Abstract
In a thoughtful book which originated in his dissertation, Ross Halbach has tried to use insights of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, complemented by different but related views of Willie Jennings, Kameron Carter, and Brian Bantum to address racism and the Church's complicity in it. Halbach does a fine job describing and analyzing the phenomenon of “whiteness” and how it oppresses by silencing the Black experience. He carefully points out the theological moves made by Jennings, Carter, and Bantum to use overlooked themes which can arrest whitenizing creation, Christology, and ecclesiology. And he creatively employs Bonhoeffer's insights to do the same. According to Halbach there seems to be agreement among all these theologians that the presence of Christ can correct false whitenized conceptions.
But questions must be posed about some of Halbach's moves and his assumptions. A primary contribution it is said that Bonhoeffer can make to critiquing racism is that he calls the Church to repentance in order to prepare for Christ (esp. 6, 11). But Halbach does not consistently make clear that repentance is a work of grace and the Holy Spirit (40, 203), and if that point is ambiguous we distort Bonhoeffer's Lutheranism and make the struggle against racism depend ultimately on us and our “good will” (precisely the arrogance which causes this injustice).
The author's failure to discuss several fertile aspects of Bonhoeffer's thought for critiquing racism surprises this reader. Halbach never discusses Bonhoeffer's communal anthropology, his concern that since our acts determine our being, we are a function of interactions with others (Act and Being, 106, 130, 139–40; Sanctorum Communio, 46–47). This point reminds us that Black and whites are each at least in part who they are due to interactions with each other. Failure to discuss this matter entails that Halbach never engages Bonhoeffer's sociological approach for understanding what happens in the Church. Granted, sometimes the book concedes that the historical Church can challenge racism (222). But in failing to discuss Bonhoeffer's activist communal anthropology, Halbach does not explain how encounter with Christ and with others of a different background changes us, leads us to become people who want to challenge whiteness.
There is another apparently problematic aspect to the book. Halbach's critique of the whiteness of the Church and its theology has validity in some locales of American Christianity, notably in predominantly white denominations. But he never alludes to the Black Church and the essence of its theology until the end of the book (220–21). Fair enough, even the historic African-American denominations have to be on guard for white encroachments in their theology and way of doing church. But to give readers the impression throughout most of the book that whiteness in the Church is the only show in town effectively marginalizes the Black witness (even Halbach's dialogue with Black authors does not make clear that there are ecclesiastical institutions which succeed in struggling with whiteness). When Halbach uses Bonhoeffer to insist that the best way to address whiteness is through repentance (223ff.) it is not clear what African Americans should be repenting for. Given the author's stress on the Gospel as surprise, his insistence that he is not giving answers to questions, we might justify his withholding the discussion of Blackness in the Church until near the book's end, but even then should he not have tipped off the reader that a surprise regarding Blackness in the Church and its theology would be forthcoming, just as he owed readers more details on Bonhoeffer's communal, sociologically influenced view of human nature?
These critiques and calls for more clarity do not undermine the importance of the subjects addressed by Halbach. And his call for reparations as part of the white churches’ repentance is on target. But insofar as racism is about structures that need to be changed, in order to ensure that this is not just a book about coping with white guilt, the book would have been strengthened by offering some indications of what the repentance of the churches through reparations might look like.