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!