Who Is Christ for Black Women Living with Systemic Oppression and Depression? The Black Church, Time, and Bonhoeffer’s This-Worldly Christology.”

This paper examines who Christ is for Black women facing systemic oppression and depression, and how the Black church can better support them.  It extends my dissertation work, which used interviews and focus groups with Black Christian women to analyze how racism, sexism, classism, generational trauma, and the Strong Black Woman myth shape their depression and their theological self-understandings. I argue that dominant ecclesial theologies—disembodied views of incarnation, glorified redemptive suffering, and constant expectations of strength—often deepen women’s pain and discourage help-seeking. Drawing on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s this-worldly Christology, his critique of cheap grace, and his vision of a church “for others,” the paper calls for an embodied pastoral theology that practices lament, rest, professional collaboration, and communal solidarity, refusing to sacralize Black women’s suffering and instead witnessing to Christ’s liberative presence amid depressive realities.