Constructive Engagements with Bonhoeffer: Anthropology, Christology, Ecclesiology, and Escatology

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.

The multisite, multimedia megachurch illuminates the problematic of the relationship between sociality and solitude – its digital offerings enable a worship experience that is remarkably connected and yet remarkably isolated. This beckons an interrogation of the what and where of the church community, which beckons remembrance of an imprisoned, isolated Dietrich Bonhoeffer questioning the very same. In this paper I analyze Bonhoeffer’s concrete yet complex definition of Christ-as-community to explore the questions: 1) What and where is Christ-as-community? and 2) Can this community exist in virtual form? In identifying Christ-as-community as necessarily incarnate and intimate, and in locating it in the world, at the center, I argue that the virtual church is disembodied, discarnate, superficial, and illusory in a world that is fundamentally made of flesh. Leaving open the possibility of the Spirit’s movement in cyberspace, I call the church to remember Bonhoeffer’s Christ-as-community, and to re-member the digital church.

Though Bonhoeffer’s name is not often mentioned in the eschatological theology conversation ruled by the Moltmanns and Pannenbergs, this paper seeks to show that Bonhoeffer’s overall thought, from early to late, should be seen as both a precursor and corrective to Pannenberg’s proposal for “the ontological priority of the future.” Along such lines, Bonhoeffer should be re-casted as belonging to the conversation as a major player. Bonhoeffer’s eschatologically-oriented theology, what here will be called an “ontological priority for the future” (where the word “for” serves as a double-entendre), will be traced from throughout the corpus of his works in a way that its ongoing theological and ethical significance for our ideologically-polarized twenty-first century world will be drawn out. 

Rowan Williams has connected Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s christological reflections with those of Sergius Bulgakov. He notes that they share a view of Chalcedon’s “negative” function. I will argue that Bulgakov can elucidate more than only this aspect of their respective Christologies. Whereas Bonhoeffer’s interest is in minimising the “how” question in favour of the “who” question, Bulgakov explicitly seeks to address how the incarnation is possible through his metaphysical and ontological discourse, sketching a hinterland missing from Bonhoeffer’s account. If Bonhoeffer’s christological insights are to have a future theologically, they need further grounding. It is not enough that it is Jesus Christ today who is pro me; we must also be able to describe how this is so, trusting that the God revealed in Christ is in fact Love (the Trinitarian pro me), so that we can maintain a plausible and credible worldly witness of love in our fragmented times.