Bonhoeffer and Arendt at One Hundred Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 2/1 (2007): 77-85 Bernauer, “Bonhoeffer and Arendt at One Hundred” 77 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol2/iss1/art6 Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations A peer-reviewed e-journal of the Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations Published by the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College “Bonhoeffer and Arendt at One Hundred” James Bernauer, S.J. Boston College 2/1 (2007): 77-85 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol2/iss1/art6 Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 2/1 (2007): 77-85 Bernauer, “Bonhoeffer and Arendt at One Hundred” 78 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol2/iss1/art6 1. Introduction While they were both born in 1906 and in Germany at that, I understand those who would doubt that bringing Hannah Arendt’s political thought into conversation with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theological text is a promising direction for research. Certainly he did not know of her and, to my knowledge, his name makes only one appearance in her published works, and that in a letter in which Karl Jaspers recommends him to her study of resistance in Nazi Germany.1 She did not take his advice and perhaps his absence is not surprising because many would regard her philosophy as entailing a dismissive lament over the ultimate unworldliness of Jewish and Christian life and thought. Such a judgment, however, would overlook Arendt’s theological preoccupations which remained with her from her earliest university studies when she decided to become a theology major after attending the lectures of Romano Guardini at the University of Berlin. Even as a philosophy student, Arendt would follow the theology courses of Bultmann and Tillich, study Kierkegaard and write a dissertation on Augustine.2 While I would maintain that this theological concern survives at the core of her conceptual 1 Karl Jaspers to Hannah Arendt, March 1, 1964, in Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926-1969, eds. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 547. 2 See Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 33-36, 62, 82. Visitors to Arendt's personal library, preserved at Bard College, will be struck by the number of specifically theological texts contained in her collection. The 1929 dissertation finally appeared in English in 1996 as Love and Saint Augustine, ed. J. V. Scott and J. C. Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). At the same time I do not want to deny the significance of Greek and Roman experience for Arendt. A helpful discussion of that influence is Jacques Taminiaux’s “Athens and Rome” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 165-177. system, it is interesting to note that even George Kateb, who takes Arendt as “adamantly untheological” goes on to note that the “wonder and gratitude for being” which pervades her work and which is in opposition to totalitarianism’s “contempt for the given” is “religious in quality.”3 My essay shall draw out some implications of her religious interest and aim to emphasize certain insights in Bonhoeffer’s thought that Arendt’s thirty years longer life span was able to confirm and develop. Both of them had to confront the toxicity of western culture’s spiritual dynamics, Bonhoeffer primarily in terms of the exploitation of Christian categories by such groups as the Deutsche Christen, Arendt principally in the abuse of religious perspectives during the struggles of the Cold War. Their thought intersects in three domains which will make up my three brief comments: Worldliness; Sin and evil; and Jesus. 2. Worldliness Certainly, their mutual embrace of worldliness is the key commitment that engenders their visions of activism and both of them make central to any clear worldly thinking the criticism of religion. For both, that criticism is the beginning of wisdom. It is interesting to note that Cardinal Ratzinger, currently Pope Benedict, while not totally accepting “religionless Christianity,” wrote in 1992 of the danger of forgetting the “criticism of religions that has been burned into our souls not only by Feuerbach and Marx but also by such 3 George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983), 158, 165. At the same time I do agree with Richard Bernstein who points out that Arendt never studied Jewish tradition with the same seriousness as she did Christianity. See his Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996). Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 2/1 (2007): 77-85 Bernauer, “Bonhoeffer and Arendt at One Hundred” 79 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol2/iss1/art6 great theologians as Karl Barth and Bonhoeffer.”4 In Bonhoeffer’s words: “For the sake of real people, the church must be thoroughly worldly. It is a worldly reality for our sakes.”5 “Amor Mundi,” “Love of the World,” was the title that Arendt originally wanted to give to the book that was published as The Human Condition and is the best expression for her deepest commitment. Her thought is a new “partisanship for the world,” that consisted of three interrelated perspectives: a vision of human existence as worldly, an understanding of human community as political, and a portrait of the life of the mind’s worldly tasks.6 While love for the world exhibits itself through action, it is also a faith that attempts to salvage for contemporary culture central religious experiences of the Hebraic-Christian tradition. Her recourse to religious thinkers and experiences was more than a matter of mere theological background. They are intrinsic to the way that she herself experienced the crisis of our times and here is one of the places where Bonhoeffer and she meet. He had seen that it is only by “living completely in this world that one learns to have faith” and he defines “this-worldliness” as “living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities.”7 Arendt realized that among the forces most needed for a renewal of the political realm were two which were not present in the ancient world: faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which 4 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Faith, Religion, and Culture,” in Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 65-66. 5 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Nature of the Church,” in A Testament to Freedom, ed. Geffrey Kelly and F. Burton Nelson (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 87. 6 Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times,” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968), 8. 7 Letter to E. Bethge of July 21, 1944) in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters & Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (London: SCM Press, 1967), 369-370. Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box. As was the case with Bonhoeffer, Arendt was convinced that institutional religion was in a state of crisis. There had taken place in modern times an indisputable loss of belief in religious dogmas but this institutional crisis was not a matter of indifference for her, however, because it nurtured the seeds of a more profound disaster. While loss of religious belief need not entail the forfeiture of faith itself, this was precisely the danger: “But who can deny that faith too, for so many centuries securely protected by religion, its beliefs and its dogmas, has been gravely endangered through what is actually only a crisis of institutional religion?”8 Amor mundi was the faith she proposed as the way of overcoming this danger. This project imitated that of her teacher, Rudolf Bultmann, whose theology sought to rescue an authentic Christian faith from the loss of credibility which many of its accompanying pre-modern beliefs had suffered. In its integration of religious experience, Arendt’s amor mundi became a discourse of ultimacy, a faith not in God but in creation. This faith was articulated as an alternative to the appeal which ideology exercises once faith is displaced. Arendt understood, as had Dostoyevsky before her, that without faith a person will become a “flunkey of his ideas” and will believe anything, especially an ideology’s total explanation and its promise to the masses of a “man-made fabrication of the Paradise they 8 Hannah Arendt, “Remarks to the 1973 Meeting of the American Society of Christian Ethics” in The Papers of Hannah Arendt container 70, 011838-011839. Hannah Arendt, “What Is Authority?” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1977), 94-95. Arendt claims that the modem loss of faith itself is not religious in origin (The Human Condition, 253-254). Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 2/1 (2007): 77-85 Bernauer, “Bonhoeffer and Arendt at One Hundred” 80 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol2/iss1/art6 had longed for and of the Hell they had feared.”9 A strictly secular form of thought is inadequate to this level of ultimacy and, thus, incapable of meeting the danger of loss of faith or the appeal exercised by ideology. However, as Max Weber reminded us, seemingly worldly commitments may actually disguise a penetrating otherwordly asceticism that alienates from worldly experience. How to be worldly? Bonhoeffer calls for action that is practical: “Not what fancies the mind, but what is braved in the bold deeds of justice; Not by lingering over dreams of the possible, but courageously grasping reality at hand, Not through ideas soaring in flight, but only through action, is there ever freedom to be.” And that freedom is “not a quality that can be discovered” but, rather, it is a “relationship” with others.10 Arendt would strongly agree for action is an opportunity to shape a presence in the full light of the public life. One of the places she articulated a religious community’s specific responsibility for that life was in her reflections on two Popes, Pius XII and John XXIII. Her reaction to Hochhuth’s controversial drama about Pius, “The Deputy,” is a searing indictment of a Christian leader’s alleged unworldliness and of the disastrous absence of political capabilities to which it leads: judgment, speech, action. Pius is portrayed as lacking that most worldly of mental faculties, judgment. He is accused of failing to understand what was taking place around him and of a “rigid adherence to a normality that no longer existed in view of the collapse of the whole moral and spiritual structure of Europe.” This loss of a feeling for reality was exhibited in the 9 Arendt’s 1967 notes for a lecture on Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, in The Papers of Hannah Arendt, container 69; The Origins of Totalitarianism, 446. 10 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Sations on the Way to Freedom (July 21, 1944)” and “Creation and Fall 1932-1933,” in A Testament to Freedom, 516, 106-107. “flowery loquacity” of Church statements which attempted to hide its overwhelming silence, its failure to speak publicly against the fate which was engulfing European Jewry. Fearing its unpredictability, the spokesman of Catholicism refused to act.11 If the Church’s conduct during World War II demonstrated to Arendt the calamity which can result from an unworldly life lived in the world, Pope John XXIII manifested for her both the promise and the danger of a true Christian’s appearance in the public realm. His “astounding faith” liberated him from all utilitarian attitudes and bestowed a confidence which enabled him to treat all as his equals and to present himself to the world exactly as he was. In response, the world paid him the tribute of carefully attending to his words and acts and the honor of capturing his existence as a permanent reality through the countless stories told about him and passed on for future generations. Despite her deep admiration for his virtues, however, Pope John also represented the danger of Christian life, its capacity to shake the world. She liked to cite Luther’s remark on the fearful consequence of an authentic proclamation of Biblical faith, that the “most permanent fate of God’s word is that for its sake the world is put into uproar. For the sermon of God comes to change and revive the whole earth to the extent that it reaches it.”12 In her essay on Pope John, Arendt 11 “The Deputy: Guilt by Silence?” was first published in the New York Herald Tribune Magazine (February 23, 1964) 6-9. Republished in Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt, ed. James Bernauer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 51-58. 12 Hannah Arendt, “Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli: A Christian on St. Peter's Chair from 1958 to 1963” in Men in Dark Times, 57-69, 59. In a letter to her best friend Mary McCarthy, she speculated that hierarchical Roman Catholicism may not survive the reforms of John XXIII. Letter of December 21, 1968, in Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975, ed. Carol Brightman (New York: Harcort Brace, 1995), 232. Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 2/1 (2007): 77-85 Bernauer, “Bonhoeffer and Arendt at One Hundred” 81 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol2/iss1/art6 expresses the awareness that Christian detachment can be both a rich worldly presence as well as a potentially dangerous transcendence of the world as it is. She is correct in that a monotheistic faith must refuse to absolutize anything, the world included. A religious amor mundi can never be an uncritical love but there is no reason, contrary to much of what Arendt says, that it must be an unloving criticism. 3. Sin and Evil Bonhoeffer’s and Arendt’s thought have a second encounter in the territory of sin and evil and the importance of acknowledging their presence in a life of worldly action. For both, sin is a communal, corporate reality that enmeshes the individual within wicked structures.13 As Haddon Willmer points out, for Bonhoeffer: “Participating actively in the history of evil, the disciple confesses public sin as his own, so that all falls on him….The depth of Bonhoeffer’s view of discipleship is plumbed here: the disciple shares with the Lord in bearing the sin of the world and in the realisation of forgiveness.”14 As far as Arendt is concerned, the continuing appeal of The Origins of Totalitarianism is due less to its general historical analyses than to its organization of that history within a particular religious horizon of meaning that enables the reader to confront and comprehend the horror of what is described.15 The focus of her portrayal is not the 13 On Bonhoeffer, see Clifford Green’s “Human Sociality and Christian community,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. John W. de Gruchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1999), 113-133. 14 Haddon Willmer, “Costly Discipleship,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 186. 15 Over thirty years ago Philip Rieff first suggested this approach to The Origins of Totalitarianism in his article, “The Theology of Politics: Reflections on Totalitarianism as the Burden of Our Time,” in Journal of Religion 32 (April, 1952): 119-126. wicked deeds perpetrated by individual men but rather a fallen state, a sinful condition, which is a feature of our age or, as the book’s original English title had it, the burden of our time. This fallen condition is described as an “absolute evil” by which she means that it is not comprehensible in terms of wicked motives of “self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice.” It is the person’s rebellion against the human condition itself, the determination to create a new man according to a technology justified by ideological claims to absolute knowledge of the laws of life and history. Running through the book is a sense of universal responsibility for crime which has often been misinterpreted by Arendt’s critics as a moral condemnation not only of victimizers but also of victims.16 In fact, she is describing a fallen state that makes revolt against the human condition a universal temptation. She will later pay tribute to the American Revolution’s Christian realism which prevented its leaders from sharing the “absurd hope” that man “might still be revealed to be an angel.” She will praise this realism in a number of other contexts, a praise which conflicts with her tendency to see images of unworldly innocence as having their source in Christianity.17 This realism is beyond the horizon of the secular mind which is committed to a universal innocence that is only lost by the evil actions of specific individuals. Totalitarian evil operated on a different terrain. 16 As examples of such interpretations, cf. Rieff, “The Theology of Politics” and Benjamin Schwartz, “The Religion of Politics” in Dissent 17 (March- April, 1970): 144-161. As an example of this tendency in Arendt, see The Origins of Totalitarianism, 452. 17 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 90. Also On Revolution, 76-83, as well as her essay "Christianity and Revolution" in Nation (Sept. 22, 1945): 288-289. Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 2/1 (2007): 77-85 Bernauer, “Bonhoeffer and Arendt at One Hundred” 82 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol2/iss1/art6 I stress the notions of sin and evil which Bonhoeffer and Arendt recognized because these may be the essential keys to successful political activism. Bonhoeffer was particularly insightful in seeing the responsibility of the Churches failure to deal with the African-American situation in shaping what he called a “Protestantism Without Reformation.” David Chappell has made a very persuasive argument for the thesis that the civil rights movement, probably the most successful social movement in American history, only succeeded when African-Americans abandoned liberal confidence in reason and natural progress for a prophetic religious discourse of sin and redemption. These reformers, according to Chappel, recognized that they “had to stand apart from society and insult it with skepticism about its pretensions to justice and truth….They had to force an unwilling world to abandon sin – in this case, ‘the sin of segregation.’ The world to them would never know automatic or natural ‘progress.’ It would use education only to rationalize its iniquity.”18 The religious aura of Arendt’s conceptual schema is exhibited best in her analysis of action. The delineation of that realm allows her to introduce two powers which she sees as essential both to the character of the actor and to the preservation of the realm itself. These are the powers to forgive and to promise.19 Both are put forward as specifically worldly acts. For Arendt, forgiving is a necessarily interpersonal act, and she contrasts it to the moral standards for ruling which were developed by Plato from the private experience of the self. Promising is put in opposition to the “darkness of the human heart” which symbolizes the unreliability of the human being who is always capable of change from day to day. Forgiving and promising shelter the 18 David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 3-4. 19 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 236-247. realm of action for they remedy the two predicaments intrinsic to action. Forgiving is a “redemption” from the predicament of action’s irreversibility, the fact that once an action is done, it cannot be undone.20 What allows the actor to recover from deeds which were performed but which are regretted is the forgiveness received from others. Without such forgiveness, without release from the consequences of our acts, we would be confined to the first mistaken deed for which we are responsible. Forgiveness allows the continuance of a public life, which always carries the risk of unanticipated, regrettable consequences. Promising is a liberation from the predicament of the actor’s chaotic unpredictability. When people come together and pledge themselves to a course of action, they make a mutual freedom and a common political achievement possible. The superiority of those capable of promising over those who are “unbound by any promises and unkept by any purpose” is that they have the capacity to “dispose of the future as though it were the present, that is, the enormous and truly miraculous enlargement of the very dimension in which power can be effective.”21 Deprived of the ability to make promises, we would be without a stable individuality and would lack the ability to join with others in contributing to the world an achievement worthy of future remembrance. 4. Jesus Arendt’s tribute to forgiveness and promising enables her to introduce into political experience two of the most potent religious acts. Promising is the politicalization of the Biblical covenant, and Arendt’s utilization of it allows her conception of politics to bask in the light of the experience of salvation 20 Arendt, The Human Condition, 237. 21 Arendt, The Human Condition, 245. Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 2/1 (2007): 77-85 Bernauer, “Bonhoeffer and Arendt at One Hundred” 83 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol2/iss1/art6 and of the establishment of a people’s identity.22 Arendt claims that Jesus of Nazareth was the “discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs” and interprets his teaching to mean that forgiveness “must be mobilized by men toward each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God also.”23 While forgiving is eminently personal, where “what was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it,” this capacity need not be rooted in an unworldly love but in the respect owed to others by their very existence.24 Whether her distinction between love and respect ultimately holds up, Arendt nevertheless manages to incorporate the power and appeal of forgiveness into her model of politics. Such a power is crucial for an historical experience that has been conceptualized as sinful. Arendt is at her boldest in absorbing the experience of Jesus into her model of political life. She regards his insights into the faculty of action to be as original and unprecedented as were Socrates’s experiences of thought. Her esteem for Jesus is based on the conviction that his “faith was closely related to action” and that the New Testament’s portrayals of him have philosophical implications. The most significant of these is that freedom is presented as the “power of performing miracles.” “The only activity Jesus of Nazareth recommends in his preaching is action, and the only human 22 While Arendt recognized the theoretical influence of the Biblical covenant on political conceptions, she always insisted that its nature as a compact between God and humanity made it inherently unpolitical because it was not a compact between equals. I think that her interpretation underestimates the radical novelty of the Biblical covenant but, in any case, my point stands. For her discussion of this matter, see The Human- Condition, 243-244; On Revolution, 166-176, 309-310, and her “Remarks” to the 1973 Meeting of the American Society of Christian Ethics. 23 Arendt, The Human Condition, 238-239. Arendt cites Matthew 6: 14-15. 18:35 and Mark 11:25. 24 Arendt, The Human Condition, 241. capacity he stresses is the capacity ‘to perform miracles’.”25 The appeal of this form of freedom for her is that it directly confronts the modem fascination with history as a natural process: “the work of faith, actually its product, is what the gospels called ‘miracles’” which are “interruptions of some natural series of events, of some automatic process, in whose context they constitute the wholly unexpected.” As Arendt points out, this power to perform miracles is not rooted in will or thought but in faith.26 This faith’s most essential effect is the personal acceptance of natality. Specifically differentiated from the classical emphasis on human mortality is the experience of the promise which one’s beginning possesses for the world. For her, the very purpose of being is to begin and she never tired of citing Augustine’s definition; “that there is a beginning man was created, before whom nobody was.”27 NataIity is the “miracle that saves the world” and its source is faith’s discernment, against the background of natural processes, of the “infinite improbability” which every new beginning represents.28 For Bonhoeffer, Jesus called people to a new life, not a new religion.29 Although the historical Jesus was central to her faith, Arendt certainly never accepted any orthodox claims regarding his divinity. For her, there was a chasm between the Jesus of the Gospels and the Christ of the Pauline texts. “I don’t feel any loyalty to Christ. I may feel a loyalty to Jesus, because that is indeed an example, what Jesus did, and his whole life, the logoi, and all the stories, this can 25 Arendt, The Human Condition, 247, 8 note 1, 247, 318. 26 Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 168. 27 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Willing , 217; cf. The Origins of Totalitarianism, 479; The Human Condition, 177; On Revolution, 212. 28 Arendt, The Human Condition, 247; “What Is Freedom?”, 169 29 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom, 41. Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 2/1 (2007): 77-85 Bernauer, “Bonhoeffer and Arendt at One Hundred” 84 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol2/iss1/art6 indeed become an example.”30 Perhaps Orthodox Christians have underestimated this worldly appeal of the historical Jesus especially when they recall the historic impact of such powerful presences as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Of course, Bonhoeffer’s Christology is quite distant from Arendt’s admiration for Jesus and, yet, it is striking how close to her is his view of action and forgiveness. Here is Bonhoeffer: “Civil courage, in fact, can grow only out of the free responsibility of free men. Only now are the Germans beginning to discover the meaning of free responsibility. It depends on a God who demands responsible action in a bold venture of faith, and who promises forgiveness and consolation to the man who becomes a sinner in that venture.”31 30 “Remarks” to the 1973 Meeting of the American Society for Christian Ethics, 001838. Although it is clear that Hannah Arendt had a personal belief in God (see Men in Dark Times, 67; Jeannette Baron, “Hannah Arendt: Personal Reflections” Response 39 [1980]: 62; Alfred Kazin, New York Jew [New York: Knopf, 1978] 199), she never identified herself as a member of any denomination: “I am neither a crypto-Baptist nor am I a crypto-Christian? I am by birth a Jew, and as far as religion goes I do not belong to any church, or to any synagogue, or to any denomination.” (“Remarks” to the 1973 Meeting of the American Society for Christian Ethics, 011828). In an article, Judith Shklar has repeated the story which surfaced around the time of the controversy over Arendt's 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem, namely, that Arendt appeared to have been drawn to Roman Catholicism (“Hannah Arendt as Pariah” Partisan Review 50 [1983]: 72). In Arendt's notes for a reply to a question regarding her supposed conversion to Roman Catholicism, she wrote that there “is no truth in it whatsoever. I suppose the rumour has been started in the old hope--semper aliquid adhaeret.” (“Answer to Grafton” in The Papers of Hannah Arendt, container 42, file "Eichmann Case: Correspondence, Periodical, 1963", 13). 31 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison: The Enlarged Edition, 6. A connection between Bonhoeffer and Arendt on forgiveness is made in Ruth Zerner’s “Church, State and the ‘Jewish Question’” in The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 200-202. The religious person’s tension between a love for the world and a recognition of its limitations was Hannah Arendt’s own experience and the gift of her Jewish faith. Amor mundi does not entail an amor fati; quite to the contrary, it demands the preservation of a certain distance, the willingness not to conform, the permanent status of what Arendt called the conscious pariah.32 Does Arendt’s depiction of Jesus follow Bonhoeffer’s call for a nonreligious language to tell who Jesus is as a man for others? Is it twin of Bonhoeffer’s criticism that traditional religious language now fails to communicate the true life of Jesus and Christ? Jim Wallace recently witnessed to this failure: “This young German theologian who was executed by the Nazis for his opposition to Hitler helped me to understand the difficult religious experiences I had known in America. The evangelical Christian world I had grown up in talked incessantly about Christ but never paid any attention to the things that Jesus taught. Jesus Christ was to be praised but not followed”.33 As Bonhoeffer, Arendt and Wallace remind us, an effective political struggle, especially in a society like the United States, may be unable to avoid delineating an image of and attitude to Jesus of Nazareth. 5. Conclusion In bringing Bonhoeffer and Arendt together, I certainly do not want to deny all that separates them. Still, for our purposes here, Arendt does seem to me to reinforce and develop some of Bonhoeffer’s own insights. And certainly we can appreciate and honor their personal and intellectual 32 See Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition” in The Jew as Pariah, 67-90, and Feldman's introduction to this collection, “The Jew as Pariah: The Case of Hannah Arendt,”15-52. 33 Jim Wallis, “When I First Met Bonhoeffer,” the foreword to A Year With Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Daily Meditations from His Letters, Writings and Sermons, ed. Carla Barnhill (San Francisco: Harper, 2005) v. Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 2/1 (2007): 77-85 Bernauer, “Bonhoeffer and Arendt at One Hundred” 85 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol2/iss1/art6 courage. It is in that same region of courage where Arendt’s amor mundi and Bonhoeffer’s religious faith can meet. It is a courage to love the world, not because there is an ideological vision of its potential perfection, but because it is greater than the storms of evil which pass over it. It is this awareness of evil and sin which guides faith and sustains democratic communities. Manifesting a face scarred by evil, the world and its citizens appear more vulnerable, but also more real and more lovable.