Hannah Arendt and N. T. Wright

Introduction post 4 of 10

Good morning! Today’s post from the book series’s introduction begins by accepting political theorist Hannah Arendt’s challenge to take Jesus seriously as a political thinker. I put Arendt in conversation with N.T. Wright, perhaps the world’s greatest New Testament exegete, to consider the insights into God’s kingdom possible when theologians and political theorists collaborate. To access the other posts that make up the introduction to Political Devotions, click its subtitle’s post number: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.

Although I am in no position to teach anyone about religion or politics, I ought, by way of introduction, to describe my approach to them. I take Jesus seriously as a political thinker. In this respect, I accept political theorist Hannah Arendt’s challenge to take the “philosophic implications” of Jesus’s sayings more seriously.¹

Arendt led the way. Jesus’s riposte to his detractors while forgiving and healing a lame man—“Is it easier to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk’?”² —caught her ear. To Arendt, Jesus’s equation of the Son of man’s “power upon earth to forgive sins” with his power to heal demonstrates the critical link between humanity’s power to forgive and humanity’s power to perform what she calls “‘miracles’ in the political realm”:³

Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new.⁴

Arendt believed that Jesus’s miracles demonstrate humankind’s ability to “begin something new,” to interrupt “automatic processes,” especially the mechanistic workings of oppressive regimes.⁵ Forgiveness greases the skids for such miracles, Arendt says, because others’ power to forgive our actions gives us the space to change our minds and act again.

But I often wish that Arendt, who died in 1975, and N. T. Wright, perhaps the greatest living New Testament exegete,⁶ had been contemporaries and could have discussed these and other political aspects of Jesus’s sayings. Where might they have driven each other’s thought? For instance, Wright could have pointed out to Arendt that, through both Jesus’s miracles and his forgiveness of sins, Jesus is announcing the kingdom of God.⁷

“Kingdom of God” is, like “political devotions,” a political as well as a religious term. The concision of “kingdom of God,” to our Western ears, makes the term’s admixture of politics and religion particularly dangerous, perhaps a pulled preposition away from “nitroglycerin.” As if to neuter the term’s nouns, Westerners often treat Jesus’s references to the “kingdom of God” as a figure of speech. For Jesus, though, the “kingdom of God” was neither a synonym for church nor a metaphor for an eternity in heaven or for a new religion or, for that matter, a new religious experience. Instead, for Jesus, as it was for his first- century audience, the kingdom of God was Israel’s hope for its return from exile—a full return without foreign rule—as well as for God’s return to his temple and for a new creation, including (in the view of many first-century Jews) the resurrection of the dead, the newborn dead who would serve in God’s just reign over all the earth.⁸

How do forgiveness and healings announce God’s kingdom? Wright points out that to the first-century Jewish understanding and in accordance with many Old Testament scriptures, the long-promised forgiveness of sins meant the long-awaited fulfillment of God’s promise to return Israel from exile: “Forgiveness was an eschatological blessing; if Israel went into exile because of her sins, then forgiveness consists in her returning: returning to YHWH, returning from exile.”⁹ Likewise, Jesus’s healings were signs of kingdom come. To the first-century Jewish witness, Jesus’s healings suggested “the restoration to membership in Israel of those who, through sickness or whatever, had been excluded as ritually unclean.”¹⁰ Like Jesus’s frequent meals with “sinners and tax collectors,”¹¹ Jesus’s healings, Wright says, would be seen as “part of that open welcome which went with the inauguration of the kingdom.”¹²

Given Wright’s political insights into forgiveness and miracles, two matters considered “religious” to Westerners, Wright might have helped out Arendt’s understanding of the early church’s politics in other respects. For instance, he might have challenged Arendt’s notion that the early Christians’ church meetings constituted a “rejection of the public, political realm,”¹³ or that the early Christians, in fact, discovered what Arendt calls the necessary but uninspiring “freedom from politics.”¹⁴

Or maybe the opposite would have happened: maybe Arendt would have helped out Wright’s understanding. Arendt’s conception of “natality”—of a person’s capacity to act (“to begin”) in public space consistent with who they are (“beginnings”)¹⁵ —corresponds to Wright’s conception of the kingdom of God’s new creation and to Paul’s encouragement to “put on the new self.”¹⁶ Paul himself, for instance, doesn’t demonstrate the kingdom only when he forgives (as he does in concord with the Corinthians’s forgiveness)¹⁷ or heals the sick.¹⁸ Paul manifests God’s kingdom also when he speaks or acts against Arendt’s “automatic processes,” such as when he frees a slave from a spirit of divination that has been enriching her masters, landing himself in jail.¹⁹ Or when the results of two years of Paul’s discussions in an Ephesian lecture hall threaten the city’s idol-making trades, and the tradesmen pull him before a rowdy civic assembly.²⁰ In either case, an Arendt-Wright mashup would highlight the threat that the kingdom of God poses to confederacies of powerful political and economic interests.

In any event, in collaboration with Arendt, maybe Wright would find fresh applications of what he terms Jesus’s “revolution” against this world’s human and demonic rulers.²¹ He also wouldn’t limit his kingdom-of-God framework by such milquetoast maxims as this: “. . . God wants the world to be ordered, not chaotic, and . . . human power-structures are the God-given means by which that end is to be accomplished . . .”²² The kingdom of God, Arendt might have reminded Wright, is hardly a “human power-structure.”

This is the fourth of ten posts that make up the book series’s introduction. Click here to read the next one.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

1. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 166.

2. Luke 5:23 REB.

3. Luke 5:17- 26 KJV; Arendt, Human Condition, 239; Arendt, Between Past and Future, 169.

4. Arendt, Human Condition, 239-40.

5. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 166-67.

6. Bird, “N. T. Wright and the Promise,” 20.

7. Wright, Jesus and the Victory, 192, 272-73.

8. See Wright, 172.

9. Wright, 549.

10. Wright, 191.

11. Mark 2:16 NNAS.

12. Wright, 192.

13. Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 135-36.

14. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 148-49; Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 135-41.

15. Arendt, Human Condition, 177-78.

16. Ephesians 4:24 NNAS.

17. 2 Corinthians 2:10.

18. E.g., Acts 14:10 & 19:11-12.

19. Acts 16:16-24.

20. Acts 19:23-41.

21. In his book The Day the Revolution Began, Wright interprets 1 Corinthians 2:8 to mean “that when the ‘rulers of this age’ went ahead and ‘crucified the Lord of glory’ they were, by implication, signing their own death warrant.” Wright, Day the Revolution Began, 246. See also 413.

22. Wright, “Kingdom Come,” 146. Wright continues: “ . . . otherwise those with muscle and money will always win, and the poor and the widows will be trampled on afresh.” Wright, 146. Wright’s position is the opposite of what the Old Testament prophets teach about “human power-structures.” Arendt would point out that Wright’s concept of security as the purpose of government and as the prerequisite of freedom accords with Hobbes and Spinoza—a modern concept indeed. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 148.