Bonhoeffer Looks East: Freedom, Palestine, and the Orientalist Gaze

This paper offers a critical reading of Bonhoeffer’s 1932 lecture “Right to Self-Assertion” by arguing that his otherwise laudable attempt to make sense of the violence underpinning modern Euro-American society is nonetheless limited by his problematically orientalist understanding of “the East.” Though his analysis of the modern Euro-American struggle to assert one’s (white settler) life over and against the life of others remains incisive, I argue that there is a fundamental gap in Bonhoeffer’s wider political and theological imagination of the actually-existing lives of those living in the Majority World. I argue that this gap is mirrored in the ongoing erasure of actually-existing Palestinian life by Christian theologians otherwise committed to freedom and justice in Palestine, suggesting a dire need for alternative theological approaches that decentre the Western liberal tradition whose limits have been laid bare in Gaza and beyond.