what<\/em> will professor West teach his impressionable, young students at Union? About the god of Fosdick, Rockefeller, Occupy Wall Street and the socialist media, or about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? Darwin or David? St. Marx or St. Matthew? St. Nietzsche (“God is dead”) or St. Paul (“I am crucified with Christ \u2026”)? <\/p>\nHad Bonhoeffer remained in New York for another year, he would have witnessed voting patterns of black Americans tragically shift away from the Republican Party \u2013 the party of the abolitionists, of Abraham Lincoln, Henry Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. It was the same party that freed their forefathers from 250 years of slavery to once again put on the slave chains in 1932 where black Americans under the influence of Dr. W.E.B. Dubois, the NAACP and thousands of black pastors like Powell who told their na\u00efve flocks to vote for the Democratic Socialist Party and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs. These were the same progressives who presently kept them segregated in racial concentration camps called ghettos in Harlem, Watts, Southside of Chicago, “Black Bottom” on the Eastside of Detroit and in neighborhoods in big cities and little towns across America in the 1930s \u2013 and in 2011. <\/p>\n
It was exactly 80 years ago that Dietrich Bonhoeffer completed his teaching fellowship at Union and his unplanned work deconstructing Jim Crow racial segregation laws by openly worshiping with black people at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist church and left New York. Returning to Germany by late June 1931, he began actively plotting against Hitler and Nazism with other courageous Germans. Bonhoeffer would eventually sacrifice his liberty to become a prisoner first at Tegel military camp (“Cell 92,” April 1943) and later at Buchenwald (Feb. 1945) and Flossenb\u00fcrg (April 1945) concentration camps, where he fulfilled his ultimate destiny as a sainted martyr who willing gave his life courageously fighting against Nazi tyranny and against the madness of Hitler’s Aryan supremacy. <\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer transcended our defective human condition and demonstrated his enduring love of God, family and country by sacrificing his own personal safety and security playing a central part in two separate plots to kill Hitler (“Operation Valkyrie” and “Operation 7”) in exchange for Hitler’s merciless revenge, SS torture chambers and eventual martyrdom by hanging at the infamous Flossenb\u00fcrg concentration camp on April 9, 1945. Why? Bonhoeffer answered in an equally transcendent manner \u2013 Silence in the face of evil is itself evil; God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I attended seminary over 20 years ago, one of my favorite activities was the inter-seminary dialogues. Once a month about seven or eight of us would drive down to Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan to meet up with Jewish rabbinical students and seminarians from Union Theological Seminary (Protestant) and St. Joseph’s (Catholic). You’d think […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11187,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1784],"tags":[1744,13,1746,296,9,1745],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11186"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11186"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11192,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11186\/revisions\/11192"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}