The tropes that birth the hero

Several years ago, I wrote a book about the impact of the academic year Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent in Harlem in 1930–31. He was a foreign exchange student, albeit a very unusual one: he had completed a PhD by age 21 and a habilitation (a second dissertation) by 24, which qualified him for a faculty position in the German academy before he arrived at Union Seminary at age 24 for one last year of study.

He was clearly a different kind of student from his peers at Union, not only in his age and accomplishments but also in the interests that brought him there. In his own words, he came to the States to “learn theology as it has developed under completely different circumstances than our own in Germany.” He was searching for something that he described as “a cloud of witnesses.” In New York, he encountered a political faith witness that left its mark on him from that moment forward and helped inspire his lifelong effort to dislodge Christianity from its attachments to lethal authoritarian forces in Germany.

This is where I connect with Bonhoeffer: in his impulse to dislodge Christianity from sources that make the faith indistinguishable from harmful ideologies and practices. I approach the study of Bonhoeffer constructively, through the lenses of the Black church and Black theology, a tradition of the Christian faith that he found deeply inspirational while he was in New York. He was inspired by the lack of compartmentalization that he saw in Black Christianity, that it places one’s whole being under the gospel—with no space for the separation of faith and politics or of public and private life. Additionally, he was impressed by Black Christians’ ability to disentangle Jesus from historically lethal forces that appropriate him as an avatar for devious and harmful purposes.