Scientia (Mar 2022)
Arendt’s Natality Intertwined in the Christian Eschaton
Abstract
This article is a tribute to the 500 years of Christianity here in the Philippines last year. It is written from a Protestant-Evangelical perspective by situating Hannah Arendt’s natality in the public space where Christians themselves, although driven by their needs and wants to master necessity in the oikos, need to have relevant engagements. But this is hampered as the human condition gets distorted by the confluent factors in the private sphere that pave the way for coercion and violence in the public space. As a solution to this predicament, I propound that Arendt’s natality may be assumed towards the Christian eschaton in its engagement with the sphere of activity. This paper has four sections to posit the idea that even Christianity is in the process of being made new by the emergence of new people. The first section is a brief biblical reflection on when action becomes possible due to human being’s potentiality. Nevertheless, this potentiality is impeded in religious and cultural practices on domestic life as presented in the second section. Then in the third section, a study is presented wherein a huge sector of Philippine Evangelical Christianity turns out to be apolitical about an immense national concern thereby evincing certain distortion. It seems that this distortion permeates from oikos proclivities. The fourth section is the intertwining of the Protestant slogan as a sense of natality: ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda! References Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition 2nd ed. Chicago & London: University of Chicago University Press, [1998] 1958. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1958. Barth, Karl. Dogmatics in Outline. USA: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1959. Cornelio, Jayeel and Ia Marañon. “A ‘Righteous Intervention’: Megachurch Christianity and Duterte’s War on Drugs in the Philippines.” In International Journal of Asian Christianity, 2 (2019). Fry, Alex. “Postfeminist, engaged and resistant: Evangelical male clergy attitudes towards gender and women’s ordination in the Church of England.” In Critical Research on Religion 9, no. 1 (2021). O’Donovan, Joan Lockwood. “A Timely Conversation on Civil Society, Nation and State.” In A Royal Priesthood?: The Use of the Bible Ethically and Politically. Ed. Craig Bartholomew, et al. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Academic, 2002. Palmquist, Stephen. “Toward A Christian Philosophy of Work: A Theological and Religious Extension of Hannah Arendt’s Conceptual Framework.” In Philosophia Christi. 11, no. 2 (2009). Passerin d’Entreves, Maurizio. The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt. London: Routledge, 1994. Schwartz, Regina M. “Monotheism and the Violence of Identities.” In Raritan: A Quarterly Review 14, no. 3 (1995). Schwartz, Regina M. The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism. The University of Chicago Press, 1997. Tracy, Steven R. “Patriarchy and Domestic Violence: Challenging Common Misconceptions.” In Journal of Evangelical Theological Society 50, no. 2 (2007). Walters, Margaret. Feminism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2005. Williams, Rowan. Faith in the Public Square. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012. Wright, N. T. The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2016.
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