Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  64. Locke had been the first African American Rhodes Scholar and a PhD graduate from Harvard, and was the chair of the philosophy department at Howard. Howard College had strong intellectual ties to Harlem. The New Negro, a book published in 1925 by philosophy professor Alain Locke, became the Bible of the Harlem Renaissance, inspiring students like Fisher to explore, affirm, and partake in this great flourishing of artistic and intellectual creativity/activity/life.

  65. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 321.

  66. See Reggie L. Williams, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black Christ,” in Bonhoeffer, Christ and Culture, ed. Keith L. Johnson and Timothy L. Larsen (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2012), pp. 59–73.

  67. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 296.

  68. Ibid., p. 293.

  69. Bob Gore, We’ve Come This Far: The Abyssinian Baptist Church, A Photographic Study (New York: Steward, Tabori and Chang, 2001), p. 31.

  70. Ibid.

  71. Letter to Martin Rumscheidt, December 17, 1986, in the Bonhoeffer Collection, Union Theological Seminary. First published in the Newsletter, International Bonhoeffer Society, English Language Section, no. 39 (October 1988): 3–4.

  72. In his short memoir: Clayton Powell Sr., Upon This Rock (New York: Abyssinian Baptist Church, 1949), p. 42.

  73. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 12, p. 356.

  74. Zerner, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s American Experiences,” p. 269.

  75. Paul Lehmann cited in von Hase, “ ‘Turning Away from the Phraseological to the Real,’ ” p. 597.

  76. Green, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Version,” p. 141.

  77. This information comes from Reggie L. Williams. His source was Dr. Valerie Fisher, one of Frank Fisher’s daughters.

  78. Clifford Green’s achievement in his essay “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition” in DBW’s volume 10—and I would say the achievement of the recently published translation of volume 10 as a whole—is not only that of highlighting the important interconnections between progressive Christian organizing in America in the 1930s and Bonhoeffer’s theological transformations. It is also his calling attention to “the thread” that links the New York experiences into a coherent life story. Evaluating Bonhoeffer’s letters, sermons, essays, and lectures from the first American year, Green says that we must “discover and interpret” statements from this period, as well as from the prison letters more than a decade later, in which Bonhoeffer “describes the significance of these years for his own sense of vocation and his theological development.” In Tegel prison in 1944, as we saw at the beginning, Bonhoeffer recalled the first American visit as one of the three decisive and transformative influences in his life. “It was then that I turned from [the phraseological to the real].” The thread that weaves through Bonhoeffer’s development in these years and over the coming decade, giving his life personal and spiritual coherence, is, as Clifford Green argues, precisely this journey from the “phraseological to the real.”

  79. Zerner, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s American Experiences,” p. 11.

  80. Abernathy would later say that King tried to replace Fisher with his former Montgomery cohort “even before Dr. Fisher had been laid to rest.” Abernathy said he was amazed at how quickly he would move to get me into an Atlanta pulpit when the opportunity seemed to present itself.” Ralph Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), p. 195.

  81. Thanks to Ralph Luker for this fascinating discovery. In correspondence with the author, Luker wrote, “Johns preached at Union on ‘The Answer of Religion to the Riddle of Life.’ I’ve got a footnote that runs to a page and a half about the tradition of ‘riddle of life’ preaching in 20th century American Protestantism. Nearly everyone you can think of—Fosdick, MLK, Sockman, etc., had a ‘riddle’ sermon. Because of peculiar details of attribution, I suspect that John Haynes Holmes heard Johns at UTS and got his own ‘riddle’ reference there. I would be surprised if Bonhoeffer didn’t hear that Johns sermon. I’ve tried several times to no avail to find out from archivists at UTS whether there’s a 1931 student newspaper or any documentation about the Johns sermon. If Bonhoeffer writes about ‘Is the Universe Friendly?,’ he’s tapping into a lively discussion around Union and in American Protestant pulpits, black and white.”

  82. Weizsäcker, “Thoughts of a Nontheologian on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Development,” p. 270.

  83. The philosopher Richard Rorty called this tradition “the reformist left” in his Harvard Massey Lectures, published in the superb volume Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America.

  84. Dunbar, Against the Grain, p. 41.

  85. For more on the intentional community movement in the United States, see Tracy Elaine K’Meyer, Interracialism and Christian Community in the Postwar South: The Story of Koinonia Farm (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1997); Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, The Intentional Community Movement: Building a Moral World (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1975); and Martin B. Duberman’s excellent study, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1973).

  86. Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx. See Frank Adams, James A. Dombrowski: An American Heretic, 1897–1983 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1992).

  87. Bosanquet, The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 84.

  88. Bonhoeffer cited in ibid.

  89. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 162.

  90. Ibid.

  91. “Christian Socialism,” Time, May 11, 1931. Union was not Bonhoeffer’s first exposure to practical theology. In an article on the theology faculty at Berlin during Bonhoeffer’s student years, Dorothea Wendebourg explains, “He not only attended Mahling’s cyclical lectures, but also his course on homiletics, and twice the catechetical seminar.” Mahling had served on Bonhoeffer’s dissertation committee. “On the one hand, this corresponded to his church commitment that becomes obvious also to his interest in catechetics, his work with children’s services and youth groups.” Mahling was interested in the question of how modern industrial and urban life created new challenges for the church’s mission and work. Still, Bonhoeffer had little interest in practical theology as a subdiscipline of theology, even though his intellectual interests inclined ever more toward the practical consequences of theological commitments.

  92. Bonhoeffer cited in Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx, p. 142.

  93. The first version of the Social Creed was adopted by the Federal Council of the Churches in Christ in America on December 4, 1908; the second version was adopted on December 9, 1912.

  94. Handy, A History of Union Theological Seminary, p. 191.

  95. Doug Rassinow, “The Radicalization of the Social Gospel: Harry F. Ward and the Search for a New Social Order, 1898–1936,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 15, no. 1 (winter 2005): 63–106.

  96. Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx, p. 144.

  97. Helmut Rößler cited in ibid., p. 283.

  98. Guido Enderis, special cable to the New York Times, September 15, 1930: “Fascists Make Big Gains in Germany, Communists Also Increase Strength as Moderates Drop in Reich Election; Socialists Remain in Lead,” http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00811F83C55147A93C7A81782D85F448385F9 (accessed October 10, 2013).

  99. See Adams, James A. Dombrowski. His dissertation was published as The Early Days of Christian Socialism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936).

  100. Horton, Kohl, and Kohl, The Long Haul, p. 35.

  101. Dale Jacobs in Dale Jacobs, ed., The Myles Horton Reader: Education for Social Change (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), p. 33.

  102. Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx, p. 142.

  103. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 296.

  104. Ibid., p. 293.

  105. “U.S. Route 1,” from Wikipedia: “One of the many changes made to the system befo
re the final numbering was adopted in 1926 involved US 1 in Maine. The 1925 plan had assigned Route 1 to the shorter inland route (Route 15) between Houlton and Bangor, while Route 2 followed the longer coastal route via Calais. In the system as adopted in 1926, US 2 instead took the inland route, while US 1 followed the coast, absorbing all of the former Routes 24 and 1 in New England. Many local and regional relocations, often onto parallel superhighways, were made in the early days of US 1; this included the four-lane divided Route 25 in New Jersey, completed in 1932 with the opening of the Pulaski Skyway, and a bypass of Bangor involving the Waldo-Hancock Bridge, opened in 1931. The Overseas Highway from Miami to Key West was completed in 1938, and soon became a southern extension of US 1.” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_1 (accessed October 10, 2013).

  106. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 304.

  107. Bosanquet, The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 90.

  108. Phrases comes from Lasserre, War and the Gospel, pp. 35ff.

  109. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 269.

  110. W.E.B. Du Bois was a major figure in what Bonhoeffer referred to as “the young Negro movement.” Du Bois’s lament resonates in Bonhoeffer’s sober observations of the “racial question”/“Negro problem”: “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?” See Reggie L. Williams, “Christ-Centered Empathetic Resistance: The Influence of Harlem Renaissance Theology on the Incarnational Ethics of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” doctoral dissertation, Fuller Theological Seminary, 2012, p. 34.

  111. Reggie L. Williams notes that “of the numerous works by Harlem Renaissance writers that Bonhoeffer read, and wrote about, this poem by Cullen is the only Harlem Renaissance literary work that Bonhoeffer directly referenced by name.” Ibid.

  112. Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, pp. 11–12.

  113. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 305. In his probing scholarship on the American year, Hans Pfeifer has shown that “continuity and change” are not only meaningful criteria for understanding the relation between the early and late Bonhoeffer—a concern that scholars have emphasized over the past several decades—but are thematic structures in every phase of his life. In this manner, continuity and change present “a significant key to understanding his entire work.” Full of unexpected surprises, Bonhoeffer’s experiences in America were marked by recognizable patterns of thought and action—by desires, habits, and various intricacies of character—unique to his story. See Pfeifer, “Editor’s Afterword to the German Edition,” p. 578. Clifford Green notes that in 1938, Bonhoeffer mentioned to Paul Lehmann that he continued to stay in contact with Erwin Sutz, and that Jean Lasserre had married. “And what about Joe Moor, Franklin Fisher, Klein, Dombrowski,” Bonhoeffer asked. See Green, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” p. 33. See also Pfeifer, “Learning Faith and Ethical Commitment in the Context of Spiritual Training Groups,” pp. 251–78.

  114. In the late 1980s, a young historian named David Nelson Duke studied Bonhoeffer’s year in New York. Professor Duke died of cancer in 1992 and the work remained unfinished. But in his two essays, along with his notes and chapter fragments, Duke gave ample evidence of his thesis that Bonhoeffer’s year in America cultivated in him “a new kind of moral passion.” See Duke, “The Experiment of an Ethic of Radical Justice.”

  115. Zerner, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s American Experiences,” pp. 261–82.

  116. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge, p. 358.

  117. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, pp. 367–68.

  CHAPTER SEVEN “Under the Constraint of Grace”

  1. Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, p. 119.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Some disagreement exists on the title of the summer seminar; the “Introduction to Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre (Doctrine of Faith)” has also been given as the subject.

  4. Barth and Bultmann, Karl Barth–Rudolf Bultmann Letters, 1922–1966, p. 41.

  5. Ibid., p. 40.

  6. Ibid., p. 120.

  7. Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, p. 120.

  8. Ibid., p. 122.

  9. Ibid., p. 119.

  10. Ibid., p. 121.

  11. Bonhoeffer cited in Tödt, Tödt, Feil, and Green, “Editors’ Afterword to the German Edition,” p. 411.

  12. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 451.

  13. Bonhoeffer cited in Tödt, Tödt, Feil, and Green, “Editors’ Afterword to the German Edition,” p. 411, note 7.

  14. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 11, p. 40.

  15. Ibid., p. 122.

  16. Bonhoeffer cited in Bosanquet, The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 98.

  17. Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, p. 139.

  18. Scharffenorth, “Editor’s Afterword to the German Edition,” pp. 490–94.

  19. Willem Adolf Visser ’t Hooft, “Foreword,” in J. Martin Bailey and Douglas Gilbert, The Steps of Bonhoeffer: A Pictorial Album (New York: Macmillan, 1969), pp. v–vi.

  20. Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, p. 136. Bonhoeffer sought to frame the language of peace in the context of the dynamic God-human encounter. In contrast to the Anglo-Saxon view (represented at the World Alliance) that international peace was an ideal, an absolute, a “final order of perfection, valid in itself,” an inevitable “part of the Kingdom of God on earth”—a view based on nineteenth-century doctrine of historical optimism—Bonhoeffer argued now that “the forgiveness of sins … remains the sole ground of all peace!” (pp. 168–69). Forgiveness of sins is therefore the “ultimate ground on which all ecumenical work rests” precisely because the “broken character of the order of peace” results from human rebellion against God.

  21. Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch cited in Rasmussen, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” p. 20, note 69; see also Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Life in Pictures, p. 54.

  22. “The ecumenical sphere in contemporary usage includes cooperation between the two major Western churches, the Roman Catholic and the Protestant. The ecumenical movement of the 1930s was intra-Protestant: Roman Catholic doctrine regarded Protestantism as an [inauthentic?] representation.” See Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 81.

  23. Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, pp. 123–24.

  24. Bethge, Bonhoeffer, p. 44.

  25. The scholar Ernst-Albert Scharffenorth is correct to say that Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of the Reich gives “this particular phase in Bonhoeffer’s life its unique character.” But Scharffenorth simplifies Bonhoeffer’s situation in 1931–33 in saying that the political events “set into motion a dynamic in Bonhoeffer’s own life that might allow us to characterize his life from this point onward as “sharing Germany’s destiny.” Scharffenorth, “Editor’s Afterword to the German Edition,” p. 483.

  26. Klaus Bonhoeffer cited in Rasmussen, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” p. 4.

  27. Rößler cited in Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, 73.

  28. See Bonhoeffer cited in Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 173.

  29. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 12, p. 69.

  30. Ibid., pp. 118–20.

  31. Bosanquet, The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 101.

  32. Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Erwin Sutz, in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 12, p. 102. In a letter to Paul Lehmann six months earlier, Bonhoeffer commented on the state of affairs in the universities: “A prelude to what can be expected from the National Socialists at the university is taking place right now in Halle, where the students (and not only the theology students) refuse to continue studying if a recently called pacifist professor of theology, who is an extraordinarily capable man, is not fired immediately [a reference to Dehn]. The intellectual level now entering the universities is simply dreadful.” Letter of November 5, 1931, to Paul Lehmann, in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 11, p. 116a.

  33. Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, p. 123.

  34. Green, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” p. 36.

  35. Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, pp. 123–2
4.

  36. Wendebourg, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer und die Berliner Universität.”

  37. Found in “13. Sermon on John 8:32. Berlin, Ninth Sunday after Trinity (Worship Service at the end of the Semester), July 24, 1932,” in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol., 11, p. 471.

  38. Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords; Ibid., p. 140.

  39. Ibid., pp. 125–32.

  40. Found in “5. Sermon on Matthew 24:6-14, Berlin, Reminiscere (Memorial Day), February 21, 1932,” in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 11, p. 426.

  41. Found in “Devotions on John 8:31-32. Berlin, Technical College, Beginning of Summer Semester 1932,” in ibid., pp. 433–34.

  42. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 204.

  43. Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, p. 140.

  44. Ibid., p. 150.

  45. Ibid., p. 151.

  46. Ibid., p. 140.

  47. Ibid., p. 37.

  48. Ibid., p. 151.

  49. During his three months in Wedding, Bonhoeffer received a copy of Karl Barth’s new book, Fides Quaerens Intellectum (Faith Seeking Understanding). In this slim but explosive volume, Barth plumbed Saint Anselm’s well-traveled ontological argument for the existence of God and reached new insights on the naming of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Barth argued that the argument depended on a prayer; according to some scholars of his thought, the book lay the methodological foundations for the Church Dogmatics. Fides Quaerens Intellectum further signaled Barth’s robust commitment to academic theology at precisely the time Bonhoeffer had begun gravitating toward practical ministry—although Bonhoeffer found Barth’s book a splendid read.