Between Lament and Bonhoeffer

the kinds of persons we might be

One book that I read last year was "Prophetic Lament" by Soong-Chan Rah. I didn't review it because it actually took me a long time to read; but scattered through about half a dozen other books I read, are references to this one, and they all took away something important. Early on, Rah talks about the necessity of Lament, as a category, and how this is lost in the contemporary (evangelical, but not only) American church, swallowed up in triumphalism.

The book itself is an extended study of the book of Lamentations, which is why it took me a while to read it - I needed to read it alongside and in conversation with Lamentations. At the same time, it's "Prophetic" Lament - Rah systematically uses the critique that Lamentations provides to the people of Judah, insofar as they are literally mourning the destruction of their city, their civilisation, and all their religious hopes and dreams, let alone earthly comforts, and applies it as a prophetic critique to the church in America, especially around issues related to race.

Today I just want to zoom in on a section towards the end of Rah's book where he discusses Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer is the kind of theologian that people love to love, especially when they don't read him, or even moreso when they want to write ahistorical biographies of him that prop up their right-wing fantasies. Yet, Bonhoeffer is a profound thinker, and his opposition to Hitler is remarkable. What's more remarkable, is that "At first glance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an unlikely candidate to resist the Nazi mindset." (p. 199).

Bonhoeffer lived in the German aftermath of WW1 - dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic, the sting of defeat, powerful impulses towards German nationalism, and exceptionalism, and triumphalism. Bonhoeffer's family background was upper middle-class, but steeped in success and aristocratic lineage, and his youth is characterised by sympathies for German patriotism, baked in the bread of privilege. Why did Bonhoeffer, of all people, not become one more supporter of Nazi Germany and a doormat to fascist and genocidal perversions of Christianity?

There are multiple factors, but Rah points to one that I had never heard before (fair enough, I am not well versed in Bonhoeffer's life) - his time teaching at Union Theological Seminary in NYC, and at Abyssinian Baptist Church. In letters about this time, Bonhoeffer simply states that "he had become a Christian"; he was challenged, and influenced, by his time there in ways that his teaching at the seminary did not - his initial teaching there was a disaster of mismatch - dry German theology finding little resonance with the students or the faculty.

Bonhoeffer didn't become the type of person, the kind of theologian and believer that he was, that resisted the Nazis, and who left us an incredibly powerful witness and theological legacy, out of either a vacuum or out of the products that had hitherto created him. He explicitly acknowledges his time at Abyssinian Baptist as profoundly formative on him, in becoming sensitive to social injustice and oppression, and developing his own theology that enable resistance.

To return to a much earlier post - what we choose to do is largely shaped by the kinds of people we have already become, and so attending to who we are and how we are formed and are forming ourselves is as necessary, perhaps more necessary, than the choices we make in the moments of crisis. We do not wait until the day of battle to shape the soldier. The choices you make tomorrow are themselves the products of the choices you have been making daily for years. That's what made Bonhoeffer the theologian who could write so profoundly, and act so decisively.