Ask where Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s courage against the Nazis came from, and the usual answer stays inside Germany: a brilliant theologian, a clear conscience, a stubborn faith. Dr. Reggie L. Williams, associate professor of Christian Ethics at McCormick Theological Seminary, argues that part of the answer lies across the Atlantic. In 1930, a 24-year-old Bonhoeffer spent a year in New York and gave most of his free time to Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. There, Williams contends, he learned to see racism as a Christian problem and to locate Christ among the people pushed to the margins. He carried that vision home.
That is a historical claim, and it deserves a historical test. What did Bonhoeffer say about his own life? What was he looking for when he arrived? What did the Harlem church do and preach? And what did the year leave unchanged?
What did Bonhoeffer say changed him?
The best evidence is Bonhoeffer’s own testimony, written long after the fact. In a 1944 letter to his best friend, he reflected that he had changed very little over his life, with two exceptions. The first was his early exposure to his father, an authoritarian figure. The second came after his first trip abroad, which he described as the time he moved from the abstract to the concrete. Elsewhere, looking back, he described himself as not yet having become a Christian while he wrote his dissertations. For a man who had written two of them on the church, that is a striking confession.
Here the record needs care. Scholars debate which trip Bonhoeffer meant. Williams argues it was the year in the United States, his first crossing of the Atlantic, and he presents that as his case rather than a settled fact. The letter proves Bonhoeffer saw a turning point in a trip abroad. Locating it in New York and Harlem is Williams’s interpretation, and a strong one, given what the rest of the record shows.
Why was a young German theologian in Harlem at all?
The sequence explains why the year could land so hard. By 24, Bonhoeffer had finished two dissertations and had already been appointed to teach at the University of Berlin. He was too young to be ordained, though, and the official overseeing his ordination suggested he see more of the world first. Bonhoeffer was not eager to go. New York and Union Seminary were chosen, and he arrived assuming there was not much theology left for him to learn there.
He also arrived with an unsolved problem. He had already served as an assistant pastor to a congregation of German expatriates in Barcelona, yet he was not attending church much. His academic work described the church as the visible presence of the body of Christ in the world, and in Germany he could not find a congregation that looked like what he had written. The German scholar Hans Pfeiffer, whom Williams cites, called Bonhoeffer’s situation a deadlock.
So he went to America looking for a cloud of witnesses. Williams stresses that those were Bonhoeffer’s own words. The phrase echoes Hebrews 12:1, where the faithful of earlier generations surround the believer as witnesses. Bonhoeffer wanted to see a living community that matched the theology on his pages.
What did he find at Abyssinian Baptist Church?
He reached Harlem during the Great Depression, while the Harlem Renaissance was at its center, and he did more than visit. He taught Sunday school at Abyssinian and led a midweek Bible study for women. Williams singles out the Black women of the church as prominent in the awakening that happened to him.
The congregation was doing real work in a neighborhood under real strain, hit hard by poverty and racism. The Great Migration was bringing people north from the South, people Williams calls refugees from white supremacy. Abyssinian had moved to Harlem in 1923 because of that migration, placing itself where the needs were.
For Bonhoeffer, Williams argues, this was the missing body: a church actually functioning as the presence of Christ in a suffering community. Williams sums up the effect on him in one line: “This is what the church should be doing.” Lisa Fields drew out what that implies about the tradition: “it seems like the first time he saw Christianity as a communal endeavor was in the black church.” The German academy had given Bonhoeffer his language about the church, and a Black Baptist congregation in Harlem showed him what that language looked like in practice.
What did the year give him?
Williams identifies three changes. The first was personal. Bonhoeffer attended Abyssinian regularly, and it grabbed him. His faith came alive to him in a way his scholarship had not managed.
The second had nothing to do with race. After World War I, the Allies at the 1919 Versailles conference assigned Germany sole blame for the war. Many Germans considered that unjust, and German Christians had turned inward, convinced the world was against them. In America, Bonhoeffer met Christians who asked him to carry their good wishes back to believers in Germany. They saw the Germans as family. That opened him to the church as an international body.
The third, and in Williams’s judgment the most important for what came next, was racism. In Harlem, Bonhoeffer saw racism from the side of the people who bore it. As a Sunday school teacher in that congregation, he could no longer treat it as a distant social question. He came to see it as a problem for Christians, a test of the church’s faithfulness.
What was the Harlem church preaching?
Williams insists his book is as much about the Black church as about Bonhoeffer, and the preaching at Abyssinian shows why. While Bonhoeffer was there, a sermon on saving faith by the pastor, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., was reprinted. Powell drew his best picture of saving faith from Mary at the wedding in Cana. In the KJV, John 2:5 reads: “His mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.” Saving faith, in Powell’s reading, hears Christ’s word and acts on it.
That is no detour from the gospel. James makes the same connection when he writes, in James 2:17, “Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.” Powell’s sermon did not set deeds against grace. It described faith that is alive.
Powell also preached a pair of sermons from Matthew 25 while Bonhoeffer was in Harlem, one called the Hungry God and one called the Naked God. By Powell’s own account, as Williams retells it, they began when he drove through Harlem in a fine car the congregation had bought him, looked at people wrecked by the Depression, and asked God why he did not do something. Days later he heard in a dream the question turned back on him, and he took it as God telling him to act.
The sermons rest on the judgment scene of Matthew 25, where the King commends those who fed the hungry and clothed the naked. In the KJV, Matthew 25:40 reads: “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Powell’s message was that we feed God when we feed our hungry neighbor. Williams states the conclusion sharply: “That’s the focus of Christianity, contact with human life.”
Christians read “the least of these my brethren” in more than one way. Many take it to include anyone in need. Others read it more narrowly, as Jesus’s followers, especially those suffering for his sake. Powell preached the broad reading, which is the more common one. On either reading, the passage locates faithfulness in concrete mercy toward real people, which is what Bonhoeffer heard from that pulpit. As Williams puts it, “the very location where you’re supposed to be faithful to God is in human contact.”
Did Bonhoeffer come home with a Black Jesus?
The title of Williams’s book, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, invites that assumption, and Williams is more careful than his title. The publisher chose it, and he wrestled with it. He had leaned toward something like Black Bonhoeffer. When he raised the title with Dr. James Cone, Cone doubted that Bonhoeffer had a Black Jesus at all.
His settled view keeps the influence and its limits in the same frame. Bonhoeffer, he says, “didn’t figure it out by any stretch” when it came to his own identity and the place of white supremacy in his worldview. If Bonhoeffer were his friend, Williams says, he would be constantly confronting him on it. “He wrestled with that until he died.” What moved Bonhoeffer was Christ standing with those pressed to the margins by an oppressive regime. Williams frames it this way: “He was inspired by black Jesus.” Then he reaches for a stronger word: “Haunted by black Jesus, better put.”
The correction matters because a person can admire an inspiration and set it aside, while a haunting keeps returning. Williams is not claiming Bonhoeffer converted to a finished theology, only that a picture of Christ among the oppressed would not leave him alone.
Part of that picture came from art. Williams teaches a course on the Harlem Renaissance, and a chapter of his book examines how its artists depicted Jesus. A white aesthetic had long rendered Black people as grotesque. Williams points to a 1926 speech in Chicago by W. E. B. Du Bois, which he wishes he had included in the book, holding that beauty serves truth and justice and calling the era’s artists apostles of beauty sent to tell the truth about Black people. When those artists painted Jesus as Black, Williams argues, they were contradicting a lie about Black humanity.
Is Harlem being given too much credit?
This is the strongest objection, and the sources supply its outline. Bonhoeffer’s resistance had other roots. He opposed the Nazis primarily over their antisemitism. He was a pacifist and a peace witness, which is why his later link to a group around German military intelligence that tried to replace the government remains controversial. And his theological clarity came early: “He saw very clearly, very early that Hitler was a problem,” Williams says. None of that was manufactured in Harlem.
The evidence for the link also has gaps. The 1944 letter speaks of a trip abroad without settling which one. Williams says Bonhoeffer imitated Abyssinian once he returned to Germany, but this conversation does not describe what that imitation looked like, so the documented chain here runs from Harlem to Bonhoeffer’s own later testimony, not to specific acts in Germany. A year of Sunday school and Bible study does not by itself prove what caused a decision made years later.
Williams’s claim, though, is narrower than the objection assumes. He does not argue that Harlem made Bonhoeffer a resister from nothing. He argues that it supplied what his theology lacked: a visible church acting as Christ’s body, a sense of belonging to Christians beyond Germany, and the experience of seeing racial contempt from the side of its victims. That last item is the hinge. A theologian who had learned in Harlem to treat racism as a Christian problem would read Nazi antisemitism as a betrayal of the church, a far heavier charge than bad politics. The year did not replace his German formation. It changed what that formation could see.
Honest history also keeps what did not change. Bonhoeffer remained a man still wrestling with white supremacy in his own outlook, and the record does not allow him to be polished into a flawless ally.
Why does this matter now?
Williams sees the same danger Bonhoeffer saw at work in the present. Many Christians, he observes, find their faith untroubled by cruel political rhetoric, even expressed through it, a pattern Bonhoeffer would have recognized in Germany. What he found among Harlem Christians, people harmed by such rhetoric, was faith grounded in love of a neighbor whose concrete needs you can see. “Not an abstract doctrine.”
Williams’s diagnosis is blunt: “It’s a Christianity of doctrine that’s got us in this problem.” He calls it a colonial Christianity that “doesn’t pay attention to social interaction, and as a result can be blended with cruelty and overlook stuff that’s important.” Read alongside Powell’s sermon on Cana, the target is plain. Williams is not attacking belief. He is attacking belief that never reaches a neighbor, the dead faith James describes, which can recite its creed while standing beside cruelty.
That is the fullest answer the record gives to the question of Bonhoeffer’s courage. His conviction and his theology were German. What Harlem added was a working church that showed him the body of Christ in the flesh, and a year spent seeing racism through the eyes of those it targeted. When Nazi Germany made contempt for a people into national policy, Bonhoeffer had already learned, in a Black congregation in Harlem, that such contempt is an assault on Christ himself.
