What do Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr have to do with one another?

This month at the theology reading group we are discussing Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought. It is a volume of eighteen separate essays and edited by Willis Jenkins and Jennifer M. McBride.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived at different times and in different contexts. Bonhoeffer lived, wrote, preached, resisted, suffered, and was executed in Nazi Germany in 1945. King lived, wrote, preached, resisted, suffered, and was assassinated in a racially-segregated USA almost a quarter of a century later, in 1968. Coincidentally, both were killed at the age of thirty-nine years and four months. Both took a stand against injustice and resisted tyranny, ultimately at the cost of their lives. Both were completely driven by their theological convictions, with a focus on costly and radical discipleship, and the Sermon on the Mount.

Both had communitarian perspectives on life and politics. Here is an example, from King.

“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be... This is the inter-related structure of reality.” 

 Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Note, that this mutuality resonates with the apostle Paul's perspective on the church as the body of Christ, as described in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12:25-26:

But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. 26 If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

Although there are similarities between King and Bonhoeffer, there are some significant differences. Foremost, Bonhoeffer as a Gentile and a child of privilege had the freedom to choose to take the path of suffering. In contrast, King and his forebears did not have a choice. Suffering was forced on them because of the colour of their skin. They were enslaved, beaten, lynched, discriminated against, and denied civil and voting rights. Yet in that enforced circumstance they had the choice to take the path of the cross, to suffer with dignity, to forgive their enemies, and to turn the other cheek (page 158).

A second difference was their theological perspective, including their interpretation of the Bible. King embraced his education in liberal Protestantism, claiming it more "rational", sometimes distanced himself from orthodox belief, and interpreted much of the Bible in terms of the social gospel. Bonhoeffer had a higher view of Scripture and embraced orthodox creeds. Note Bonhoeffer was against the tide of his time, when Germany was awash with higher criticism and liberal theology. Although, Karl Barth was a kindred spirit.

Both were preachers who carefully crafted sermons with aesthetic appeal and anchored in Biblical texts, metaphors, and theology. There is a nice chapter on "Preaching and Prophetic Witness," by Raphael Warnock, currently pastor of the last church that King pastored, and recently elected to the USA Senate.

A chapter, "King and Bonhoeffer as Protestant Saints," by Stephen Haynes, ends by quoting the first two stanzas of the poem, "A Dead Man’s Dream" written by Carl Wendell Hines Jr. as a tribute to King.

Now that he is safely dead,

Let us praise him.

Build monuments to his glory.

Sing Hosannas to his name.

Dead men make such convenient heroes.

For they cannot rise to challenge the images

That we might fashion from their lives.

It is easier to build monuments

Than to build a better world.

So now that he is safely dead,

We, with eased consciences will

Teach our children that he was a great man,

Knowing that the cause for which he

Lived is still a cause

And the dream for which he died is still a dream.

A dead man’s dream.