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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance by Reggie L. WilliamsCourtney H. DavisBonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance Reggie L. Williams waco, tx: baylor university press, 2014. 196 pp. $39.95.In a year when nine people were killed in a historic black church and a litany of African American lives have been extinguished by police brutality, to say this book about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and racialized interpretations of Jesus is timely is an understatement.Bonhoeffer was in search of a meaningful Christian theology through an authentic encounter with Jesus. Reggie Williams argues that Bonhoeffer, while [End Page 205] communing with people of color in 1930 Harlem at the height of its literary movement, found that meaning in the “black Christ” tradition otherwise unfamiliar to the young scholar. Bonhoeffer carried the identity of the black Christ to Germany, where he actively resisted Nazi atrocities and was executed in 1945. How is it that his ethic of resistance could be so singular, given that he was formed in much the same way as his “fundamentally oblivious” German peers (2)? Williams credits the difference to Harlem, where Bonhoeffer was schooled in hermeneutics and empathy; he further contends that Bonhoeffer’s practical experience in New York as well as the South and Cuba informed and motivated his attempts to actively eradicate the “lethal assumptions” of his peers in the German academy about God and humanity (3).On the undeniable influence of a hermeneutic, Williams states that a community of believers must have one; not only that, its hermeneutic must be connected to justice that extends concern beyond the confines of “self and kind” (3). Here Williams introduces the concept of empathy, which he describes as an ability to enter into the context of another’s suffering. Quite unintentionally, he informs the Rachel Dolezal controversy in noting that one does so without “losing grasp of one’s own separate identity” (3). Williams posits that Bonhoeffer must have experienced a “healthy and appropriate” empathy evidenced by his transformation from a theology that sanctioned racism prior to Harlem, to a willingness to share vicariously in the daily toll of racism in the black community, to resistance of racism upon returning to Germany (4). Bonhoeffer was not hamstrung by his social identity; he did not let being a white German scholar impede his ability to enter into the black American community and learn from it, “as though he had never been an outsider at all” (78).Williams argues that Bonhoeffer’s German peers did not possess such empathy because they had not shared in his Harlem experience. But there were in fact others in Germany who did not allow German nationalism to supersede Christ-centered resistance, even without the benefit of such an encounter. Although Williams does not address this fact in his argument, the historical documentation assembled in this book makes it plain that Harlem, the black literary movement, and Adam Clayton Powell Sr.’s ecclesiology did indeed have a profound effect on Bonhoeffer and his radical ethic of resistance.In addition to the exploration of Bonhoeffer’s time in Harlem, this book raises important considerations about scholarship and pedagogy that would benefit a broad audience. Williams, using Bonhoeffer’s own words, emphasizes that his early theology had been a demonstration of intellect rather than an expression of faith. Although he had written two dissertations, he was “not yet a Christian” when he set off for New York (109). When he returned, he lamented the German academy’s “guardians of purity” in Bonn who policed the borders of tradition—what was and was not taught in the classroom or preached on [End Page 206] Sunday (111). Has the academy continued this tradition of policing, and what is the rationale for the discipline of theology: intellectual religion or active faith? Williams makes the answers clear.Courtney H. DavisSt. Bernard’s School of Theology and MinistryCopyright © 2016 Society of Christian Ethics...