IN 2004, an article by James Cone in the journal Black Theology, “Theology’s Great Sin: Silence in the Face of White Supremacy”, set a movement in motion to which Tim Judson has now made a clearly argued and persuasively articulated contribution.
This important book addresses three key concerns with clarity and conviction. First, how skin colour, with all its significations, affects how Christian theology is formulated, articulated, and practised. Second, how his Whiteness played a part in Bonhoeffer’s personal and theological development as evidenced in his authorship. Third, how Judson’s own experience as a White, British, Baptist minister has been affected by both those considerations.
Perhaps too little has been made of how Bonhoeffer immersed himself in the Black life, experience, and spirituality of African Americans when visiting the United States. For Judson, he becomes “a kindred spirit, someone who was wrestling with the question of who Jesus is in a world that served him well but excluded and exterminated others”. So, Judson set himself to “a reading through Bonhoeffer’s corpus that asks questions about race . . . in the hope that we might learn where we might redress or repent of aspects of who we are as White Christians”. This is the “pilgrimage” upon which Judson invites us to join him — and Bonhoeffer.
The book is in two parts. Part One explores five key theological themes which foreground Bonhoeffer’s relationship to racial issues: Scripture, Creation, Sin, Salvation, and Creeds. Part Two focuses on Bonhoeffer’s main publications and ways in which they contribute to an overall assessment of his evolving engagement with issues pertinent to the theological, ethical, pastoral, ecclesiological, and spiritual implications of racial identity and inter-relationships.
AlamyDietrich Bonhoeffer plays the piano at a Christmas celebration with friends: Christoph von Dohnanyi, the future conductor, as child, with his hand over the chair; from left: Klaus and Barbara von Dohnanyi, and Eberhard Bethge
Liberal deployment of anecdotes, analogies, and poetry (Judson’s own poems in Part One and Bonhoeffer’s in Part Two) both lighten and illuminate the way ahead.
A concluding chapter movingly draws on a project by the Church in Wales to replace a window in an Alabama Church destroyed when the Ku Klux Klan bombed the church, killing four Black children who were attending Sunday school in 1963. The window depicts a Black Christ crucified. The story elegantly evokes a gesture signalling a flicker of hope waiting to be fanned into a flame.
As a project focusing on theology, and the work of a particular theologian, through a racially nuanced lens, this models a methodology that is ripe for replication and application across the widest spectrum of theological reflection, and especially that emanating from the overwhelmingly White academic mainstream.
Although Bonhoeffer’s writings are the lens through which Judson views and evaluates his “pilgrimage” towards a penitential but ultimately positive liberation from “the White Christian imagination that turns me away from God and others towards myself”, he does not sidestep Bonhoeffer’s theological, contextual, and societal limitations in relation to, inter alia, the social status of women.
But the overall thrust of this project poses questions to all those who write and read theology at a time when critical race theory presents a challenge from which no amount of “wokery” charges should deflect us.
The Rt Revd Dr John Saxbee is a former Bishop of Lincoln.
The White Bonhoeffer: A postcolonial pilgrimage
Tim Judson
SCM Press £25
(978-0-334-06536-4)
Church Times Bookshop £20
