[Applause] thank you thank you for that lovely introduction and it's a pleasure being here and finally uh having the privilege to um meet professor allen wolfe whose work i've um admired and learned from over the years and to um encounter the um good folks at the boise center and um and uh to be to be back in in in boston um it's such a beautiful afternoon outside you're courageous to come in and and give up the remaining sunlight there will be no more sunlight until june of 2016. um but in any
case it's it's um it's a pleasure to be here i spent much of the morning at a wonderful cafe in brookline great coffee shop like the four something somebody know that coffee shop awesome right across from the um from the israel bookstore you know the bookstore anyway um i was on such an amazing caffeine buzz and having such a wonderful time in the sunlight that i re-wrote a lot of this lecture it's not going to be any longer than 50 minutes i promise um or i i i hope um will be the case and prob
ably don't hope as much as you do um but i will be kind of looking around at a very complicated series of notes that i've made to myself as we as we journey together through what i hope you will find to be um a fascinating year in the life of dietrich bonhoeffer um in his journey from um a child a golden child of the of the german bildun's burger tomb the upper educated middle class of the neighborhood of intellectuals artists industrialists called the berlin grunovald to a member of the german
conspiracy who prayed for the defeat of his country and who blessed the work of conspirators in their plot to assassinate hitler there there was a time just to get things started in american public life when theologians and scholars of religion took part in the critical issues of the day their articles and books were published by major newspapers by political journals and magazines their their books were often commissioned by major trade presses and um and and sold not only in sort of niche acad
emic markets or religious markets but uh but but promoted through the major journals of the of the day um those years uh appear to be over do they not and um i think of um some of us you know long for those golden years of the public theologian not not everyone misses them my one of my former teachers richard rorty uh in a response to a fairly complicated and esoteric lecture on post-modern theory and religion said and ended up writing that i just keep hoping that theologians will all go away bu
t this is not to say that theology has a discipline has become obsolete i met this afternoon with brilliant young theologians the the the applications are up the guild is thriving this university has just sent a very talented young theologian to join uh us at uva in the the religious studies department nicole flores if any of you know her still the public theologian has become a rare bird and in any case the sound bites of the religious celebrities are preferred by by the right and by the left i
should add to the ruminations of the teachers who insist on slowing down speech on delineating nuance on drawing from ancient historical sources and exercising a certain reticence when necessary the forecast in any case for a secular america made amidst the social crisis of the late 1960s did not play out to script in fact i would suggest that theology matters now more than ever and it will not do to wish that we all go away even though i often wish that as a theologian in the guild as inevitab
le or desirable i should say as that may be to some as i have made my uh way from a childhood a long way away from the berlin grunoval in the segregated south the child of a southern baptist minister who came of age during the most violent years of white christian terrorism uh in the 1960s i have found as i have tried to make sense of haunting memories that have formed that have formed haunting equally haunting theological questions that the most compelling answers have often come when i cleave
to the stories of people whose lives illuminated hope and authenticity who performed theology in vital and um and meaningfully uh concrete ways and whose lives were devoted to humanity and to live if we had the rest of the evening i would tell you stories about some of these patron matron saints of mine miss fannie lou hamer of royalville mississippi clarence jordan victoria gray adams john lewis casey hayden will d campbell whiskey drinking tobacco chewing baptist preacher passed away last year
ella baker one of my heroes is standing sitting in this audience today surprised me russell zhang from oakland uh about whom i wrote a short section in the beloved community a brilliant organizer out of a community called the oak park community and american religious dissidence of the generation preceding the civil rights movement some of whom you will meet presently but always and always my thoughts have returned to the life and legacy of dietrich bonhoeffer the berlin pastor in theologian exe
cuted by the nazis on april 9 1945 in the flossenburg concentration camp whose robust christian humanism and one might say fierce devotion to the teachings of jesus his commitment to live in truth inspires me to to think of him and to offer him today to us as a theologian for our time and in my in my talk this afternoon this evening these two worlds will in fact cross paths in surprising and i think intriguing hopefully inspiring ways the the story of bonhoeffer's journey to reality as one of hi
s um relatives later described the narrative arc of his life and the radical prophets and and and um and activists who um scholars have learned only recently framed his american year as one of profound growth and imaginative renewal so please join me on this journey as we revisit tonight bonhoeffer's life and legacy in the context of his first and his longest trip to the united states 1930 1931. in the summer of 1930 let's get going dietrich bonhoeffer came to new york city into union theologica
l seminary in manhattan as a visiting student and postdoctoral fellow when he arrived he was a straight arrow academic whose star was rising he was a 24 year old private docent assistant professor at the university of berlin the most important and famous of the theology faculties in germany his sights were set on a lifetime of intellectual leisure and the rewards of the academic guild his doctoral dissertation completed years earlier at the age of 21 had been praised by the great carl bart as ai
na taylor uber a theological uh a miracle or surprise depending on the tone and he had recently completed his second dissertation uh his habilitations this rift which is the second dissertation required to be promoted in german academe called actin being which was a conceptually dazzling and uh exceedingly ambitious attempt to completely overhaul the german philosophical tradition as it moved from kantian subjectivity through um herserl and heidegger all of that's to say a lack of self-confidenc
e was not or then or ever a problem for bonhoeffer but when he left new york 10 months later he did so with a profoundly transformed perspective on social gate engagement on historical responsibility and on the pasta the possibilities of the theological vocation and the life of faith a technical terminology that had defined his writings prior to 1930 would would give way to a language more direct and expressive of lived faith um that that was animated by by what he often spoke of as the effort t
o see clearly in the anxious middle in integral prison in in 1944 where he would be incarcerated for uh numerous um charges related to his role in the conspiracy against hitler bonner for recalled this um first american experience in a letter to his dear friend eberhard and he said there have been only two times in my life when i can observe profound personal growth and transformation one was under the strong impression of my father his father was the director of the center for nervous diseases
and psychiatry at the university of berlin the second was on my first journeys abroad and he spoke not of of his time in italy in north africa of spain and and more than anything else of this year in america and he said it was then that i began to make and i love this i love this uh phrase the turning from the phraseological to the real baker abelhart baker uh who the author of the magisterial biography weighs in at about 1200 pages 700 pages longer than strange glory [Music] wrote in a very sho
rt section on the american experience something happened didn't really tell us what it was what i'd like to ask tonight is what happened and i'd like to explore this this question what happened in the context of three prophetic encounters during this year the first is bonafer's encounter with what we might call the america the tradition of american social theology the second with the african-american church and uh and uh and black culture and the third with what we might call the american organi
zing tradition let's take before we jump in a brief inventory okay of bonhoeffer's life on the eve of his first visit to america looking at his notes and his letters as i was able to do in the beautiful stats bibliotheque where alan may have worked some years ago in berlin you might draw the conclusion that he expected the year in america to be another chapter in his charmed life he certainly did not think he had anything to learn theologically in the new world he regarded american theology as n
othing more than william james's pragmatism kind of applied to protestant congregational life and maybe he was right about that the scholar clifford greene who lives and works here in boston if you indulge me one kind of pedantic moment here draws our attention in trying to answer this question to an intriguing passage that we find in bonneffer's second theological examination that berlin before he came to the united states the examination had asked him to find interesting scriptural passages fo
r a bible series a series of preaching on god's path through history in the church and bonhoeffer turned his attention and found quite revelatory those first few verses of the epistle of hebrews which describe the great story of faith and culminates the saga of faith from creation to the first martyrs in chapter 11 um with this verse therefore you know this verse since we are um surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses certainly this verse would come to have great importance to bonhoeffer as
the american year unfolded and he would write to a good friend in berlin five months into his year that as he experienced a new country a an unfamiliar culture the strange and to him altogether exotic bewildering kind of religious landscapes of america that he realized that he was searching for a cloud of witnesses in the 12 courses bonhoeffer took as a sloan fellow at union he focused on philosophy of religion theology and social ethics but the subject while the subject matter was familiar the
institutional context was altogether unlike anything he was accustomed to in berlin and he was decidedly underwhelmed what was he to make of a religious culture in which he said people fashioned their ideas of god the same way a man might order a car from the factory in detroit the students he would he said more to the point of his observations the students here on average 25 to 30 years old are totally clueless they are not familiar with even the most basic questions of christian dogmatics they
can become easily intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases they talk a blue streak but often without the slightest substantive foundation railing against the christian fundamentalists he said seemed to be the union student's favorite pastime bonhoeffer said and yet basically most of the students i've observed here are not even up to the level of the christian fundamentalists everyone just blabs away so frightfully he noted there is no theology in america noted with astonishment that he o
ccasionally heard students seminarians preparing for the protestant ministry ask whether really one must preach about christ in order to be a minister bonnefort noted it's come to this that this protestant seminary has forgotten what the christian faith in its very essence stands for he felt that this was more broadly true of american protestant culture and the whole franchise of liberal protestantism as a whole the principle um the principal doctrines of christian dogmatics are in utter disarra
y and in america it would appear that it's possible to enter the ministry without having a clue of what one thinks about god this is bonhoeffer's first observation and yet amidst all this sort of theatrical hand-wringing and and i think um drama that is sort of part of his personality i don't want us and i don't want you to lose sight of an important fact that prior to coming to america and in berlin bonneville had fallen into a melancholy state in his academic life his best friend at the time f
ranz hildebrand assured bonhoeffer with a kind of homegrown irreverence that there's nothing better to report about berlin than what you're reporting in america and hildebrand went on to recount how um one markedly inferior professor named uh professor schwabel had recently treated the students to a completely muddled and annoying discourse on the merits of the whole and solar dynasty and on the spirit of obedience in faith and of the discipline of patriotism bonhoeffer had written in his notebo
oks prior to his journey to america the air is closed and stuffy in berlin you look at his notebooks and it's like he's having a sense of claustrophobia and that the air has grown thin and moreover as a post as a post doctoral graduate student teaching fellow teaching in the theology department he his life really amounted to little more than as he said grading excruciatingly dumb research papers such observations fueled throughout his life bonhoeffer's frequent desire to run away and you see in
his character i think a a profound restlessness and he he might have gone back to italy where he spent a wonderful six weeks um completely enchanted by italian catholicism during holy season he might have gone back to spain or to northern africa he might have gone to india or to palestine as it was his life's hope to do everything here in germany seems so infinitely banal and dull i have never noticed what nonsense people speak and the trams on the street it's just shocking all of this is to say
bonhoeffer's critical agitated remarks suggest that he had grown impatient with what he found constraining not only in the life of academic um and intellectual work but that that the kind of a feeling of of them of the of the malays in germany had reached a kind of uh um innervating had become a kind of innervating weight um and so he came to america american social theology in the fall of 1930 as many of you will know union theological seminary in new york was the flagship institution of prote
stant liberal thought in north america the student body in 1930 was more diverse than it had ever been and it included african-americans asian-americans women and uh and poor whites from uh the urban north and the rural south among the faculty of nearly 40 no one represented the uniqueness and the and the vibrancy of progressive protestant uh thought uh more than the indefatigable reinhold niebuhr uh still only two years away from his pastorate in inner city detroit reynold niebuhr the great dra
matist of theological ideas in the public square for whom probing analysis of the contemporary political and social situation as important as if not more so than parsing sacred doctrine for whom concrete engagement in the social order was a foremost responsibility for the person of faith bonhoeffer had never seen anyone like him in the concept of christian realism which niebuhr was working out in his seminars and lectures during that very year 1930-31 and which would um set the the the the sort
of the thematic uh framework uh for um niebuhr's landmark work a moral man and immoral society that was published uh in 1932 niebuhr spoke the sobering truth that there will never be any final escape in historic existence from the contradictions in which human nature is involved niebuhr's honest assessments of power and justice would strike a chord with people of faith and people throughout american public life searching for a way beyond liberal idealism and victorian quietism by the time um so
let me just say one one one quick thing about about niebuhr niebuhr was at his best when analyzing the structures and the behavior of political systems and offering theological interpretations of events as a basis for common action for a wide audience was one of the great public theologians of the day and aspiring to greater public relevance niebuhr tended to communicate his ideas in a manner that left his theological commitments unspoken the public theologian he understood would inevitably be m
isunderstood at times as would demurrels on doctrines finer points but niebuhr resolved nonetheless to be a circuit writer in defense of the christian faith in a secular age while also making common cause with progressives in responsible action throughout the various fields of social and political engagement in an interesting autobiographical essay hebrew would say you know i've never been very competent in the nice points of pure theology and i must confess that i have not been sufficiently int
erested heretofore to acquire the confidence bonifer took courses with niebuhr in both semesters and while he found the courses intriguing particularly niebuhr's ethical viewpoints in modern literature that introduced bonhoeffer to the writings of james weldon johnson and w.e.b du bois bonnefer found niebuhr's views positively bewildering one day after class in the first semester bonifa went forth directly to speak with the professor and he asked is this a seminary or is it a training center for
politicians and activists and he did not mean that as a compliment neiman might have taken it as one but niebuhr was equally perplexed by the erudite uh and supremely confident lutheran from berlin and as you know ronald niebur was not one to shy away from a good debate when bonifa asserted in a term paper he wrote for niebuhr in that first fall that the god of guidance could be known only from the god of justification niebuhr responded sharply your doctrine of justification i know that it's ve
ry lutheran but it has no ethical dimension it is overly abstract he wrote in the margin there is no ethical dimension in your notion of justification it has no bearing on the concrete here and now and neighbor pushed bonhoeffer to think more realistically about the ethical content and significance of this god of justification in making grace as transcendent as you do niebuhr said i don't see how you can ascribe any ethical significance to it bonhoeffer would never acknowledge a a clear or speci
fic theological debt to reynold niebuhr he he worries that niebuhr's theology lacked confessional richness and these worries were were basic and i think well-founded the two however would stay in touch over the next decade bonhoeffer often wrote as the church struggled the cure concomp and the and the conspiracy took shape to niebuhr in german and which neighbor read well and spoke fluently though he replied to bonifa in english when in the summer of 1939 bonhoeffer found himself at a faithful c
rossroad niebuhr would offer him refuge in new york and hastily put together a professorship or a series of positions that would have given bonhoeffer a um a way of of um of living safely apart from the great masquerade of evil that was unfolding in germany and yet i think that it's correct to say that bonhoeffer was fundamentally transformed by what we might call the spirit of public theology and by um the exemplification of a theologian who engaged the social order with civil courage and ultim
ate honesty two neburian terms which would become um terms in in boniface ethics and and um later writings who insisted that the enterprise of theology engage the um concrete concerns of of the present era i think for example when you hear bonhoeffer use the phrase costly discipleship in what's probably his best known book outside of academic audiences the cost of discipleship you are hearing echoes of niebuhr's margin comments in his union paper your doctrine of justification does not have an e
thical consequence and von neufer would write in the very first pages of cost of discipleship justification without obedience is cheap grace costly grace is understanding that justification and that the grace of god is a grace that forms and compels new patterns of life and ethical behavior you know i just last week discovered um one other amazing point it kind of blew me away i wish i had had it for the biography that when bonhoeffer launched in what would become an illegal seminary in 1935 in
this beautiful sort of estate in northeast germany in the pomeranian region that served for two years to train pastors who were going into the canada character the confessing church was which was a small part of the lutheran church that was seeking to carve out a non-nazi anti-nazi space bonhifer said what we shall need now he was writing to his brother carl friedrich who's an atheist the the bonfer family was kind of who was all mainly you know robust humanist and not particularly religious wer
e quite um concerned about their their brother or son dietrich who was showing every sign of being a bit of a zealot as a pastor and bonhoeffer is writing his brother an atheist to say i know this seems weird to you it seems a little zealous but this is the path that for me is the path to reality the path to full humanness and we i i think that the only way to blow up this great evil system is by taking the sermon on the mount with absolute seriousness and it's by developing in small groups of c
ommunities of radical christians a new form of monasticism well i found the letter from rhino niebuhr written three years earlier in which he said precise now is a new kind of monasticism so sorry for that digression the african-american church and culture before his arrival in new york this is the second point we're moving along here um before his arrival in in new york from germany von nerfer had never had a conversation with a person of color once on a 10-day excursion to libya in the spring
of 1924 he and his brother klaus had gone to italy for a long spring break and then without telling the parents jumped on a a a freighter down to north africa and wandered around libya for 10 days he had noted in his journal that the arabs beguns and negroes sitting on donkeys and great picturesque white cloaks traversing the streets of tripoli and the colorful throng of peculiar figures and prior to 1930 that's about the only reference to race you find in his writings his teachers at union intr
oduced him to what the swedish sociologist gruner mardo occult would later call the american dilemma via readings from du bois uh johnson and the rest still it was not until a seminarian named franklin fisher sought him out that bonhoeffer came to know an african-american and it was not until this black seminarian union invited bonhoeffer to join him for a sunday morning church service in harlem that the german visitor had any experience of american preaching and worship that seemed to him vital
and authentic the first time he worshipped with black christians was in fact a revelation frank fisher the son of acl fisher pastor of the 16th street baptist church in birmingham alabama and the graduate of howard college now at howard university had come to new york not only for the unique opportunities union offered african-american seminarians but also to learn more about the harlem renaissance than in full flower assigned to the abyssinian baptist church as a pastoral intern fisher would w
ith a gentle kindness guide this stranger in a world foreign to most americans let alone europeans and bonhoeffer was more than pleased to discover a tradition that as he would write in his notes stood fairly untouched indeed avoided by the white church and this marked the beginning of an intense five-month immersion in the black churches of america bonhoeffer would write to his family for my friendship with this negro student i've come uh i'm meeting every week with a group of boys and also vis
it them in their home of what he understood as one of my most important experiences in america in fact he would begin teaching a children's bible study a a bible study for women in the church and on one occasion the great adam clayton powell senior invited bonhoeffer to preach and he yielded the pulpit which is a remarkable compliment to this young german alas the transcript of that sermon is somewhere the suspense of history i spent a lot of time looking for it he knew bonhoeffer did that that
that the access he enjoyed to the african-american church was rare but at the same time the results of such an experience are i must say also deeply distressing he said it was to see the real face of america something that is hidden behind the veil of words in the american constitution that all men are created free and equal the image of the veil some of you will know it is worth noting bonnefort borrowed from the boys as the souls of blackfolk a book he had been assigned to read in niebuhr's cl
ass it was not only the exuberance and the felt worship and what bonhoeffer called the eruptive and sorrowful joy of black church that excited him but the seriousness of black intellectual life as well among his white northeastern classmates bonnerfer said he often had the sense he was talking with school boys but his conversations with frank fisher and with other negroes and east asian students though in one way entirely new were in another profound sense reminiscent of exchanges in berlin grun
ervall the ideas percolating with intensity with concentration with with verve the runner for said the reigning atmosphere of white protestant culture in america produces inordinate confusion and lack of clarity and it always leaves me feeling depressed but my negro friends prove to me proved to be never for a moment boring it really does seem to me that there's a great movement forming and i do believe that the negroes in america will still give the whites here considerably more than merely the
ir folk songs one classmate miles horton founder of the highlander folk school some of you may know that school became a great training center for labor activists and civil rights organizers in mont eagle tennessee a seminary in bonnerford could never have imagined before coming to new york uh poor white um from uh from eastern appalachia who grew up in in situations you know that um that were you know unforgivably marked by um james agee and walker evans and let us now praise praise famous men
who would later write in a memoir great memoir called the long haul that the only reason he had ever he ever got accepted to union is because the seminary was looking for a token hillbilly miles horton recalled an exchange that he had with dietrich on a sunday morning after he had just returned from morning services at abyssinian he said bonhoeffer was talkative and excited and i i never seen him quite like that and instead of going to his room where he usually preferred to go he asked me to tak
e a walk down riverside drive and and describe the preaching with excitement sometimes speaking german and audience participation and especially the singing of the spirituals he was very emotional and did not try to hide his feelings it thrilled him to hear the church people respond to the sermon with punctuating amens and hallelujahs he said it was the only time he had experienced true religion in the united states and he was convinced that it was only among this particular counter-culture that
there might be any real religion any authentic christianity in the united states one more point on this and then we'll turn to the final section not to be overlooked is that this year bonhoeffer's immersion at abyssinian also marked an important a year of growth and change in the life of the distinguished senior pastor adam clayton powell senior when i was doing research at the stats bibliotheque in berlin it moved me greatly to open up one of these newly obtained boxes of archival documents th
at had been given to the city library by um by family and to see that this box labeled america had an enormous file of clippings on all aspects of american race relations of lynchings naacp reports and and particularly of of black sermons in the black homological tradition and it included a small little unpublished memoir by adam clayton powell senior called upon this rock it'd be great if someone would would re reprint that powell had been the senior pastor of this historic church since 1908 el
oquent speaker and skilled administrator but as the great depression swept over his harlem parish he was inspired to a new self-understanding as a pastor and a citizen in this short book upon this rock powwow said that he began to think differently about jesus and he said i began to imagine jesus no longer this is his phrase as as only a transcendent reality powerful but inaccessible but as but as one who wandered the streets of harlem homeless and poor who shared the struggles of the distressed
as friend and counselor three years later both harper's last lectures at university of berlin before he lost his teaching position because of the nazification of the faculties in lectures about the doctrine of christ he would he would he would propose a notion called the christological incognito the idea that the presence of christ is found in places of exclusion and distress in places that subvert our you know prevailing notions of deity and of divine power and i think that he was speaking dir
ectly from his his months of listening to powell preach okay so i have to say this before we turn to the third point and maybe you can ask me about this in q a but the spring of that year in april 1931 bonfire decided that he didn't want to go back to germany early the semester ended at the um at the end of april that he wanted to see america so with a fellow two fellow europeans both of whom had been visiting uh students that year erving suits a swiss and jean leser a frenchman he borrowed an o
ld car and um passed his driver's exam uh he took him four times but he finally passed his driving exam apparently he bribed the new york city driver instructor with a five dollar bill and finally passed to take a road trip and across country and in six weeks um the the the the trio and finally ended up being only bonhoeffer and the frenchman logged 4 000 miles driving and another 1200 miles on mexican trains and coming back from mexico in new orleans instead of going north to chicago and back t
o new york the way they had come bonifer said let's go due east and the two europeans took their car straight into the heart of the jim crow south driving from new orleans along old highway 10 through hattiesburg laurel meridian mississippi through demopolis birmingham alabama they would have driven 20 miles from a town called scottsboro that that very month was bringing to trial the um the scottsboro boy case in a trial that electrified liberals and progressives and as i was reading most recent
ly served as a great recruiting boon to the alabama communist party um which is like reading you know a story about some almost a fantasy tale but there's an extraordinary um moment in in american and internationals covered by all the international papers and bonner for returned to new york and before he left for germany he penned a little meditation using a poem he had he had been assigned that year by harlem renaissance poet county cullen called the black christ bonnerfer comments on this blac
k christ who is being led into the field by all the white christ and he refers to cullen's poem and the the this astonishing conclusion that as a lynching unfolds in a southern field this an african-american who has who is who is brought to this brutal death by a lynch mob of white church people in his death and then his suffering becomes the anointed one bonhoeffer said becomes the black christ finally the american organizing tradition the third and last prophetic encounter of fauna first year
in america in the remaining months of the spring semester bonner for found his way into one other vibrant counterculture in progressive religious circles decades on in 1976 the physicist carl friedrich von fiedsacker would present a paper at the dietrich bonhoeffer congress in geneva commemorating the 70th anniversary of his birth describing the pastor's life as quote a journey to reality if bonhoeffer had remained an academic theologian vaiseco wrote seems to me that he would not have been able
to resolve the problems he dealt with in response to historical necessity he freely chose a path that is more real that path on which he first embarked during this american year passed through not only the black church and the politically charged classrooms at union but also finally into circles of american activists um for of uh um energies or to what um um my former teacher richard rorty spoke of as the the old the old reformist left so that by the end of the year the real the real had achiev
ed almost the status of a sacrament it was among unions faculty and students that bonhoeffer first encountered that the scholarly activist cohort through these associations he would visit the tenement ministries of new york engage with the women's trade union and the workers educational bureau of america taking notes on the labor movement poverty homelessness crime and the social mission of the churches he met with officials at the american civil liberties union which after its founding in 1920
had focused mainly on the rights of conscientious objectures and um on the problem of resident aliens protecting resident aliens from deportation he would write to his brother carl friedrich that we will need an aclu in germany all had connections with religious thinkers reynold never foremost he's everywhere in the story since his arrival at union uh just to bring this point home one final time in 1928 a cadre of social reformers had turned to niever for moral and financial support which time a
nd again he had provided generously without his inspiration and his practical assistance these movements might not have existed or succeeded to the extent that they did niebuhr's encouragement as well as his concrete help he was a very skilled fundraiser and organizer are evident throughout the letters and exchanges with members of groups dating to this remarkably fertile period of american social theology most of these men and women of the american organizing tradition the ones bonhoeffer met b
oth at union and in his travels we're earnestly seeking the building of the kingdom of god on earth and thus we're working in some fashion in the spirit of the social gospel movement and while these champions of the social gospel hardly had time to sift through the implications of niebuhr's emerging christian realism had they they would have understood that he um had moved beyond um such um liberal hopes and uh aspirations and such utopian visions i think it speaks to to niebuhr's sensitivities
and wisdom and his as kindness that even as he rejected as naive optimism many of the suppositions of the social gospel that the age of perpetual peace and that the kingdom of god were coming in full through our labors in the community in the fields in the in the cities neighbors still embraced the social gospel movements transformative energies and never discouraged idealism among the grassroots admiring the intent of these visionaries if not their own understanding bonnefer's personal knowledg
e of the american organizing tradition however came more directly through two largely forgotten teachers at union one harry ward and one charles weber and it also deepened in friendships with classmates whose social imaginations had been excited by the emerging this this is emerging vision of beloved community let me say a word about charles weber a methodist minister professor of practical theology and radical socialist weber hailed from a small town in michigan he would become known to friends
and foes alike as the chaplain of american organized labor his theater his his book titled um don't all run out and buy it a history of the development of social education in the united neighborhood houses of new york city though unlikely summer reading was devoured by bonhoeffer in new york weber was himself a skilled and tenacious organizer his involvements were extensive in the 1930s he held leadership positions in the industrial fellowship of reconciliation the upper mississippi waterway as
sociation and the amalgamated clothing workers of america based in richmond virginia weber's course that bonnefort took called church and community resembled what we often call today a service learning initiative but it was much more than that walnerford could not believe his eyes when he saw his professor convening the students in the quadrangle at union and going with them out into a city that was that was teeming with an exquisite variety of live theologies innovations and congregational orga
nizing um and his subject was life this professor weber theology and practice bonhoeffer and his classmates ventured out from this from the classroom into a metropolis abounding with innovations in faith-based organizing bonifa would write in connection with a course of mr weber's i paid a visit almost every week to one of these character building agencies we went to settlements to the ymca home missions cooperative houses playgrounds children's courts night schools socialist schools asylums you
th organizations we visited members of the national association for the advancement of colored people that a professor would lead such efforts was nothing short of astounding to one accustomed to to to professors at berlin bunker down in their offices in the theology faculty near the hegel plots bonhoeffer would get deep into the weeds visiting the national women's trade union and the workers educational bureau of america studying labor problems selective buying campaigns civil rights restrictio
n of profits juvenile delinquency and the activity of the churches in these fields in proposing solutions weber drew on models and insights gleaned from the southern tenants farm workers union the delta cooperative and the british cooperative movement with whom he personally had worked he introduced students to officials as i said from the aclu and to other radical organizations these were transformative encounters before that year vonnerfer had rarely discussed politics and when he had it was m
ostly in response to his brothers radicalized by the great war who never missed an opportunity to butt heads concerning diviner finer points of the weimar government or the morality of its democratic reforms bonhoeffer's friend helmut rusler had once complained of bonhoeffer's inclination to escape into the ethereal world of comprehensive ideas and thus avoid the muck the murk and mist of boiling hot politics indeed there is not even mention in bonhoeffer's notes or letters of what was the lead
item and the new york times the day of his arrival fascists make big gains in germany but as it turns out his queerless suspicion of god-deprived theology-deprived union seminary softened in the course of his interactions with as he would put it the contemporary representatives of the social gospel he would come to regard the sobriety and the seriousness of this generation as irrefutable as well as determinative for me for a long time to come and he would never drop his charge that reformation c
hristianity already included the same concerns without repudiating historic theology which repudiation he would continue to regard as un undermining the social gospel position yet his signal transformation in the course of that year when he accomplished as he would later say or when he began as he later would say to make the turning from the phraseological to the real would always be linked by what he saw at union both inside the classroom and out there would be for bonhoeffer no longer an escap
e from this awareness something was missing from german theology as bonhoeffer's cousin hans christoph van haas would later put it the grounding of theology and reality and in america bonhoeffer found that grounding back in berlin and we're almost finished thanks for hanging with me he moved into the neighborhood near tseon's kierke in prince lower berg teeming with unemployment and massive social unrest the result of layoffs from factories and industry in the area he moved because he wanted to
work in an inner city ministry and would eventually have several hundred coffermans under his care he said he fell in love with the bible he said i don't want to call myself a theologian anymore but a christian he said i i became obsessive about the sermon on the mount and indeed these teachings would become obsessive in bonhoeffer's theological imagination in the coming years he was drawn into an intimate reading of jesus's teachings and at the same time affirm the importance of christianity's
rootedness in judaism and the hebrew bible he moved now in response to a new understanding of faith and as we know he would only come to speak more passionately of communities of obedience and of prayer of spiritual disciplines that would bring purification clarification and concentration upon the essential thing and of responsible action in the world come of age it is the problem of concreteness that preoccupies preoccupies me now he wrote and this from the same young young scholar who less tha
n a year earlier found american pragmatism an offense to german precision so back to the question posed to the outset what happened in america of the year 1930-31 among a lost but venerable generation of radical christians social gospel reformers and african-american preachers among many of the same women and men who plowed the soil for the civil rights movement to come bonhoeffer learned the skills and practices that helped him do theology closer to the ground and that enabled the turning from
the phraseological to the real one last point bart bonifar's favorite book was a little book it's a powerful book when i when people ask me whether not that people ask me this often but what are the two most important books you've ever read i say as a theologian it would be james cone's black theology black power and it would be carl bart's word of god word of man that's translated and the new translation word of god and the task of theology well this was bonhoeffer's favorite book at the time a
nd in this extraordinary book bart ponders the possibility of of ever hearing god's word afresh and anew after the era of religion had passed of hearing amid the den and clutter of modernity and the babel of religious language that that that has killed the idea of god by a thousand equivocations of hearing for the first time the eternal word how do you do that how do you hear a fresh word of god how do you hear the word of god spoken with authenticity and surprise and delight bart said that the
century of hopes for enlightened self-expansion lay in ruins the world had turned with this quiet disorder in distress in forms minute and gross obscure and evident those keeping the faith bonhoeffer said you know those wanting to keep the language of faith alive often you know take refuge in eternally green islands of security security he would call religious institutions or or morality or the nation pitching their tents in these lands of self-righteousness of of human-made morality and religio
n and nationalism but true christianity was always elsewhere to be found it was always strange and unfamiliar and bart said we must take the trouble to go off far enough to hear the word again we must take the trouble to travel to new places well boner for now knew himself able to go that distance because as he said at the end of this year i heard the gospel preached for the first time in the negro churches of america so thanks for bearing with me
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