The papers in this session engage Bonhoeffer's thought in relation to politics and various political theology discourses, including secularism and Christian nationalism; queer theory; global and racial capitalism; whiteness, fascism, anti-racism, and anti-Semitism; and retributive justice and violence.
Focusing on competing understandings of the kingdom of God, this paper contrasts the political theologies of German pastor/theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and American senator Josh Hawley. The paper traces the connections between Bonhoeffer and Hawley’s visions of the kingdom of God and their political choices. While Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of God’s kingdom informed his costly repudiation of Christian nationalism in his context, Hawley’s interpretation bolstered his unwavering support for Christian nationalism in his context.
Despite their very different contexts and styles, there are some striking resonances between Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s late theology and Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011). On the one hand, Bonhoeffer proposes a “view from below”, claiming that “suffering is a more useful key, a more fruitful principle than happiness for exploring the meaning of the world in contemplation and action.” On the other hand, Halberstam develops queer theory as “knowledge from below”, which can assist with countering “the logics of success that have emerged from the triumphs of global capitalism.” In this paper, I bring Bonhoeffer’s reflections on suffering and weakness into conversation with Halberstam’s insights into failure. Specifically, I explore how Halberstam’s work might help to supplement and radicalise some of Bonhoeffer’s reflections in his late theology.
In contemporary soteriological discourse, several voices have raised the concern that atonement theologies that assume divine justice has a retributive element end up justifying violence. Though this may be the case in some instances, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology and ethics present a more complicated picture. While Bonhoeffer presumed retributive justice was operative in God’s saving work in Christ, this never resulted in an outright justification of his work in the resistance.
This talk addresses the religio-racial transformation of “the whiteness project” through the machinery of antiracism and anti-antisemitism. It turns to the mid-twentieth martyr-theologian and ethicist Dietrich Bonhoeffer, glimpsing this machinery in his late writings to imagine a postfascist Western future. That future entailed subjecting Jewishness to whitening, thereby figuring Jews no longer as targets (traditional supersession) but now agents (a new supersessionism) of Christian (post)colonial empire. This is Bonhoeffer’s unwitting renewal of “the religion of whiteness” (W. E. B. Du Bois), where in its distinction from and yet relation to “white people” whiteness is a locution for planet-wide racial capitalism. Imagined now as racially “plastic,” Jews are hailed into the West’s civilizational project while Jewishness becomes a site for Western post-Holocaust self-renewal. With the term “Judeo-Christianity,” I sketch how this maneuver works in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics to illuminate the religio-racial terms of the present, including the current crisis in Palestine.