The Way of Social Incarnational Embodiment

Bonhoeffer’s Time in NYC by Reggie Williams

Bonhoeffer the movie is all the rage these days. It is provoking much discussion and controversy.

There are accusations that the movie presents a Metaxas view of Bonhoeffer, which in turn has placed a renewed focus on Metaxas as the progenitor of right wing political uses of Bonhoeffer. Myles Werntz published a critical review of the movie on Christianity Today a while back. Christian Century published a nasty review here. All this intensified attention on Bonhoeffer isn’t bad. Bomhoeffer’s life is uniquely applicable to our times. He’s worth the attention. But I do worry that the incredible richness and challenge of Bonhoeffer’s story for our times might get lost in the hoopla. So by all means let’s go see the movie, but also read a little. Explore the depths of what we Christians can learn from Bonhoeffer for the times we are living in.

To aid in this process, let me use this post and the next, to highlight two books I think you should read: 1.) Reggie Williams’ Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus and 2.) Mark Thiessen Nation’s Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis: Recovering the True Legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I think you should read both of these books and only then discuss the movie. But of course that is a big ask so I offer the next two posts on this podcast to explore these two books to get you going on some key issues worth considering as you watch the movie. Let me start with Reggie Williams’ ‘Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus’.

Social Incarnational Embodiment

When Bonhoeffer was 24, already accomplished with two dissertations, and being offered teaching posts in Germany, he famously decides to go to NYC to study at Union for a year. He wants to explore, experience and ask questions of a church and a theology formed in America. The trip proves transformative for Bonhoeffer in a totally different way than he was expecting. He encounters the Black church in Harlem as he goes through a process I’ll call “social incarnational embodiment.” Williams’ Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus focuses on Bonhoeffer’s trip to NYC and the process of this personal transformation in Harlem.

Williams does explore Bonhoeffer’s privileged upbringing in Germany, his formation as a white European, and his relationship with German nationalism. He describes his Euro-Christianity that aligned Bonhoeffer with racism, Volkish German Nationalism, and colonialism. And then he spends equal time unfolding the culture of the Harlem Renaissance, a culture in stark contrast to German nationalism, a culture of an oppressed minority, the writers that influenced it - WEB DuBois, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes etc. – as well as the history and culture of Abyssinian Baptist Church. This all leads us to the 10 months Bonhoeffer spent in New York City beginning in the fall of 1930. Here the German nationalist Bonhoeffer immerses himself in the culture of Black Harlem and the Abyssinian Baptist church, and through this process of “social incarnational embodiment,” he is transformed, his theology reshaped, from which he returns to Germany a different person, a much deeper Christian and a more resolute resister to the culture of Hitler.

Reggie doesn’t actually use the term “social incarnational embodiment” in this book (that I could find). Nonetheless, I am sure I’ve heard him use it in lectures. And I suggest it captures what Williams is narrating in this book. The term captures so much of what Bonhoeffer does in Harlem and how he is transformed, and thereby escapes his own social capitivity, to see the gospel anew, and become a leader of a resistance church to the Nazi’s in 1930’s/40’s Germany.

Williams traces the relationships, the practices that take this wealthy privileged colonialist German into a completely foreign culture of Black Harlem, all the while many his associates, including Reinhold Niebuhr, all living within the same two mile walk to Harlem, stay distant and never take that walk. As James Cone said about Niebuhr, Bonhoeffer’s professor and friend at Union Seminary in NYC, and Cone’s colleague at Union 35 years later, Niebuhr failed “to step into black people’s shoes and “walk around in them…It was easy for Niebuhr to walk around in his own shoes, as a white man, and view the world from that vantage point, but it takes a whole lot of empathic effort to step into those (shoes) of black people and see the world through the eyes of African Americans” (Lynching Tree 2102, p.40). Bonhoeffer on the other hand practices social incarnational embodiment. And it results in a truly revolutionary theology. It is all quite stunning. It teaches us all, especially we who do theology, teach theology, write theology, that we must do the work of social incarnational embodiment.

As you read Williams, pay attention to the ways Bonhoeffer went to be with the people of Abyssinian Baptist Church and sink himself in among them, be present to them. He learned their music. He taught their children. He went to concerts. He studied their history. He became close friends with black persons at the church and at the seminary. He tended to what God was doing in a place and a culture completely foreign to him. And it was here in this space, that the scales fell off his eyes. He saw how encrusted and captive his white German Jesus had become in his own cultural Christianity. He discovered a living Jesus, the living presence of Jesus at work among a people working out the gospel on the ground, who Williams calls “the Black Jesus.” As Williams put it, “the practice of incarnation moved him beyond emphasis on right doctrine as the sole indicator of Christian identity to the healthy expressions of intimate joining and a faith that is social and participatory rather than primarily conceptual and abstract.” This is the essence of what I’m talking about: “Social incarnational embodiment.”

Two Lessons for Doing Christian Ethics Today

I could probably end this post here, but I need to point out two lessons in this process of social incarnational engagement that appear in the book. They are actually a minor part of the book, but for me they are key lessons of social ethics, mission, church and culture, that I harp on again and again at Northern Seminary in the MA Theology and Mission program. 1.) the role of creation, and 2.) the role of “principles” in our ethics of doing social engagement.

Created Orders

Beginning at page 10, Williams goes into a riff on the way the doctrine of “created orders” and “the Lutheran two kingdom split” made possible certain conditions for racism to sustain itself and even flourish among Christians in Germany.

The “orders of creation” argue that “certain structures of human life are not just incidental biological or historical phenomena but are deliberately ordained of God as essential and immutable conditions of human existence.” And so things like marriage, economics, government, education become these places ordained by God for the purposes of God.

These structures, undergird now by God’s act of creating them good, take on a certain ontological permanence which justifies their existence. This logic was applied by the German intelligentsia to legitimate Volk language. God has created our unique people and now it is the German culture itself that is ordained by God. And so, in a footnote, Williams quotes the German National Socialists: “Above all the supreme order of creation is the people, race or nation to which one belongs ….”(cf. note 15, p. 144) This creation language was used to legitimate the superiority of the white culture over Jewish or Black, the order of men over women, etc. etc.

I think Williams is observing a major issue in Christian ethics that affects so much in our daily lives as Christians in America and beyond. Whether it be race, class, sexuality, gender, we argue according to creation that we are created this way. This is just the way things are. Therefore let us affirm these orders as good and created by God. Regimes of racism, sexuality and gender (both traditional and progressive sexual ethics), capitalism are all justified in this way. In the next post, I’ll go into Thiessen-Nation’s exposition on Bonhoeffer on this, and how it worked out in Germany. It’s insightful for so many of our moral navigations in the church today.

This all becomes even more dangerous when aligned in 1930’s Germany with the Lutheran two kingdoms doctrine which states that God rules the worldly or left–hand kingdom through secular means (the sword or compulsion) and the heavenly or right–hand kingdom through spiritual means.

This doctrine got twisted into German 1930’s church doctrine arguing the church has no right to intervene in the affairs of the state and furthermore, church members are legally bound to abide by the laws of the state. The state’s role is to provide the legal protection for the church so it can proclaim its message and do the work of the “kingdom” without government interference (cf. note 50, p. 168). The church’s role is to tend to the spiritual needs of souls and that is it.

Combining the Created Orders doctrine with the Two-Kingdom Split set the stage for the church, and for Christians in general, to sit idly by while the government carried on its Aryan agenda. It enabled Christians to say it was Christian to stand by the Nazi government, even if some of its moral character and decisions were seriously against good Christian morality.

The Created Orders connected with the Two-Kingdom Split, I suggest, work against the practice of social incarnational engagement. By setting up creation as affirming the ways things are, we in essence accept the current status quo. We no longer engage socially. We ignore the way sin has corrupted creation. We displace Jesus as the center of our ethic and the only one who can lead us into a renewal of creation as all things good. Today we see creation used (especially within Reformed and Mainstream Evangelical contexts) to ground our ethics in problematic ways. We see it inn how we engage government, sexuality, gender, racism, and economics. Likewise, a Two Kingdom approach leads us to divide the inner life from the outer life of the Christian. Politics, social systems are left to be managed through coercive power of gov’t (this – maybe not in its pure Lutheran form -I contend is subliminal to much of evangelical ethics towards government and Trump) while our inner life is where the Spirit works. This all leads to another form of disengagement of Jesus, and our lives in Jesus, with social issues on the ground. Our engagement for justice is left to the coercive powers of the state, and becomes disembodied from our Christian lives lived in the Spirit.

At Northern Seminary, in both the MATM and the Doctorate in Contextual Theology, we dive deeply into understanding how the doctrines of creation, and personal/social split work to undermine living faithful Christian witness in our time, i.e. social incarnational embodiment.

Conceptualizing Doctrine Into Principles

The second idea I see at work here is the impulse to conceptualize doctrine into principles to be applied, separate from discerning the living presence of Jesus at work in our culture. Williams describes how Christian doctrine became conceptualized and divorced from its practice in the world of German Christianity and German theology. Christianity got compartmentalized from social life. It became doctrine we are only intellectually believe, think about, write books about.

Indeed, this is what Christianity had become in Germany via its university system. Bonhoeffer would later say that all his work there in the university was as a non-believer. Because, after his Abyssinian church experience, he came to see that Christian faith cannot be extracted from concrete everyday life, where Jesus is encountered, discerned and cooperated with.

Williams quotes the words of Adam Clayton Powell, the great preacher of Abyssinian Baptist, “The best definition I know of saving faith (versus an intellectual faith) is the statement made by the mother of Jesus to the waiters in Canaan of Galilee when the wine gave out: ‘Whatever he saith unto you do it.’ Faith consists more in doing than it does in believing.” (97)

The Western, European conceptualization of faith, the abstracting it from everyday life, makes it possible to divorce faith from the social worlds we live in. Once faith becomes intellectual, abstracted from everyday life, we can make belief into principles which we can then use to justify our most comfortable living arrangements, our privilege, our wealth, all of which exploit certain peoples. It is what made possible the Christian acceptance of Aryan supremacy, Volk religion, and the despicable racism/violence toward the Jews. Because justifying all of this was easier than resisting it. Intellectual principles, abstracted from discipleship with Jesus, could be used to explain any hardships the German people had endured, and thereby remain blameless. This is virtually how all ideology works, adapting abstract views to specific agendas. (Mark Thiessen Nation’s book goes deeper into Bonhoeffer on this- I'‘ll be writing on it in future posts)

Needless to say, all of this conceptualization of belief works against social incarnational engagement. It provokes us to look with discerning eyes on what we’re doing as churches in accommodating to an immoral incoming president. Could it be, that what lies at the heart of Christians and their support of Trump, is that we have made Christianity so purely personal, so purely conceptual, that we are able to disengage from the social contagion of racism, misogyny and marginalization of the oppressed that has swept parts of our American landscape?

What to Do with All This?

The take away for me of Reggie Williams’ book on Bonhoeffer is that the cure for all of the above just mentioned is not more arguing, more twitter storms, more social media. It is church communities who will dare to live lives of social incarnational embodiment.

Bonhoeffer went to be with the people of Abyssinian Baptist Church Harlem. He became present to them (a practice I describe in ch. 6 of Faithful Presence). It was there that Bonhoeffer discovered a living faith, a real Jesus at work among a people. From here Bonhoeffer went back to Germany to plant communities of social incarnational embodiment that are centered in Christ’s presence, starting with Finkenwalde (these developments are explored deeply in Thiessen-Nation’s book). For Bonhoeffer, in communities like this, this is where Christ shall meet the world, engage the world, and even resist and overcome the world. Sadly, by the time he returned to Germany, the truth had almost totally disappeared, having been absorbed by the counterfeit, German Volk religion. Finkenwalde was too late.

And so, as many of us go to the cinema to watch the Bohoeffer movie, can we go with these questions in mind? Can we start leading communities of social incarnational engagement before it is too late? Can we be challenged to extend the practice of Bonhoeffer into the coming months of political upheaval in this country. Can we challenge ourselves to do a Bonhoeffer? Can those among us blessed with privilege, go be with those who are not us, the immigrant, the refugee?

For such a time as this, can we take the journey of Bonhoeffer?