Deliver Us From Evil: A Constructive Account of Prayer and Justice in Conversation with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ernst Käsemann, and the Black Pentecostal Tradition

This paper assesses Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s engagement with justice in Letters and Papers from Prison and Ethics. Specifically, I interrogate his claim that the church can enjoy a clean break with injustice through confession and forgiveness and question whether prayer, left unnuanced, will entail just action. After considering his discussions of prayer and justice, I first engage his contemporary Ernst Käsemann’s critique of the post-war German Church’s entanglement with the idolatries of white supremacy and then consider the Black Pentecostal tradition as it can reveal issues in Bonhoeffer’s account of justice and insufficiencies in Käsemann’s account of idolatry.

In May of 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer laments from Tegel prison that the church’s failures during the Third Reich have invalidated its spoken witness. Bonhoeffer concludes that—to regain the authority to speak rightly—the church must constrain itself to prayer and just action.[1] His view of just what this action might entail can be mined from Ethics, wherein he contends that a church complicit in evil might be renewed through confession, conformation to the cross, and forgiveness of sin that will together accomplish “a full break with guilt and a new beginning.”[2] Bonhoeffer argues that this will facilitate the renewal of the West more broadly, but only to the extent that the state might admit its guilt, join in the slow scarring over of past wrongs, and take up again just action.[3] So, in Bonhoeffer’s account of justice, the church experiences a clean break through confession, conformation, and forgiveness while the state can only hope for the scars of time to sufficiently enable a return to justice.

Ernst Käsemann, also a member of the Confessing Church and an ardent resistor against National Socialism, makes clear that Bonhoeffer’s account is problematic in the sense that it does not fully reckon with how elusive a clean break might be for a church complicit in evils. After his imprisonment at the hands of the Nazis, his forced conscription, and his capture by the Americans, Käsemann would engage in the West German Student Movement, and attend to Global Liberationist efforts—all in an attempt to join in the renewal of Germany and the German church.[4] That process proved far more difficult than some anticipated. While Germany declared a Stunde Null (zero hour), or full break with the Third Reich, scholars have come to question the narrative that Germany actually desired a new beginning and have interrogated whether some evils can so easily be started over from.[5]  This was not an issue constrained to the state. In the late 1970s, Käsemann laments that the church continues to serve at the whims of the white, Western bourgeoisie, ignore the rise of global militarism, and defend its own comforts rather than attend to the subjugated. He concludes that, even after a purported clean break, the German church remains bound to the idolatry of the “White Man” and the demons of white supremacy. He argues that only deliverance from these possessions will heal such a church.[6] Käsemann therefore names an obstacle to new beginnings that Bonhoeffer does not anticipate in the claim that prayer and liturgical processes might ensure just action. He offers an amendment to Bonhoeffer’s vision of renewal within Bonhoeffer’s own context.

And yet, there is another tradition, that lies outside of the context of Bonhoeffer and Käsemann—and yet equally confronts manifestations of white supremacy—that interrogates both Bonhoeffer’s paradigm of a confession, forgiveness, and a clean break and Käsemann’s call for deliverance. I have in mind here early 20th-century Black Pentecostals. In Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, Ashon T. Crawley traces the contours of early 20th-century Pentecostal debates regarding tongues speech. White supremacist Pentecostals largely emphasized xenolalia while Black Pentecostals broadly prioritized glossolalia. Xenolalia was amenable to white supremacist aims because, as a gift of human languages, it imbues persons with the means to speak the language of lands conquered. Glossolalia, in contrast, pursues incoherence unto sanctifying divine encounter[7] Proponents of xenolalia presumed that sanctification was accomplished at the receipt of the Spirit and so the gift of new languages amounted to divine affirmation. Proponents of glossolalia recognized that tongues speech, in the form of new human languages, did not entail freedom from racialized logics and racist corruption. They argued that ongoing sanctification through divine encounter via the gift of incoherent tongues was necessary for deliverance and healing from these evils.[8] Therefore, the Black Pentecostal perspective interrogates Bonhoeffer’s claims by better identifying what evils must be overcome and what processes are necessary to form just actors. It interrogates Käsemann’s call for deliverance by elaborating how that deliverance might be accomplished. With this in mind, this paper engages Bonhoeffer, Käsemann, and Black Pentecostal Theology to develop a constructive account of what type of prayer might precede just action in our day as we face our own entanglements with current forms of white supremacy, in hopes that, in Bonhoeffer’s words, the church “will once more be called to speak the word of God…in a new language, perhaps quite nonreligious…but liberating and redeeming like Jesus’s language.”[9]

[1] DBWE 8: 389-390.

[2] DBWE 6: 142-143.

[3] DBWE 6: 143-144.

[4] James H. Cone, foreword to Ernst Käsemann Church Conflicts: The Cross, Apocalyptic, and Political Resistance (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), xi-xx.

[5] Cone, foreword, xviii-xix.

[6] Ernst Käsemann Church Conflicts: The Cross, Apocalyptic, and Political Resistance (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), 183-184.

[7] Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 210-216.

[8] Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath, 214.

[9] DBWE 8 390.