The primary question posed by Bonhoeffer and the Racialized Church—“How do we remain faithful to and work within a Christian church that has been historically complicit in racism and that still exhibits racial actions in its communal life?”—is answered through a dialogue Ross E. Halbach establishes between Bonhoeffer and three very different thinkers: Willie James Jennings, J. Kameron Carter, and Brian Bantum. Halbach engages Bonhoeffer by having each interlocuter bring a topic that intersects with whiteness in different ways: for Jennings it is sin and creation, for Carter Christology, and for Bantum ecclesiology.
Before these discussions take place, Halbach takes his readers into Bonhoeffer’s world, grounding them in the historical period (Germany in the time leading up to and during World War II) that shaped Bonhoeffer's outlook, his response to Nazism and its personal impact on his life, and his unique theological standpoint.
To answer his central question, Halbach begins with the premise that the modern church does not have a race problem. Rather, the modern church is the race problem. He posits that whiteness is a resistance to the ongoing call of God, not because white people per se are resistant to God, but because of its “coercive” characteristics, whiteness accords power and control to some and places others at a disadvantage—a position anathema to the call of God.
In the pairing of Bonhoeffer and Jennings, Halbach uses the latter to juxtapose sin and whiteness. Jennings avers that whiteness has the capacity to rewrite its story without acknowledging the past and is thus able to “white-wash” its sin. Jennings highlights the need to address whiteness as a means of preparing the way or penultimate—that time which is between “a beginning and an end given in Jesus Christ” (38) through which the church, and through the church the world, is made ready for the ultimate—the justification of the sinner by grace alone. Bonhoeffer’s penultimate. In response, Bonhoeffer emphasizes that it is only within the church, which is addressed by God in an ongoing manner, that God’s people know themselves to be a community of sinners. This community, notes Bonhoeffer, is completely identified with the construct of whiteness that "affords power and privilege to some and weakness and disadvantage to everyone else" and the sin which flows from this construct.
When Carter is brought into the conversation, Halbach shifts from creation to Christ, and more specifically to who the church believes Christ to be. Bonhoeffer sees the church as being established though Christ acting on behalf of the sinful world, while Carter insists that modern racial imagination seeks to extract Jesus from his Jewish (i.e., not white) roots. While whiteness draws borders, the non-white Jesus Christ brings all of creation into a process of intermixing, which challenges the artificial borders of whiteness. Carter’s emphasis on Jesus’ Jewish ethnicity, coupled with Bonhoeffers’ focus on encountering the reality of Christ within people of faith, counterbalance the danger posed by claims (either overt or implicit) of “self-election,” whereby people of certain races assert that they, and they alone, are the elect.
In his discussion of Bantum, Halbach contrasts Bonhoeffer’s idea of the church as an experiential community in a sinful world with Bantam’s suggestion that the church actually shares in the mixed-race (“mulatto”) body of Christ. Halbach makes a salient point: ideas (such as whiteness) always have a physical impact, and the physicality of our bodies in turn shape our ideas. The church cannot be unlinked from the people who form it, nor can ideas around race exist in a purely hypothetical realm. For Bonhoeffer, the notion that ideas and bodies can be separated is a consequence of the Fall, when responding directly to the call of God was put aside in favor of speculation about God. It becomes clear that Bantum sees God’s work in the world as a “disruption,” challenging the accepted organization of the church, while Bonhoeffer views God’s work as an “irruption,” confronting the ways in which people are included and excluded. Bonhoeffer maintains that it is only God, working through his church, who can address the whiteness that includes and excludes.
Having only a very general understanding of who Bonhoeffer was and what he wrote about, I found Halbach's background on Bonhoeffer very helpful, both from a historical point of view and as a way to familiarize the reader with the essentials of his work. In particular, comprehending Bonhoeffer's own racist outlook (shaped negatively by his cultural upbringing) and his intentional work with people outside his own people group underscores the necessary complexity of any answer to the question Halbach poses. Bonhoeffer's understanding of the “ultimate” and “penultimate” permeate the discussion, and by engaging Bonhoeffer with three distinctly different theologians, Halbach emphasizes the strengths of Bonhoeffer’s deployment of these two concepts. He pits a theologian who wrote from a particular and unique point in history against three theologians who write from different cultural, historical, and philosophical backgrounds. In this way, Halbach occasionally acknowledges the limitations of Bonhoeffer’s standpoint. However, I would have preferred a stronger critique of Bonhoeffer’s views—Halbach makes Bonhoeffer the standard against which the other theologians are judged, and they are often found wanting.
Halbach stresses that the key for Bonhoeffer is that the church existed as an entity long before whiteness was a racialized concept. This is the strength of Bonhoeffer's outlook. The problem left for the church to address is that if whiteness is to be truly tackled, then the church must forthrightly acknowledge that at no point in history does God surrender to whiteness. If that is true, then the church is called to do the same.
Bronwyn Williams is a PhD student in theology at Charles Sturt University.
Bronwyn Williams
Date Of Review:
November 29, 2022
