Abstract
Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought
Willis Jenkins and Jennifer M. McBride, editors
Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010. 302 pp. $25.00
Frederick Buechner once noted that in his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs, said Buechner, are called saints. This book offers 18 scholarly articles concerning the thoughts and actions and spirituality of two of the most beloved saints of modern times. Why do we love Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr. so much? Among other reasons, both paid the ultimate cost on behalf of some pretty unambiguous causes. We would have to go back to Lincoln and the Civil War to find a moral cause as profound and pressing as the stand-up war against the Nazis and their treatment of Jews, or the sit-down battle against the segregationists and their treatment of African Americans.
The problem this book faces, of course, is not the saintly shine of its protagonists, but the fact that their lives have been combed over so often that it’s hard to find anything new to say. Still, there is a fresh generation out there that needs to hear the stories and understand the ethical strategies and theological convictions behind them. And such is our love for Bonhoeffer and King that the rest of us do not mind a little repetition.
For all the familiarities, Bonhoeffer and King still manages to deliver some surprises. Eric Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010) powerfully brings out the spiritual influence played by the evangelical Abyssinian Church in Harlem during Bonhoeffer’s stay at Union Theological Seminary in 1930–1931. But this book in addition uncovers a fascinating connection between the Black classmate who invited Bonhoeffer to that Harlem congregation and the Civil Rights movement. The classmate, Frank Fisher, ended up serving a pastorate in Atlanta and joining Martin Luther King Jr. in the attempt to integrate Atlanta’s buses in 1957. Along with King, Fisher was arrested for his troubles at the time, and only his premature death in 1960 would seem to have prevented him from playing a leading role in the movement.
We also learn how Christians on the right have tried to exploit the work of Bonhoeffer and King for their own ideological purposes, such as: the man who murdered a Florida physician and his security escort outside an abortion clinic and then equated his cause with Bonhoeffer’s attempt to protect innocent life by plotting the death of Hitler; and the American Family Association which used King’s image and words to justify its boycott of McDonald’s on account of the fast food chain’s alleged gay-welcoming policy.
The left, mind you, also comes in for its knocks. More than once King’s less than profound christological understanding is remarked upon. Bonhoeffer may have gone to New York, but King obviously never went, even in spirit, to Basle. Roger Shinn’s recollection is cited according to which Bonhoeffer asked Reinhold Niebuhr, following the usual vigorous question period at the close of one of the great man’s classes, “Is this a theological school or a school for politicians?”
All in all, this work is a meaty text offering considerable material for reflection on the activism, ministry, and theology of two of the most saintly figures of modern times.
John McTavish
Trinity United Church, Huntsville, Ontario