dougherty, Mark Chaves and Michael Emerson conclude that, for too many white Christians, “diversity is pursued by trying to attract people of color who will not challenge white congregants’ views and practices.” This is another feature of market dynamics even if, in many cases (although not all), problems arise contrary to the best intentions of leaders and participants.

Recalling Bonhoeffer’s comparison of the fight or flight activity of European and American Protestants, we might observe that neo-evangelicals reintroduced a “fight for the whole” mentality in the U.S. context — but in a different mode. Reconceiving U.S. history as a triumph of evangelical influence that had since waned, Ockenga framed his reformation as an attempt to recover this ideal, but non-existent, American church.

“The entrepreneurial, market-share competition for individuals’ attention and loyalty, in effect if not intention, defines the perpetual struggle for an evangelical identity.”

With no structures to fight or resist except those already deemed apostate, Ockenga and company could cast themselves as conservatives even as they created new institutions (a progressive act). And the whole project could be pursued with reference to a world-viewing population of individuals with personal knowledge of the liberated Bible and its application, standing in for “the church.”

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What we can Learn from the Unique and Vibrant Faith of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

J.John

COMMENTARY

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 to an aristocratic German family. Evidently gifted, he chose to study theology and swiftly graduate with a doctorate at the age of twenty-one. In the first of what were to be many international connections, he worked for two years with a German congregation in Barcelona. He then went to the United States to study for a year at a liberal theological college that he found shallow and uninspiring. He was, however, impressed by the African-American churches he worshipped at, appreciating the congregations’ zeal and sympathizing with the social injustices they endured.

Bonhoeffer returned to Germany in 1931, lecturing and pastoring a church. Horrified by the rise of the Nazis he spoke out publicly against Hitler from the moment he became Chancellor in 1933. His was not a popular view: many German Christians, encouraged by Hitler’s manipulative use of Christian language, saw him as the nation’s savior.

Bonhoeffer found himself part of the resistance against Nazism. He spoke against the persecution of the Jews and when Hitler demanded a church that swore loyalty to him, Bonhoeffer helped create the Confessing Church which declared that its head was Christ, not the Führer. Bonhoeffer gained only limited support and, disillusioned by the direction Germany was taking, he went to pastor two German-speaking churches in London. There he would gain even more international connections, having developed friendships with British church leaders.

Returning to Germany, Bonhoeffer was soon denounced as a pacifist and an enemy of the state. In 1937 he became involved in the secret training of pastors for the Confessing Church. He also wrote one of his most important books, The Cost of Discipleship, in which he rebuked shallow Christianity that he termed cheap grace: ‘the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession . . . Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.’ It is a warning that continues to be valid today.

With war looming, Bonhoeffer, committed to peace and refusing to swear allegiance to Hitler, realized that he could be executed. An opportunity to escape conscription appeared with an invitation to teach in the USA. Bonhoeffer took the chance and left in June 1939. Yet once in the States, he realized that he could not be absent from his own country at a time of war and within two weeks took the boat back to Germany.

When war did break out, Bonhoeffer found himself drawn into the circle of those patriotic Germans who sought to overthrow Hitler. In order to again escape conscription, he joined the German military intelligence agency, a body which included many who were opposed to Hitler. On paper, his task was to utilize his many international church connections to advise the military, but in reality, he used them to try to find support for the German resistance.

As the war went on Bonhoeffer found himself on the edges of various plots to assassinate Hitler. Increasingly aware of the horrors the Third Reich was unleashing, he found himself reluctantly concluding that the assassination of Hitler would be the lesser of evils.

In 1943, Bonhoeffer became engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer, but shortly afterward his role in helping Jews escape to Switzerland was uncovered by the Gestapo and he was arrested. At first, he was able to write and receive visitors who supplied him with books and took away his writings; many of these were incorporated into another classic book, Letters and Papers from Prison.

In July 1944, Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment became more severe and he was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. The accounts we have of him at this time describe him as a man of peace, a man full of grace and kindness, and a man who was occupied in pastoring and counseling those about him.

In the spring of 1945, Bonhoeffer’s name was linked with an old plot against Hitler and his execution was ordered. He was hanged on April 9th, 1945, just two weeks before the camp was liberated. His last recorded words were, ‘This is the end – for me the beginning of life.’

I found the faith of Dietrich Bonhoeffer to have many striking characteristics.

First, his faith was displayed in doing. Bonhoeffer could have stayed an academic theologian quietly writing. Instead, he insisted that Christianity had to be lived out and to be a disciple of Christ was to do something. Beliefs must have consequences: whether it was to work for good or against evil. Bonhoeffer was no armchair Christian and we shouldn’t be either.

Second, his faith was displayed in daring. One of the first German Christians to denounce Hitler, Bonhoeffer worked against Nazism for twelve years, knowing that at any moment he could be – as ultimately he was – arrested, imprisoned, and killed. It’s particularly hard not to be impressed by how, having made it to the safety of New York in 1939, Bonhoeffer then took the boat back to Germany. We could do with a lot more daring today.

Third, his faith was displayed in defying. Faced with a threatening government and a church that remained silent, Bonhoeffer spoke out boldly against both. There are times when we, too, need to stand up and speak boldly.

Finally, and it’s uncomfortable, but Bonhoeffer’s faith was displayed in dying. 

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer Went Back to Germany

Answering the call for help

By Jeff Long ~ Southeast Missourian

Back in 1992, a new bishop was assigned to serve Missouri in my religious denomination. Because she was unknown to most of us, an audiotape of one of her sermons was sent to me and every other United Methodist pastor in the state. In it, Bishop Ann Sherer used Isaiah 6:1-8 as a text. She focused on verse 8, which says: “Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!'”

Bishop Sherer has been reassigned to another state, but her message on this scripture remains memorable. She asked, “If God calls and you don’t go, who will? If God calls and you say the time is not right, when will it be right?”

My mind remembered that now-lost cassette tape when I heard of the circumstances regarding the recent death in Iraq of Staff Sergeant Brad Skelton, a man previously unknown to me. I do know some men who knew this departed soldier well, and here’s the thing: Mentioning Brad Skelton’s name brought smiles to their faces. I didn’t know him, but I visit the Gordonville Grill from time to time; the patrons of this eatery had more than a passing acquaintance with Brad. When someone we admire dies, we discover — without much effort — that we knew someone who knew someone who knew him or her. It’s the idea of “six degrees of separation.”Get our Daily HeadlinesSent right to your inbox. 

Yes, Isaiah 6:8 comes to mind when I think of Brad Skelton. He had already served in Iraq; he had already done his tour of duty. No one could ask more of him; no one did. Yet the job is still undone in Iraq, and Brad knew that. His reasons for returning practically shouted the message of that Old Testament passage:

He had close friends doing a second tour.

He thought his experience might help protect U.S. soldiers new to Iraq.

As a man without a spouse and children, he thought he could “give someone a break that had a wife and family.”

Brad Skelton had many medals and commendations to his credit. Yet it was his selfless intentions that have a voice more persuasive of his heroism than any combat ribbon. His death on a second tour reminds us of how many others have gone back into harm’s way again in places we’d have a hard time finding on a map. If you begin to despair about people, if you start to think folks just don’t care anymore — I offer the example of Brad Skelton and so many others who put themselves at risk for something greater than themselves.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer did exactly that. A celebrated theology professor from Germany, Bonhoeffer — a young man like Brad Skelton — was out of danger as Adolf Hitler rose to power in his native country. He had a job teaching at a seminary in New York. Yet Bonhoeffer went back, telling his American colleagues that he could not stand by in idleness and safety while his countrymen suffered under tyranny. Bonhoeffer returned to Germany. He was arrested and hanged in April 1945, just days before the Allies liberated the concentration camp where he was being held.

What Bonhoeffer did by returning to Germany and confronting Hitler was no different from a firefighter rushing back into a house fully involved with flames, hoping to save one more person. No one forced him; in fact, many tried to dissuade him. Bonhoeffer went anyway. Guess what? Brad Skelton did the same thing by returning to Iraq. He didn’t have to go back into the cauldron. And here’s the kicker: Brad actually was a fireman. Six degrees of separation.

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Maybe Unity Will Be Achieved Through a Good Cigar!

I Owe Rush So Much

Feb 17, 2021 | By Marvin R. Shanken

Rush Limbaugh and Marvin R. Shanken at the 2019 Els for Autism Pro-Am.

In 1994 I held my first Night to Remember cigar dinner at the ‘21’ Club in New York City. The dinner celebrated the cigar, and the proceeds went to Prostate Cancer research. In attendance were a notable number of cigar enthusiasts from all walks of life. During the dinner, we all got to know each other, and I especially remember two guests at my table: Gregory Hines and Rush Limbaugh. The evening conversation centered around the joy that a cigar adds to our lives and its ability to create and build friendships. Gregory and Rush were on different sides of the political aisle, yet through smoking a cigar they became instant friends with mutual respect.

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Americans Are Now Witnessing the Cost of Discipleship

By Rev. Michael P. Orsi 

A sign informs patrons that a church is closed during the coronavirus pandemic. (Photo credit: Bill Tompkins/Getty Images)

The 56 men who signed our Declaration of Independence made their case that the American colonies should separate themselves from Great Britain by listing the King’s abuses of his subject people. They then demonstrated their commitment to the path of liberty by concluding the document with an extraordinary resolution:

“…with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

All knew that putting their names on the Declaration and waging war against Britain could bring the penalty of death.

In a later era, Dietrich Bonhoeffer a Lutheran pastor in Germany, opposed Nazism. He operated an underground church and seminary until he had to escape from the country with Hitler’s agents hot on his trail. Coming to the U.S., he taught for a time at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

Bonhoeffer found the preaching in mainstream Protestant churches to be rather empty. In the black churches of Harlem, on the other hand, he heard the Gospel message “clear and raw.” This encouraged him to go back to Germany where his people where suffering under Nazi oppression. He was arrested, and was executed in a concentration camp just a couple of weeks before it was liberated by American troops.

Those who signed the Declaration of Independence were “in it” completely. They were entirely devoted to a cause in which they thoroughly believed, even if they weren’t saints in their personal lives. Neither was Bonhoeffer’s life beyond question. Along with his preaching, he became involved in an active plot to assassinate Hitler.

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Bonhoeffer Saw American Racism During Year of Study at Union Seminary

Dietrich Bonhoeffer would stand up for racial justice today. ~ Bryan

by William Nunnelley  

German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who would ultimately be martyred for his opposition to Nazism in his native country, spent a year of study at Union Theological Seminary in New York City during 1930–31. The year “had an especially significant and lasting impact” on Bonhoeffer, said Holocaust scholar Victoria Barnett.

The experience introduced him to American racism, said Barnett, and helped shape his views toward the antisemitism he would see in Germany after the Nazi party came to power in the early 1930s.

Barnett delivered a lecture, “From Harlem to Berlin: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Experience of American Racism,” at Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School Jan. 5. She is director of the United States Holocaust Museum’s Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust.

Bonhoeffer worshiped at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem with his fellow seminarian, Albert Fisher, an African American, during his year in New York. “I think there is little doubt that his experience of the Black Church, racism in America, was an important part of his journey,” said Barnett.

Bonhoeffer and Fisher taught Sunday school, and Bonhoeffer began to attend worship services that were “dramatically different from what he was used to,” said Barnett. The parishioners at Abyssinian opened their homes to Bonhoeffer, she noted, and he led a women’s bible study and assisted in weekly church school.

At the end of the year, Barnett said, he wrote a report of his experience, saying, “I heard the gospel preached in the Negro churches . . . Here one really could still hear someone talk in a Christian sense about sin and grace and the love of God and ultimate hope . . . .” He contrasted the “often lecture-like” sermons preached in white churches with the “captivating passion and vividness” of the sermons he heard at Abyssinian.

Bonhoeffer “immersed himself that year in the realities of racism in the United States” by taking courses on social issues and reading African-American authors, said Barnett. He “even got a personal glimpse of American racism,” Barnett said, when he and Fisher visited a Washington, D.C., restaurant, and Fisher was refused service. They both left.

In Harlem, Bonhoeffer “witnessed racism that deeply outraged and troubled him, and he surely carried those impressions with him in the years that followed,” said Barnett.

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Today’s Movement for Racial Justice

This is indeed a moment in history when we may acquire the much needed insight and inspiration from Bonhoeffer’s extraordinary life and legacy.

By Sam Ben-Meir

Dietrich Bonhoeffer | Foto: Gütersloher Verlagshaus in der Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH

Walking through the park this weekend I noticed a man on a bench reading Metaxas’ acclaimed biography of German theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And it occurred to me then and there that this is indeed a moment in our history when we may acquire much needed insight and inspiration by revisiting Bonhoeffer’s extraordinary life and legacy.

Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 in Breslau, Germany into a large and prominent family – which included his father, noted psychiatrist and neurologist, Karl Bonhoeffer. The younger Bonhoeffer graduated from the Protestant Faculty of Theology at the University of Tübingen and went on to complete his Doctor of Theology degree from Berlin University in 1927.

In 1930, Bonhoeffer went to the United States for postgraduate study and a teaching fellowship at New York City’s Union Theological Seminary. Perhaps the most important part of his stay in the US was being introduced to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where he would not only teach Sunday school and form an abiding love for black spirituals – recordings he brought back to Germany would become “some of his most treasured possessions” – Bonhoeffer would also hear Adam Clayton Powell Sr. preach the “kingdom of social justice.” Powell had the fire of a revivalist preacher, combined with “great intellect and social vision” – he actively condemned racism and “minced no words about the saving power of Jesus Christ.”

Finding in Powell the gospel preached and lived out according to God’s commands, Bonhoeffer became acutely aware of the injustice and subjugation experienced by minorities and began to adopt the standpoint of the oppressed. He remarked, “Here one can truly speak and hear about sin and grace and the love of God…the Black Christ is preached with rapturous passion and vision.”

Returning to Germany in 1931, Bonhoeffer lectured in systematic theology at the University of Berlin – but his promising career as an academic would be derailed by the rise of Nazism, and Hitler’s installation as Chancellor in 1933.

Bonhoeffer resisted the Nazi regime from the very beginning and never wavered. Within days of Hitler’s election, he gave a radio address in which he denounced Hitler and admonished the people against forming an idolatrous cult of the Führer (leader), who could easily turn out to be Verführer (or misleader) – a distinction Donald Trump’s blind followers would do well to remember.

In April 1933, Bonhoeffer was the first to assert the church’s opposition to Hitler’s persecution of the Jews and insisted that the church cannot merely “bandage the victims under the wheel,” but must “jam a spoke in the wheel itself.”

Bonhoeffer’s theology was a theology of the oppressed, and his active involvement in the German resistance against Hitler followed from his moral awareness that “the structure of responsible action includes both readiness to accept guilt and freedom,” as he wrote in his Ethics – for “If any man tries to escape guilt in responsibility he detaches himself from the ultimate reality of human existence…” A life spent in fear of incurring guilt was itself sinful. In this respect Bonhoeffer is essentially in agreement with G.F.W. Hegel: only a stone can be innocent; all meaningful action entails guilt – and we must act. As Bonhoeffer observed: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

The Cost of Discipleship (1937) – an extended commentary on the Sermon on the Mount – is generally regarded as Bonhoeffer’s masterpiece. In Chapter 4, he considers that passage from Mark 8:34, where Christ says, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” From an ethical standpoint this is all-important: as Bonhoeffer famously said, “When Christ calls a man he bids him come and die.” This may not mean actual martyrdom (though it certainly might): it means first of all that we must die to ourselves. In his commentary he writes, “Just as Christ is Christ only in virtue of his suffering and rejection, so the disciple is a disciple only in so far as he shares his Lord’s suffering and rejection and crucifixion.”

To ‘deny oneself’ has nothing to do here with asceticism or suicide, both of which retain an element of self-will. Rather, “it is to be aware only of Christ and no more of self, to see only him who goes before and no more the road which is too hard for us.” Self-denial then is inseparable from the obedience of the responsible one who hears the call and says, “Here I am” (hineni) – for “faith only becomes faith in the act of obedience,” not to any man-made law or worldly authority, but to God, whose call reaches us through the voice of our oppressed and persecuted neighbour.

Bonhoeffer makes the crucial distinction – as important now as it ever was – between “cheap grace” and “costly grace.” Cheap grace means grace without price, without cost, “everything can be had for nothing.” Bonhoeffer reminds us that we are still in the fight for costly grace, “which calls us to follow… It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.”

Costly grace affirms that you can only discover what obedience is by obeying. It is no use asking questions – questions such as, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ “You are the neighbor. Go along and try to be obedient by loving others… Neighbourliness is not a quality in other people, it is simply their claim on ourselves… We literally have no time to sit down and ask ourselves whether so-and-so is our neighbour or not. We must get into action and obey – we must behave like a neighbour to him.”

Bonhoeffer was arrested in 1943 by the Gestapo – two years later, at dawn on 9 April 1945, he was led naked to the gallows and hanged to death, a few weeks before Hitler would commit suicide.

Throughout the last two weeks, we have witnessed across the country protests against systemic racism and police brutality – and indeed protesters have gathered in cities around the world, from London to Hamburg, from Pretoria to Brisbane. Blacks and whites are rising up in unison to oppose the systematic subjugation of people of colour – a subjugation which began over four hundred year ago when the first slave ships arrived on these shores.

Bonhoeffer’s life holds an important lesson for us today, regardless of our religious affiliation or lack thereof. And simply put it is this: you are called upon; you are called on behalf of your neighbour. When you are called to be responsible that is not an obligation which you can decline, discharge or acquit yourself of – it is an infinite responsibility, a “forever commitment” as Charles Blow recently put it. And we all must be prepared to make any sacrifice necessary when we are called.

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