The Divine Mandates and Political Resistance

Abstract

Abstract Building on the framework established in Chapter 3, this chapter interprets Bonhoeffer’s account of the divine mandates as a Hegelian-inspired account of the “ethical life” or Sittlichkeit of modern society. For Bonhoeffer, the divine mandates constitute the forms of ethical life that gives substance to our lives in society, establishing the possibility for an authentically “modern” form of social life that can endure through time. In outlining the mandates, Bonhoeffer describes the actual, existing norms and practices constituting the ethical life of society. The grounding of ethics in the social institutions that the divine mandates name wards off alienation even while making space for social criticism. Bonhoeffer links the conception of freedom represented by the French Revolution with the rise of National Socialism in Germany. The modern commitment to rational autonomy, unmoored from the actual ethical life of a determinate culture, leads to the “absolute freedom” on display in the Revolution’s descent into terror, and later in the rise of National Socialism. Bonhoeffer saw this utopian impulse as modernity’s enduring temptation. Living amid the social ruin wrought by absolute freedom’s destructive power, Bonhoeffer sought a solution to this central problem of modern political life.