The Conscience and Political Agency in Martin Luther and Hannah Arendt
Martin Luther’s pastoral practice of instructing consciences proves illuminating for thinking through the relationship between the conscience and political action. Specifically, Luther saw a clear and assured conscience as enabling free political action, while political tyranny operates, in part, by...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
[2020]
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| In: |
Political theology
Year: 2020, Volume: 21, Issue: 8, Pages: 705-722 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Luther, Martin 1483-1546
/ Arendt, Hannah 1906-1975
/ Conscience
/ Political action
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| IxTheo Classification: | CG Christianity and Politics KAG Church history 1500-1648; Reformation; humanism; Renaissance KAJ Church history 1914-; recent history NBE Anthropology VA Philosophy |
| Further subjects: | B
Resistance
B Civil Disobedience B Martin Luther B Hannah Arendt B Preaching B Totalitarianism B Conscience |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) |
| Summary: | Martin Luther’s pastoral practice of instructing consciences proves illuminating for thinking through the relationship between the conscience and political action. Specifically, Luther saw a clear and assured conscience as enabling free political action, while political tyranny operates, in part, by oppressing the conscience. As such, Luther’s understanding of the political efficacy of the clear conscience is remarkably close to Hannah Arendt’s insight in her early work that totalitarian terror aims to make the conscience doubtful and equivocal in order to foreclose the possibility of genuinely new action. However, Arendt’s later writings demonstrate a view of the conscience as subjectivist, and therefore unpolitical. Luther, in contrast, reads the conscience in a more intersubjective manner dependent upon instruction in the Word of God, thus narrowing the gap between politics and the conscience and revealing a practice of pastoral care that is at the same time an empowering of political agency. |
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| ISSN: | 1743-1719 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Political theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2020.1824058 |