Introduction
A strong belief in God’s truth inspires some followers to take courageous action against political forces of deception, manipulation, or violence. However, religious truth claims can also display a “tyrannical” character, creating insensitivity to diversity and discouraging dissension—two qualities essential for healthy democracy. This article investigates religious truth’s ambivalent effect in politics through two anti-Nazi contemporaries, Hannah Arendt and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Arendt objects to bringing predetermined moral criteria into the political dimension. For her, the political exists not simply by the formal means of state institutions but through active public participation. Thus, the picture of politics she envisions is much more nuanced and dynamic than liberal constitutionalism or proceduralism.Footnote 1 Yet her thinking has been criticized for a secular bias grounded in a simplistic view of religiosity.Footnote 2 The concern is that her otherwise-attractive view of free politics overlooks the potential of religion as a force for human freedom beyond domination. Bonhoeffer’s thinking can serve to rectify Arendt’s secular reservations about religion’s role in politics. Witnessing the Nazi regime’s rise and churches’ related struggles, he developed distinctive theories of resistance and reconciliation.Footnote 3 Examining Bonhoeffer’s political theology helps us recognize a mutually beneficial interaction between politics and religion, an approach that seems overshadowed in Arendt’s endeavor to salvage human freedom from anti-political forces and her caution against religion-based domination.
Both thinkers were born in 1906 in Germany, although their paths never crossed. Bonhoeffer did not seem to know Arendt’s work, while she was informed of his significance in German resistance by her former mentor Karl Jaspers, who recommended a “close study” of his thought,Footnote 4 but she did not follow this advice. This article reconstructs their thinking to argue that a critical dialogue between them can provide much-needed insight into the application of religious truth claims to politics. Despite their shared appreciation of worldliness as outlined by James Bernauer,Footnote 5 their approaches to truth in politics contain several notable differences. Comparing them showcases a way to comprehend religion in developing a theory of politics at a time of “post-truth.”Footnote 6 Arendt argues that for free politics, plural voices or opinions are essential. Ultimate truth belongs to God, and human affairs driven by God’s truth are boring and even meaningless.Footnote 7 Reality appears not with confirming an established truth but with people continuing to share their different views on how to maintain their common space for freedom.Footnote 8 This diagnosis is undeniable when aggressive religious proselytization reminds us of “rigid” or legalistic aspects of religious doctrines and their practices. For Bonhoeffer, however, such a verdict on religious truth and truth-telling in politics is lopsided. In his view, truth can emerge only when one is in a living relationship with God and the other person.Footnote 9 Reality is revealed as believers continue to deliberate about what it means to be like Christ and to live for others in concrete situations.Footnote 10
Arendt finds it crucial to establish and maintain a robust sense of the public sphere and care for the public world. By contrast, Bonhoeffer emphasizes the person of Christ, who suffers for humanity. He urges Christians to see the world as a space of solidarity among the oppressed for non-domination and to witness a Christ-reality that resists ideological assertions. Bonhoeffer’s nuanced political theology provides a path for religion that Arendt’s political theory might miss. Yet, as I have noted elsewhere, Arendt’s sharp judgment of the dangers of a modern society driven by capitalism and consumerist culture is more informative than Bonhoeffer’s.Footnote 11 Her critical insight suggests that even a modest version of religious practice, like one inspired by Bonhoefferian christological reality, cannot remain intact in the face of modern socio-economic forces. By demonstrating how their thoughts can enrich each other regarding religious truth claims, this article formulates an informed view of political subjectivity that engages with the broader issue of what form of religion is compatible with freedom beyond enforcement, domination, and violence. This study also attends to complexities in Arendt’s and Bonhoeffer’s respective thinking that challenge simplistic interpretations. Both appreciate institutions for human freedom, though are aware of the dangers that appear when institutions serve dogmatism and an arbitrary projection of a tyrannical will.Footnote 12 Through articulating the subtle differences in these thinkers’ attempts to synthesize the demands of change and continuity for human lives, this article provides a more complete picture of their thoughts on religion and politics.
The first section, “Arendt: the public world resisting a tyrannical truth,” elaborates the grounds for Arendt’s critique of (religious) truth and the scope of “the world” in her republican thinking to resist both tyrannical truth and individual subjectivism. Section two, “Arendt’s idea of religiosity,” critically examines Arendt’s conceptions of religiosity and the scholarship thereof. Section three, “Bonhoeffer: Christ resisting a tyrannical truth,” articulates the grounds for Bonhoeffer’s critique of religious truth claims and the scope of “responsible action” in his christological thinking to eschew unbridled subjectivism and theocratic legalism. Section four, “Bonhoeffer’s possible blind spot,” identifies a potential blind spot related to Lutheran influences in Bonhoeffer’s thinking. Section five, “How Bonhoeffer can inform Arendt,” shows how an alternative view of religiosity, drawn from Bonhoeffer, can correct Arendt’s bias against Christianity and religion—while also emphasizing the need to avoid one-sided interpretations that overlook the dual appeal to change and continuity in both thinkers. Section six, “How Arendt can inform Bonhoeffer,” demonstrates how the Lutheran aspect of Bonhoeffer’s political theology invites Arendt’s critical yet balanced insight into modern society—an insight that emphasizes the need to remain vigilant against the growing danger of ideological ossification driven by modern socio-economic forces, and to confront it through activities that sustain the public world for freedom.
Arendt: the public world resisting a tyrannical truth
Arendt’s thoughts on truth and politics can best be viewed as a distinctive form of republicanism that resists both universal truth claims and individual subjectivism. She judges that “since philosophical truth concerns man in his singularity, it is unpolitical by nature.”Footnote 13 The political appears and sustains itself only when individuals continue to share their different perspectives on public matters. Truth, unlike opinion, is inherently singular and has a coercive feature. Her concern is that, in politics, philosophers use what they conceive of as truth to win over some tyrants.Footnote 14 Once this succeeds, the implementation of truth is likely to develop into despotism. For Arendt, truth-tellers are always tempted to resort to coercive measures. In the case of truth-based tyranny, one cannot point to “a failing of [individual] character” because the adoption of tyrannical enforcement actually occurs “by the strain of habitually living under a kind of compulsion.”Footnote 15
As a way of envisioning a polity for free politics instead of a tyrannical regime entertaining a truth claim, Arendt developed a distinctive sense of republicanism. The republic is not subject to a master but is the common possession of its citizens as the public thing. This is reflected well in her most republican book, On Revolution, which recognizes two sources of domination: from the top and from below.Footnote 16 She juxtaposes “politics of opinion” not only with a coercive politics of truth à la Plato but also with the reduction of plurality by projecting a singular mass opinion. Her thinking resists a “high” politics enacting predetermined truths from the law of God, nature, or history, as well as a “low” politics attending to ideological agendas of society as a whole. Both forms of politics are based on an inauthentic or pseudo-public realm where individual uniqueness is significantly undermined. Thus “opinions … never belong to groups but exclusively to individuals, who ‘exert their reason cooly and freely,’ and no multitude, be it the multitude of a part or of the whole society, will ever be capable of forming an opinion.”Footnote 17
However, Arendt’s critique of mass politics does not point to individual subjectivism. In what she considers a “politics of opinion,” human plurality is the precondition. The point of deliberation is not to eliminate differences of opinion but to enrich and more fully articulate them. For Arendt, forming an opinion is not an incident that occurs in reaching the truth.Footnote 18 Only with the activation of plurality can individuals form an opinion, as they deliberate with and imagine the perspectives of others. Forming an opinion, then, is not a projection of a given, ascriptive identity; rather, one’s uniqueness must be actively shared—not enforced—in the public setting. Thus Arendt ascertains that political thinking ought to be representative and public-minded: We form opinions only by considering any standpoints of those absent.Footnote 19
Truth, then, must be removed from Arendt’s vision of politics, where a plurality of opinion, argument, and deliberation among diverse equals is essential for a vibrant public realm. Her verdict is that for free politics to facilitate a continuous exchange of opinions, we need not truth-seekers but public-spirited citizens. An appreciation of the common world as a space of appearances and mutual deliberation, not any belief in truth, is enough for generating and maintaining a politics of opinion.Footnote 20 Arendt opposes the adoption of some baseline standard of value (whether economic, moral, or religious) that can supposedly serve as a comprehensive measure for all human activities and political communities. Quite apart from the sheer reductionism such criteria imply and the false sense of fungibility they create, she wants to keep us focused on the need for a particular common world—a world of laws, institutions, and practices we can call our own. This desire, in turn, suggests that the public world is a locally common site, one that can serve as the common meeting ground of those present in it. Hence, the scope of the public realm—whether universally or locally common—matters. Although she does not think that truth is needed for the formation of an opinion, she concedes that doing so requires a shared world that serves as a locally common space for political actors. A truth that claims to be universally common is not the right candidate for Arendt’s free politics, but a “human artifice” that individuals accept as locally common and cherish for its stabilizing role in the reliable appearances of their words and deeds is necessary for operating what Arendt considers a politics of opinion.
The ensuing question is to what extent citizens ought to care for the public world. As Dana Villa contends, Arendt at times suggests that our different views on the common world can be called “opinions” in her sense only when a high degree of public-spiritedness exists among the participants.Footnote 21 As Alan Keenan shows, the Roman conception of augmentation Arendt invokes in her accounts of the American Revolution is one such example.Footnote 22 She points out the danger of depoliticization associated with the tendency to rely on transcendent standards when a newly founded constitution needs authority. For her, the people of the American Revolution avoided this “problem of an absolute” by taking a path similar to the Roman augmentation, viewing the founding act itself as an object of worship.Footnote 23
Yet such a quasi-religious deference to the founding is not identical to the religious traditionalism that sets a divine absolute above the body politic. Even in such a Roman moment of her thinking, Arendt makes sure that the activity of augmentation enables political communities to integrate new voices for change into constitutional amendments as people apply and expand constitutional principles in their public lives and incrementally modify existing arrangements of public judgment.Footnote 24 The constitution cannot be perpetually open to change because constant disruption would decrease internal stability and would not be conducive to making opinions significant and actions effective.Footnote 25 In this regard, the constitutional state has a certain independent dimension once created. Citizens are expected to cherish the constitution that is available as a locally common site for the exchange of opinions and the appearance of actions. As James Ingram suggests, this republicanism takes the “bottom-up” approach and eschews the criticism levied against the “top-down” model of liberal governance that attempts to ground some universal truth claims in politics.Footnote 26 Contra the Kantian charge, as raised by Seyla Benhabib,Footnote 27 Arendt’s free politics significantly differs from the Schmittian world of politics that fosters permanent antagonism because, with the gradual change in the constitution’s internal arrangements, the augmentation-based political association modifies the existing stipulations regarding its external relations with other polities. In Arendt’s republicanism, the public worlds as locally common sites displace truth-driven tyrannies. Moreover, they are internally and externally connected through the means of council-based federation so that they can avoid the self-contained model of sovereign state politics and reduce international conflict.Footnote 28
In terms of Arendt’s position on truth in politics, then, three points are distinctive. First, because truth has a tyrannical feature, it does not fit with what she considers free politics. The main target of her critique here is a hierarchical politics of truth, and her thinking instead entertains value pluralism. For her, though, opposing absolute truth as a foundation for politics should not lead to individual subjectivism, so she emphasizes the importance of the common space for political action. Thus, for one’s different perspective on the public matter to be worthy of the title “opinion,” it must be representative and public-spirited. Finally, Arendt’s res publica is not self-contained. Instead, it is a locally common site for a continuous exchange of different views on the common world, one that goes through amendments and augmentations. In this theoretical scheme, religion is associated with truth’s allegedly coercive character. Arendt treats truth and religion as the same antipolitical force.Footnote 29 Her concern is that bringing a totalizing God as the source of truth, as instanced in the Decalogue, into politics only results in worldlessness among believers aspiring to divine redemption.
Arendt’s idea of religiosity
As explained, a key area of interpretation is Arendt’s critique of truth and its frequent association with divinity, or “the problem of the absolute,” as she says in On Revolution. Footnote 30 Samuel Moyn portrays the complexity of Arendt’s thinking in this regard such that although she recognized religion’s “nearly irresistible” appeal as a source of political authority in revolutionary situations, she opted to deny religion vigorously.Footnote 31 The American Revolution, for her, demonstrates how to achieve secular politics in modern times. Yet some commentators have suggested considering an alternative form of religiosity for analyzing her thoughts on religion and politics. One example is to view the mysterious quality of action conceived of as a new beginning as an instance of religiosity.Footnote 32 According to Susannah Gottlieb, Arendt’s accounts of action allude to a “weak” messianism, which eschews both nihilism and utopianism as it shifts attention to acts of renewal in the world here and now.Footnote 33 With this focus, the Arendtian divinity of natality avoids the common charge against organized religions that they entertain the divine retribution of past wrongdoings and the future soteriological redemption. This innovative interpretation engages with what Mavis Biss calls “competing definitions of the religious,”Footnote 34 aligning with critical scholars of religion who have explored the unorthodox, everyday, and “mundane” dimensions of religiosity that do not necessarily rely on traditional doctrines and deity.Footnote 35
Yet religion tends to gain relevance when Arendt observes and criticizes its inheritance in the Western tradition of political thought: the mistaken belief that politics requires an absolute ground.Footnote 36 A frequently cited ground for the speculated divinity of natality is her brief statement about Jesus in The Human Condition. Footnote 37 The human Jesus of Nazareth, for her, is the first discoverer of the role of forgiveness (and its natal feature in the form of action) in human affairs. However, as George KatebFootnote 38 and VillaFootnote 39 note, Arendt did not develop this allegedly religious dimension of action in her later works. The alternative attempt to formulate Arendt’s political theology as a form of messianism by valorizing her appreciation of the natal aspect of action is innovative. Owing to her consistent concerns about religion-based domination, however, changing the fulcrum of interpretation requires caution. As Miguel Vatter concedes, “Arendt does not understand modern revolutions along messianic lines.”Footnote 40 It remains unclear whether Arendt intended to propose a new form of religiosity to assuage her anxiety about religion’s appeal to (revolutionary) politics.
As indicated, work that accentuates the religious dimension of Arendt’s thinking often points to action’s initiatory feature articulated in The Human Condition. Her appreciation of natality symbolized by the birth of each individual is traced back to her doctoral dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, where she investigates the tension between notions of divine love and social responsibility cultivated among fellow humans.Footnote 41 Augustine provided Arendt with a puzzle: whether individuals displaying Augustinian neighborly love can love others as natal beings or unique, particular individuals while they consider them God’s creations.Footnote 42 However, Christianity is only one of the three traditions that affected Arendt’s accounts of action. Homeric heroics and a Roman foundation were also influential. Naturally, her oeuvre shows some variations in her thoughts on political action. Most distinctive is her acknowledgment of the challenges action creates in politics.
Contra the natality-based interpretation of Arendtian action, Arendt recognizes action’s drawbacks and merits. The initiatory feature of action as a new beginning serves to “force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries,” creating new human relationships.Footnote 43 Yet because this boundlessness also means a lack of stability, Arendt sees the need to minimize the problem by appealing to the significance of institutional limits for politics.Footnote 44 Bringing so-called “institutional Arendt” into the ongoing discussion is not to deny her deep appreciation of action. Instead, it confirms nuances and complexities in Arendt’s appeal to isonomy or free politics for non-domination. Viewed from such a vision of politics, as recent work on Arendt’s vita activa has demonstrated, a much more dynamic relationship among the three activities (action, work, and labor) is conceivable than the natality-focused reading assumes.Footnote 45
Portraying Arendt’s thinking as religious in a traditional sense is difficult—one can easily identify her reservations about religion’s negative impact on politics. For her, religion has anti-political elements that foster coercion and domination. However, describing Arendt as a religious thinker in such a nontraditional sense of religion as entertaining a weak messianism is also problematic because that interpretative move risks undermining the institutional aspect of her thinking. The question is whether theological voices that emphasize worldliness exist or whether a form of religion that aligns with Arendt’s vision of free politics attending to the demands of both initiatory action and stable institutions is identifiable.
Bonhoeffer: Christ resisting a tyrannical truth
In Bonhoeffer’s political theology, we find complexities and nuances that can serve to correct Arendt’s occasionally simplistic view of religion. On one hand, as Michael DeJonge points out, Bonhoeffer cautions against any type of religious radicalism that treats the word of God as an instrument for justifying revolutionary movements.Footnote 46 The Arendtian charge against truth’s compulsion to enforce a tyranny in politics is not dismissed when Bonhoeffer raises concerns about the sixteenth-century radical reformation and its modern heirs. On the other hand, as Stanley Hauerwas notes, Bonhoeffer affirms the unique role of the church as a proclaimer of the Gospel for the world.Footnote 47 His theology adds depth for addressing fundamental questions about religious truth and politics: How do human beings discern God’s truth in political matters? If Christians witness a political movement that attacks their core values, what method of resistance should they employ?Footnote 48
At the center of Bonhoeffer’s conceptual distinction between ultimate and penultimate things in Ethics is his concern about ways to comprehend how God’s truth, the ultimate, affects human lives, the penultimate.Footnote 49 The ultimate is the spiritual kingdom, where God proclaims the “justification of the sinner by grace alone.”Footnote 50 The penultimate is the temporal kingdom that God preserves via secular authorities, such as the state, for “preparing the way for the [ultimate] word.”Footnote 51 Bonhoeffer’s main argument is that authentic reality can only be captured in witnessing a unified life of Christ who reconciles divinity and humanity. Viewed from this judgment, two mistaken approaches are recognizable. The “radical” solution claims that God’s truth is directly accessible to the believers, and the enactors of God’s truth consider “Christ [a]s the destroyer and enemy of everything penultimate and everything penultimate [a]s the enemy of Christ.”Footnote 52 By contrast, the “compromise” solution understands that God’s truth, the ultimate word, “is divorced in principle from all that is penultimate.”Footnote 53 The problem Bonhoeffer finds with the “compromise” approach is that the influence of God’s word on the penultimate is nominal. The political world operates according to the law of nature instead of God’s truth, and the ultimate serves only as the eternal justification of all existing entities. The result is the religious practice of “cheap grace” through which sinful human mistakes await and receive “a metaphysical cleansing.”Footnote 54
Both typologies of radicalism and compromise fail to represent authentic Christianity, embodied in the reconciled reality of God and the world in Christ. Unless Christians grasp a person-concept of God as a middle way between subjective and objectified deity, Bonhoeffer warns that their acts develop into either radicalism (where the believers’ conviction that the direct assessment to God’s ultimate word is available triggers hasty actions for revolutionary change) or compromise (in which God’s word is considered irrelevant to everyday lives and its impact on this world is only symbolic). Bonhoeffer also urges Christians to avoid “thinking in terms of two [spatial] realms.”Footnote 55 From this thinking, the secular and the sacred are in “insoluble conflict” at the theoretical level, and what is worldly and what is Christian “battle like eternally hostile principles.”Footnote 56 Consequently, those believers obsessed with spatial thinking overlook the importance of a confessional posture that embraces the already-accomplished reconciliation of the world with God. They misconceive the purpose of Christian ethics: investigating “how [the] reality of God and of the world that is given in Christ becomes real in our world.”Footnote 57 The truth for Christianity is this reconciled reality that appears in “the unity of the reality of God and the reality of the world established in Christ [that] realizes itself again and again in human beings.”Footnote 58
For Bonhoeffer, Christian believers who perceive the reconciled reality of God and the world lead responsible lives.Footnote 59 Beyond individual interests, they attend to others, especially “the victims of any societal order.”Footnote 60 They engage in social actions by embracing “vicarious representative responsibility.”Footnote 61 As Christ acted as a vicarious representative for humanity before God, Christians are asked to live responsibly for others. The political connotation, as John de Grunchy articulates, is a christological form of solidarity: By participating in others’ sufferings, the believers each share in the sufferings of Christ, although the grounds of their actions are not humanitarian or moral.Footnote 62 Of course, such christomorphic actions are not new in Christian theology,Footnote 63 but a distinctive aspect of Bonhoeffer’s argument is his emphasis that vicarious representative action must accord with reality. This form of action, Clifford Green notes, “is rooted in God’s becoming human in Christ, as correspondence with reality is rooted in the concreteness of that incarnation.”Footnote 64 Accordingly, the reality Bonhoeffer’s thinking considers is not factuality or rationality but christologically mediated. Christ-reality guides responsible action by having it engage with concrete situations where actors are always persons in webs of relationships rather than abstract, isolated individuals. Bonhoeffer clarifies that responsible action occurring in a concrete world involves uncertainty. Far from the conventional portrayal of religious believers, the authentic image of Christians Bonhoeffer envisioned is that they eschew making the distinction between absolute good and absolute evil.Footnote 65
As a way of avoiding unbridled subjectivism, Bonhoeffer suggests that Christian believers take “appropriate action that will operate within the confines” of the divine mandates: church, family, work, and government.Footnote 66 The mandates’ specific role in Bonhoeffer’s thought is debated,Footnote 67 but his acknowledgment of them is not a mere expression of legalism or positivism. His objection to legalism is evident when he argues that “every order … can be broken … when it is locked within itself, hardened, and when it no longer permits the proclamation of the revelation.”Footnote 68 In this respect, the state—one of the mandates—embodies “the wisdom distilled from the experience of many generations,” although its specific (administrative and diplomatic) arrangements cannot exhaust “the intrinsic law of the state.”Footnote 69 Inevitably connected with human existence, state laws must ultimately extend beyond existing definitions and techniques. Specific faults of the state, then, do not justify its immediate overthrow. Rather, any incident that reveals the state’s incompetent performance in policy areas “prompts a return to a true ordering under the divine mandate, and a restoration of true responsibility for the divine task.”Footnote 70
As David Hall outlines, for Bonhoeffer, responsible action needs a certain structure so it can be “directed and preserved through membership in the Christian community and citizenship in the political unit.”Footnote 71 Such structures—mandates—should function to render individual action that “completely free of tragic or heroic overtones, soberly and simply does what is in accord with reality.”Footnote 72 Christian believers with vicarious representative responsibility do not view their participation in the world as tragic, assuming no human agency for what they do. Nor do they see it as heroic, presuming that their action is a direct manifestation of God’s will and will actualize God’s kingdom on earth. Shifting attention from the task of naming what is and what is not Christian, the religious attitude that Bonhoeffer elaborates focuses on exploring what it means to be “trying to be like Christ” in concrete situations.Footnote 73
Hence, the type of action Bonhoeffer envisions aligns with neither theocratic legalism nor vulgar voluntarism. His thought appeals to both change and continuity. His prison correspondence toward the end of his life contains such revolutionary ideas as “religionless Christianity.”Footnote 74 Yet, as noted earlier, Bonhoeffer also voices concerns about anti-legalistic approaches to politics.Footnote 75 To be clear, legalism or statism cannot represent Bonhoeffer’s nuanced view of religion and politics. As Stephan Plant explains, Bonhoeffer looked for “a subtle ecology of temporal and spiritual authority under God” as he differentiated the orders of creation and preservation and eventually replaced “orders” with “mandates” in his work.Footnote 76 Motivating this change were inadequate interpretations of Luther’s theology of orders and the Nazis’ appropriation of them. Bonhoeffer’s rationale was that the “orders of creation” sounds too static to reflect the dynamic relationship between orders of the world and their fundamental source, God. However, viewing such a nuanced differentiation as indicative of Bonhoeffer’s total break with Martin Luther’s theology, especially his two-kingdom thinking, is problematic. As DeJonge demonstrates, Bonhoeffer’s idea of the reconciled reality in Christ pursues “an authentically Lutheran account of the two kingdoms as a differentiated unity.”Footnote 77 His target of critique is his contemporaries’ mistaken readings of Luther, rather than Luther himself.Footnote 78 Characterizing his theology as an exemplar of anti-Lutheranism is hasty and fails to capture his real intention.
Bonhoeffer’s possible blind spot
Lutheran traces, such as the divine mandates, generate a certain tension in Bonhoeffer’s theology. One example relates to how Christian believers view the extant state and institutions. For Bonhoeffer, responsible action is not anarchic; it happens with some acknowledgment of the state and its role as one of the divine mandates that reflects a true ordering. However, there might be circumstances in which the church should do more than advise the state to avoid taking illegitimate actions and care for the victims thereof. In those extraordinary cases where “the state, without any scruples, has created either too much or too little law and order,” the church can take direct action “not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself.”Footnote 79 Yet, resonating with his concern about radicalism, Bonhoeffer also points out the need for any responsible actor to take on guilt. No human action ought to be presumptuous, and responsible action demands that actors embrace guilt due to their unavoidable imperfection. “In [his] exhortations to embrace guilt,” notes Matthew Puffer, “Bonhoeffer consistently refuses to the agents any knowledge about the ultimate justification of their actions.”Footnote 80 The ground for this judgment is his emphasis on a christological reality in which the two entities of the church and the state are (to be) reconciled, although the specific type of action varies according to how one perceives the given situation.
Presented this way, though, the concern about a Bonhoefferian responsible action is not fully resolved. One crucial matter in Bonhoeffer’s thinking that needs clarification and that his commentators often fail to notice is the nature of Christ’s mediated reality. The core claim is that God has reconciled with the world in the person of Christ. Bonhoeffer is clearly troubled by the secular ethical thinking that operates on “the antithesis between ought and is, idea and realization, motive and work” and its theological parallel that suffers from the dichotomy “between reality and becoming real, between past and present, between history and event (faith).”Footnote 81 Resonating with Hegel’s dialectic, Bonhoeffer argues that such a distinction at the abstract level is overcome in Jesus Christ.Footnote 82 Rather than raising the question of the (abstract) good, Christians must investigate ways of perceiving and participating in God’s reality revealed in Christ. Thus, “Good is no longer an evaluation of what exists, for instance, my essence, my moral orientation, my actions, or of a state of affairs in the world. … Good is the real itself, that is, not the abstractly real that is separated from the reality of God, but the real that has its reality only in God.”Footnote 83
Despite this obvious objection to Kantianism, one can question whether the idea of christologically reconciled reality entertains some kind of idealism. Does the idea suggest that an imaginary point of complete equilibrium between God and the world, between ought and is, or between law and freedom exists and that believers can have access to such an ideal point of equilibrium and achieve a full reconciliation? The theme of reconciliation, once taken as a confessional statement, generates religious believers’ actions. The life of Jesus Christ evinces that the reality of God has entered into the reality of this world. Analogously, “[Christians] are invited to participate in the reality of God and the reality of the world at the same time, the one not without the other.”Footnote 84 Yet even while informed by Bonhoeffer’s concerns about the approaches of radicalism and compromise, one can find that his religious ethic is not entirely free from the charge of idealism. Rather, Christian participation in the world via Christ’s mediated reality can go two ways: Christ’s reconciliation may serve as a motivation for believers’ vicarious representative action or be so assuring that those believers form the rigid thought that what they see is an already or more-or-less reconciled world.
The dissonance between idealism (suggestive of an “ideal” world fully reconciled via Christ) and non-idealism (pointing to the need for reconciliation in this “non-ideal” world via Christ) is evident in extraordinary conditions. The question of whether “the ultimate is the eternal law or free responsibility that is contrary to all law but before God” may not create much trouble under ordinary circumstances.Footnote 85 Here, one can expect that the Christian narrative of reconciliation would trigger both an appreciation of extant laws and a call for gradual reform. However, in cases of state-sponsored violence, such as mass atrocities or genocide, making the empirical claim that a perfect balance between obedience/law and freedom/God’s will has been achieved would be nonsensical. Under such circumstances, Christ’s reconciliation is not an empirical fact of the current world. Christians should adopt the reconciliation theme as a confessional statement and even consider taking direct action to challenge state authority and violate imposed laws while embracing guilt and leaving the ultimate justification of their acts to God.Footnote 86
How Bonhoeffer can inform Arendt
Several Bonhoeffer scholars highlight Arendt’s and Bonhoeffer’s statements about action. Ruth Zerner claims that “Arendt, with her emphasis on the genuine experience of and love for the world and on free action … might have found much in common with Bonhoeffer, had she studied his works and actions.”Footnote 87 Zerner sees a strong continuity between Bonhoeffer’s conception of responsible action and Arendt’s appreciation of initiatory action. Petra Brown and Andrew DeCort respectively advance a natality-centered interpretation of Arendt’s thought to chide or praise Bonhoeffer’s political theology. In Brown’s view, both thinkers reject the otherworldliness of Christianity, although “Bonhoeffer’s vision of a ‘worldly Christianity’ falls short of Arendt’s understanding of a common world,”Footnote 88 one that she envisions through “the radical openness that is part of [her] concept of natality.”Footnote 89 Whereas Brown attempts to correct “a retreat into conservative values” in some of Bonhoeffer’s work,Footnote 90 DeCort discovers a modest ethic of new beginning which is lacking in Arendt. For DeCort, Bonhoeffer’s idea of vicarious representative action aims at what Bonhoeffer calls “a new life in being there for others.”Footnote 91 He argues that Bonhoeffer’s accentuation of “the self’s God-given liberation from its self-enclosure to begin again”Footnote 92 by embracing others in love contrasts with Arendt’s “proposed new beginning … [which] requires an optimistic embrace and even intensification of [human] autonomy.”Footnote 93
Charles Mathewes’s work is a rare example in Bonhoeffer studies that cautions against “a simplistic voluntarist reading” overstating the agonistic dimension of Arendt’s thinking, although one can also contend that such an interpretive problem stems not merely from Arendt’s “rhetorically complex” statements but from a failure to capture the fundamental nature of her free politics that attends to the demands of agonistic action and institutional stability.Footnote 94 Arendt is a theorist of action; witnessing the rise of totalitarianism’s anti-politics to remove human spontaneity, the phenomenon of thoughtlessness, and the spread of social forces that have infiltrated the political, she felt the need to restore political action’s meaning and dignity. However, for action’s reliable appearances, we need a bounded, ocular space that “makes opinions significant and actions effective.”Footnote 95 Her appreciation of the importance of institutional, communal limits for politics is clear;Footnote 96 thus, the nuances found in Arendt’s accounts of action and her estimation of its role in free politics must be recognized.
Arendt’s and Bonhoeffer’s conceptions of action both note that it occurs in the condition of uncertainty. For Arendt, political action’s associational feature makes its impact unpredictable. Likewise, for Bonhoeffer, responsible action’s concrete quality points to its entanglement with the contingency and messiness of the world of actors. With this common insight into the nature of (political or religious) action, both Arendt and Bonhoeffer problematize the rigid, judgmental, and defensive aspects of conventional Christianity oriented by two-realm thinking (e.g., Augustine’s two cities for Arendt and the “pseudo-Lutheran” attempt to pitch the orders of the world against the law of Christ for Bonhoeffer). Yet whereas Arendt recognizes “the problem of the absolute” that religion’s formal involvement with (founding) politics creates and instead accentuates the role of public institutions and the public-spirited citizenry,Footnote 97 Bonhoeffer cautions against self-affirmative action or simple rebellion that dreams of bringing about the kingdom of God. Such religious fanaticism is as problematic as bleak secularism for him. Instead, believers must know that “[a]ction in accordance with Christ … allows the world to be world and reckons with the world as world, while at the same time never forgetting that the world is loved, judged, and reconciled in Jesus Christ by God.”Footnote 98
Arendt and Bonhoeffer are wary of truth’s tyrannical connotations. For Arendt, what matters is not who or what regime implements truth in politics. Once one harbors the intent to implement what one considers absolute truth, it is difficult to avoid enforcement and violence. As we have seen, her alternative is the politics of opinion, through which individuals share their different perspectives on the public matter and establish reality that reliably appears “in-between” them.Footnote 99 Bonhoeffer also recognizes dangers that lie in truth-based politics. To him, claiming a direct assessment of God’s word is not authentically Christian. As history shows, such an attitude often leads to self-affirmative action and simple rebellion. Similar to Arendt, for Bonhoeffer, reality is not a given, like factual, rational data, but a mediated phenomenon. Yet Bonhoeffer’s critique of Christianity is immanent in that, unlike Arendt, he discovers a source of correction in Christian traditions. The authentic church must be a sacramental space for Christian believers to deliberate what it means to be like Christ and live for others in concrete situations. Reality only appears in their analogous acts and witness to Christ’s reconciliation of the divine and the world. Bonhoeffer’s idea of christological reality helps us revisit the Arendtian charge that Christianity is closely associated with truth’s coercive feature. His thinking suggests that alignment with forces of domination is not the only path. Instead, once Christians know and follow Christ’s mediated reality, they avoid the dangers of radicalism and compromise, and their discipleship takes a worldly, anti-dictatorial form.
Although Arendt’s and Bonhoeffer’s thoughts contain radical components needed for our contemporary imagination regarding the intersection of religion and politics, they also entail nuances and complexities that challenge a simplistic categorization. Recall the earlier discussion of recent interpretations that frame Arendt’s thinking through the lens of weak messianism, and how the one-sidedness of such readings influences the emerging scholarship on the intersection of Arendt and Bonhoeffer. Instead of a selective reading, a study of the Arendt–Bonhoeffer nexus needs to confront Arendt’s republican traces and Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran legacy. Through engaging with these rather “conservative” aspects of their thinking, we should investigate how their views on religious truth claims converge and diverge and what their worldly and christological ways of attending to the demands of change and continuity for politics imply for the broader discussion on human freedom and civic engagement. The following section examines how the tension generated by Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran emphasis on divine mandates invites Arendt’s radical insights into modern society—insights that coexist with her concern for public institutions—thus offering a balanced approach to modernity.
How Arendt can inform Bonhoeffer
DeJonge clarifies that, for Bonhoeffer, the agent of resistance remains the church until the divine mandates are destroyed and individuals eventually follow their consciences to do what is necessary to restore the mandates.Footnote 100 However, in addressing resistance strategies, we must also be clear about how political orders are compromised. We must specify the nature of the harm done to the whole society. Arendt’s typologies help here. Four types of harm are identifiable when she discusses how to remedy the irreversible past: trespassing, non-extreme crime, extreme crime, and radical evil.Footnote 101 Trespassing happens daily and unknowingly in what Arendt considers free politics. Broadly, Arendt shares Bonhoeffer’s objection to Kantianism. Her politics attend to the concrete actions of actual people rather than imaginative entities set up for constructing a moral conception of justice.Footnote 102 The harm of trespassing is unavoidable in her action-centered politics, although a remedy “does not arise out of another and possibly higher faculty, but is one of the potentialities of action itself,” which is forgiving.Footnote 103 Meanwhile, the radical evil of totalitarian terror is not characterized by what is conventionally known as violence, which, for example, has the “limited” aim of protecting a tyrant’s interests.Footnote 104 Thus, the radical evil the totalitarian Nazi manifested is not identical to authoritarian dictatorial violence. Going beyond using violence for regime survival, radical evil aims at total destruction, rendering individuals superfluous by depriving them of their spontaneity. In Arendt’s framework, it is the most disastrous harm done to humanity.Footnote 105
Arendt also introduces “the banality of evil” in Eichmann in Jerusalem, a notion often contrasted with that of radical evil.Footnote 106 The two ideas point to the same event (the Holocaust), although each focuses on different aspects: one the radical nature of totalitarianism—superfluousness—that we cannot capture with the conventional sense of violence and the other a banal, not monstrous, agent whose thoughtlessness contributes to and makes possible deeds manifested in extreme evil. While not fully reconcilable, the two concepts of evil can supplement each other. For instance, banal evil highlights the danger associated with truth claims and institutions based on ascriptive criteria of collectivity, whereas radical evil characterizes the role of legal and institutional structures as a bulwark against proto-totalitarian forces. Thus, if indiscriminate resistance to public institutions develops, one’s awareness of radical evil guards against such a move. Conversely, if one is too complacent about existing institutions as the “duties of a law-abiding citizen,” the banality of evil warns against it by appealing to the need for distance and defiance for independent judgment.Footnote 107
Relevant to the ongoing analysis is how different types of harm complicate Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran appreciation of state laws and institutions as part of the divine mandates. Cases of radical evil are rare, and incidents of trespassing may not be a reason for rebellion. Public trust exists in the case of trespassing whereas none is found in radical evil. This distinction suggests that the aforementioned gap between idealism and non-idealism regarding the Bonhoefferian theme of reconciliation is much more evident in radical evil than in trespassing. In the former, a responsible Christian should take Christ’s reconciliation as a confessional statement that triggers actions. Otherwise, the believer fails to embrace vicarious representative responsibility and is disqualified from being a responsible Christian in Bonhoeffer’s sense. The real trouble, though, comes when we address harms other than trespassing and radical evil. Crime can be close to trespassing (non-extreme crime) or proximate to radical evil (extreme crime). It is a borderline case where, depending on how religious believers discern the situation, they maintain that what they see still reflects the fulfilled reconciliation via Christ or indicates the moment of responsible action with their confessional assurance of Christ’s reconciliation to prevent any impending disaster of radical evil. Regarding which perception of reconciliation (an empirical fact or a confessional statement) is adequate when dealing with a borderline case of harm, Bonhoeffer does not offer a clear answer.
The matter becomes even more complicated if one believes that the state and institutions are means of domination, as they are constantly colonized by disciplinary power and biopolitical strategies. From this angle, violence happens via a hidden structure of power, and invoking the theme of christological reconciliation as an accomplished fact of the world is inadequate because doing so would only make us complicit in structural injustice. Bonhoeffer argues that “[the church] should recognize and understand the state’s creation of order—whether good or bad from a humanitarian perspective—as grounded in God’s desire for preservation in the midst of the world’s chaotic godlessness.”Footnote 108 However, violence may be deeply embedded in political, social, and cultural structures.Footnote 109 One cannot determine whether “the state’s creation of order” is good or bad merely on the basis of superficial observation. Such a judgment needs to be accompanied by the acknowledgment that the state operating “normally” can be entangled with structural injustice and violence. The state’s temporarily “inhumane” action may stem from a harmful structure that cannot be rectified while retaining the state’s authority.
Here, one may be tempted to invoke Michel Foucault’s call for increasing sensitivity to unnoticed power operations and strategies in biopolitics.Footnote 110 In my view, we can find a more balanced alternative in Arendt’s thinking that incorporates both demands of change and continuity for free politics. Arendt’s acute diagnosis of modern society broadly shares Foucault’s concern about the operation of disciplinary power and the fate of agonistic subjectivity in the modern age. An important aspect of her thought is an awareness of the challenges the modern world faces due to the increasing infiltration of socio-economic forces into politics. Arendt argues that the most agential activity, action, has been demoted to the lowest rank in human activities and that prejudices against action have created the environment for the rise of totalitarianism’s anti-politics. The gradual process culminating in the devaluation of action, the activity most compatible with the human condition of natality and plurality, is “the rise of the social.”Footnote 111 Such a process comes with “the unnatural growth of the natural.”Footnote 112 Dominant now is the society that Arendt views as “the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.”Footnote 113 An increased danger, if not the direct consequence, of the rise of the social is thoughtlessness, an extreme example of which Arendt discovers in the strange operation of Adolf Eichmann’s conscience.Footnote 114 To resist the banality of evil, which refers to such thoughtlessness found in Eichmann’s case, Arendt recognizes the need to accentuate the courage of refusing authority in matters of judgment and morality. She thus values Socrates’ deflationary and aporetic method of philosophic activity that serves to dissolve everyday dogmatism and thoughtlessness.Footnote 115
This historical side of Arendt’s thoughts adds a critical twist to Bonhoeffer’s theology. It urges those who implement his Christ-reality ethic to see that structural sources of domination entangled with consumerist culture and the neoliberal market economy are effective in the modern world. Arendt’s penetrating analysis of modern society illuminates that state institutions that seem to be “normal” may be complicit in structural violence produced by the socio-economic forces of neoliberalism and capitalism. To defend Bonhoeffer, one may agree with Green that the anti-Nazi theologian prepared two versions of Christian ethics: for everyday life, where the demand for obedience to divine mandates is strong, and for exceptional cases in which resistance strategies that include violence are explored.Footnote 116 Yet the distinction between normal and exceptional is not always clear-cut in modern politics. Indeed, Christian believers often encounter borderline cases that puzzle them as to whether their situation is close to an already fulfilled reconciliation via Christ or to the moment of action for resistance with a confessional assurance of Christ’s reconciliation. Even worse, what seems normal at a superficial level may not be normal at a deeper level. Thus, without recognizing the violence that occurs at the structural level, Christians who attempt to practice Bonhoeffer’s ethic may be misled to believe that the extant world of politics is (relatively) normal. Here, an Arendtian insight is that claiming that Christ’s reconciliation has been fulfilled and is an empirical fact of the world increases the possibility that Bonhoeffer’s refined religious ethic will fall into ideological ossification. In this way, Christian believers are prone to harbor more relief than motivation to challenge existing ideological beliefs and act for change. Consequently, their celebratory tone of engagement with the world renders them oblivious to structural injustices modern social forces commit.
Nevertheless, we should not overstate this possible blind spot of Bonhoeffer’s theology and the historical and agonistic dimension of Arendt’s political thought. Bonhoeffer’s work, especially his later writings, entertains an apocalyptic idea that emphasizes the priority of God’s action yet in a way that, as David Congdan claims, “it always remains other and never becomes something given within the world.”Footnote 117 This apocalyptic theology, different from the idea that the believer merely awaits the final eschatological inbreaking, conceives of the will of God as “a reality that wills to become real ever anew in what exists and against what exists.”Footnote 118 Thus, Bonhoeffer’s objection to religious dogmatism coexists with his concerns about unbounded subjectivism and populism.Footnote 119 Arendt’s thinking also contains complexity that challenges a one-dimensional reading. Although, as suggested above, some of her reflections (e.g., disaggregated modern mass, consumerism, and thoughtlessness) anticipate Foucault’s call to preserve agonistic subjectivity in the modern age, her thinking hardly points to the politics of everyday life that view public law and institutions as the mere means of domination and pursue dispersed, never-ending, and local resistance.
Places in Arendt’s thought attest to deep appreciation for the foundation of a “care for the world,” from which action reliably appears and human civilization is possible.Footnote 120 Reviving the demoted activity of action would be the best method of resistance to the emergence of totalitarian and proto-totalitarian forces, but for this matter, Arendt also believes we need a bounded, ocular space that “makes opinions significant and actions effective.”Footnote 121 She does not think that participation in the world of institutions inevitably results in overlooking structural injustice. The anxiety in her observation on the rise of the social never suggests that the fight for sustaining the “objective, public world” or an institutionally articulated space for freedom is necessarily futile. Rather, she intends to assure us that the fight is much tougher than we (and Bonhoeffer at times) assume. Arendt’s engagement with ancient Greek action seeks to secure a way to resist the infiltration of the social into the political, through which all foundational claims (secular or religious) and institutions based on them are subject to the cyclical life process promoting production and consumption and vulnerable to ideological ossification.
As such, Arendt and Bonhoeffer’s theories have both progressive and conservative aspects, although their specific ways of mediating these differ. The ambiguity found in Bonhoeffer’s idea of christological reconciliation invites Arendt’s critical yet balanced insight into modern society and mass politics. Yet a more complete analysis of their thought can be made when we acknowledge their political sensitivities that incorporate both continuity and change, beyond the presentation of agonistic Arendt triumphing over Lutheran Bonhoeffer or anti-legalistic Bonhoeffer falsifying republican Arendt.
Conclusion
Exploring theological nuances and complexities in Bonhoeffer’s thought provides an enriching case for analysis, such as worldly Christianity that retains its distinctiveness yet does not develop into religious exclusivism or fanaticism. His political theology shows that, while Christianity can serve as an ideological source of domination, it can also facilitate civic engagement and human freedom. Despite her thinking that accentuates dynamism in free politics, Arendt’s overall judgment of religion tends to be simplistic. Through Bonhoeffer’s political theology, this article has sought to demonstrate that religion can be an ally of, not an enemy to, Arendtian politics. Arendt’s free politics of action beyond domination and Bonhoeffer’s appeal to christological reality and responsible action offer us much to consider regarding the contested topic of religious truth claims in politics. Identifying a relative paucity of comparative research on their thought, this cross-reading has articulated whether and how their unconventional views on religion and politics intersect. The result is a nuanced form of political subjectivity, one that aspires to Arendt’s sense of freedom yet is not overwhelmed by the danger of religion-based domination and appreciates Bonhoeffer’s Christ-reality ethic yet remains wary of the danger of its ideological sclerosis by modern socio-economic forces.
As this article has demonstrated, however, such a reconstruction of Arendt’s and Bonhoeffer’s thought on religion and politics must endure several twists due to their complexities. Fundamentally a theorist of action, Arendt nonetheless emphasizes the concrete world of political institutions that renders opinions significant and actions reliably appearing. Bonhoeffer, while pointing to a worldly form of Christianity that attests to Christ’s reconciliation of divinity and humanity, still recognizes the important role of divine mandates that make ethical life substantial and concrete and serve to avoid unbounded subjectivism and individualism. One may dismiss these features as inconsistent and contradictory. Yet one can also consider them as expressing nuances and sensitivities that elide conventional contrasts, such as the dogmatic versus the pragmatic or the conservative versus the progressive. Indeed, the real merit of engaging with Arendt and Bonhoeffer is to generate critiques beyond secular and anti-secular approaches to politics. Possible thoughtful critiques are often submerged in caricatures of Christian triumphalism or secular formalism. This article has shown that those pursuing Arendt’s free politics may recognize another path for religion suggested by Bonhoeffer’s political theology. Those embracing Bonhoeffer’s view of christological reconciliation can benefit from Arendt’s critical analysis of modern society. Beyond tyrannical truth, their thought points toward a constructive dialogue on religion and politics.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was presented at an invited event organized by the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation at Middlebury College in 2023 and at the Bonhoeffer: Theology and Social Analysis Unit of the 2023 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. I am grateful to the organizers of these events—Sarah Stroup, Karen Guth, and Matthew Puffer. I also thank the editorial team of The Review of Politics, along with the three anonymous reviewers, for their thoughtful guidance and constructive suggestions. Special thanks go to James Bernauer for his helpful comments on my early thoughts on the Arendt–Bonhoeffer nexus.
