Evental Public Theology: Reconstructing Public Theology through Minjung Theology
Sukhun Huh (Hanshin Univ., Systematic Theology)
Abstract
This study reconstructs Heinrich Bedford-Strohm’s public theology and Ahn Byung-mu’s Minjung theology as two distinct paradigms of public theology rooted in a shared Bonhoeffer’s legacy. It conceptualizes them as discursive public theology and evental public theology, respectively. Both inherit from Bonhoeffer the conviction that the church is called to respond to God’s reality within history and society beyond the sphere of private faith, yet they diverge in how publicness is realized.
Bedford-Strohm derives the ontological principle of public theology from Bonhoeffer’s concept of one reality. Drawing on Habermas’s theory of the public sphere and Rawls’s concepts of public reason and overlapping consensus, he develops a bilingual discourse model that integrates theological identity and social responsibility into democratic public discourse. However, as critics of Habermasian public discourse argue, this discourse-centered model remains vulnerable to excluding those unable to participate in public deliberation. By contrast, Ahn identifies the suffering of the Minjung as the event of God’s saving action. Interpreting the ochlos as those uncounted within the existing social order, he develops an evental logic of publicness in which a new historical subject emerges through the event.
Although discursive and evental public theology adopt different approaches to realizing publicness, they constitute complementary rather than competing paradigms. An event acquires enduring social reality through discursive forms that interpret and institutionalize it, while discourse remains genuinely public only insofar as it is continually renewed by events that disclose those excluded from existing structures of recognition. Their relationship is therefore cyclical rather than oppositional: discourse gives form to events, and events revitalize discourse. By reconstructing this reciprocal dynamic, this study argues that discursive and evental public theology together expand the theoretical horizon of contemporary public theology.
Keywords: Public Theology(Heinrich Bedford-Strohm), Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Public Sphere (Habermas), Minjung Theology (Ahn Byung-mu), Event
Ⅰ. Introduction
Public theology has emerged as a significant strand of contemporary theology. It critiques the modern understanding of religion that confines the church to the sphere of private faith, and instead explores the responsibilities that Christian faith may be called to exercise within the public life of democratic societies. Within this development, Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, drawing on the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and incorporating Habermas’ discourse theory together with Rawlsian political philosophy, has developed a systematic public theology that seeks to realize the church’s public responsibility within democratic public discourse. Yet, as Bedford-Strohm himself emphasizes, public theology is perhaps best understood not as a single universal model but as “one of many public theologies, each one for its own context.”[1]
This perspective opens a fruitful dialogue with Korean Minjung theology. By interpreting the lives and suffering of the socially excluded Minjung as an event of God’s saving action and by seeking to enact the church’s public responsibility within history, Minjung theology constitutes a form of public theology in the broader sense. Although Bedford-Strohm and Ahn Byung-mu are situated in markedly different historical contexts, they share a common Bonhoeffer’s conviction: the church is called to respond faithfully to God’s reality in history through responsible engagement with society, especially with the poor and the marginalized.
And yet, even though both begin from the same Bonhoeffer’s legacy, the two theologies diverge in their understanding of publicness. Bedford-Strohm locates publicness within the democratic public sphere, mediated through public reason and discursive justification. By contrast, Ahn Byung-mu locates the publicness of the kingdom of God in the historical event of Jesus’ encounter with the Minjung. On this basis, this study conceptualizes Bedford-Strohm’s public theology as discursive public theology[2] and Ahn Byung-mu’s Minjung theology as evental public theology. It argues that a shared Bonhoeffer’s inheritance gives rise to two distinct paradigms of public theology and explores their theological and practical implications for contemporary public theology.
To this end, the study first examines Bedford-Strohm’s public theology through his reading of Bonhoeffer in dialogue with Habermasian discourse theory and Rawlsian political philosophy, identifying the distinctive features and internal tensions of discursive public theology. It then turns to Ahn Byung-mu’s Minjung theology, reinterpreting it from the perspective of public theology and reconstructing the Minjung–Jesus event as the theological basis of evental public theology. Finally, the study argues that these two paradigms—discursive and evental public theology—are not competing alternatives but complementary forms of public theology. Together, they expand the theoretical and practical horizon of contemporary public theology.
II. Two Paradigms of Public Theology: Discourse and Event
1. Heinrich Bedford-Strohm’s Discursive Public Theology
1) The Principle of Public Theology: The One Reality
The theological foundation of Bedford-Strohm’s public theology rests on the concept of one reality (Eine Wirklichkeit) developed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Ethics. Bonhoeffer criticizes the modern theological division of reality into sacred and secular, church and world, and faith and politics—that is, a way of thinking in terms of two separate realms. Instead, he argues that reality is not divided into two realms but constitutes the one reality of God disclosed in Christ within the reality of the world. This ontological claim provides the theological foundation for a public theology that cannot remain silent in the face of public reality.
The concrete meaning of one reality becomes clearer in Bonhoeffer’s concept of Christ-reality (Christuswirklichkeit).[3] For Bonhoeffer, overcoming two-realms thinking is not simply a matter of reconnecting faith and politics; rather, it entails an ontological reorientation in which reality itself is understood as a unified whole in Christ. Reality is already God’s reconciled reality in Christ, within which the world is taken up as the object of God’s reconciliation and redemption. Politics, economics, culture, and civil society are therefore not autonomous secular spheres but dimensions of the one reality in which God’s justice and reconciliation are to be made manifest. On this basis, Bedford-Strohm understands public theology not as a strategy of social engagement but as the necessary consequence of Christology.[4] The reason theology is to have a public direction is because the world itself already belongs to the reality of Christ. Public theology, therefore, represents an attempt to overcome two-realms thinking by redefining the church’s responsibility within the one reality.
The concept of one reality does not imply a integration of church and state. Within the reality of Christ, church and state belong to the same reality while remaining distinct. How, then, can this seemingly contradictory relation of distinction and unity be sustained within the one reality? Bonhoeffer regards church and state as standing in a relation of polemical unity. In Bonhoeffer’s own words, the church and the world do not exist as two independent realms; rather, they stand in a polemical relation to one another, and precisely through this mutual opposition they bear witness to their unity within the one reality of Christ.[5] In other words, Bonhoeffer holds that the two realms of church and state stand in polemical opposition, each setting limits on the other, yet at the same time affirming the unity of God’s reality and the world’s reality in Jesus Christ. Just as Luther resisted a form of Christianity that separated itself from the reality in Christ, the church is called to resist, “in the name of a better world,” [6] the church’s own static self-sacralization for the sake of ecclesial power. And just as Bonhoeffer resisted secular power that separated itself from the reality in Christ, the church is called to resist, “in the name of a better Christianity,”[7] the state’s self-absolutization of political power for its own sake. For Bonhoeffer, Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms (Zwei Reiche) is properly understood only within this framework of polemical unity.[8] Church and state are distinct in function and responsibility, yet neither stands independent of the reality of Christ. The state preserves the world through law and political order, while the church, through the message of Christ, restrains the use of power beyond what has been entrusted to it. Bedford-Strohm states that not two separate realms, but the two governments of God within one world, are what Luther originally intended.[9] This is why he suggests that the term ‘twofold rule’ would be a considerably more fitting way to describe it.[10]
Bedford-Strohm sees that Bonhoeffer’s reinterpretation of the two-kingdoms doctrine as a “polemical unity” is continuous with the christological logic developed in Bonhoeffer’s 1933 Christology lectures, in which he describes the church as the “hidden center of the state.”[11] According to Bedford-Strohm, this formulation indicates that the church bears witness that the state’s foundation and limits are grounded in God’s justice and reconciliation. The state is responsible for protecting human dignity and preserving a just political order. When it fails in this responsibility, the church is called to hold the state accountable and to bear public witness to God’s justice on behalf of those who suffer from such injustice. For this reason, Bedford-Strohm defines the church’s political role not as participation in power but as public testimony to justice.
Yet the task of criticizing the state and testifying to justice calls for a standard by which such judgment can be made. Bedford-Strohm finds this normative basis in the Lutheran doctrine of justification. This is because he locates the foundation of a conception of justice grounded in human dignity, not in human achievement but in God’s grace, through which human beings are justified by faith in Christ.[12] For Bedford-Strohm, the doctrine of justification provides the theological grounding for the Christian understanding of justice by serving both as the anthropological foundation of public theology and as the political-ethical criterion by which the state and society are evaluated.
2) The Methodology of Public Theology
If the theological foundation of public theology explains the basis on which theology engages public life, its methodology explains how such engagement is carried out in a pluralistic democratic society. Bedford-Strohm develops this methodology as a discourse-oriented model of public theology that preserves the theological identity of the gospel while engaging in democratic public discourse.
This discourse model is grounded in the notions of Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity and ethic of responsibility. Bonhoeffer understands the “world come of age” (mündige Welt) not as a post-religious society independent of God but as a world that has moved beyond religious tutelage and become capable of bearing political and ethical responsibility on its own For Bonhoeffer, the coming of age of the world is not a crisis of faith but the historical maturation of humanity, in which Christians are called to live responsibly before God (coram Deo) in a world that has learned to order its common life “as if God did not exist(etsi deus non daretur ).” In light of this understanding, Bedford-Strohm argues that public theology should engage in democratic public discourse while preserving its theological identity, rather than being absorbed into secular social discourse. This discourse-oriented model thus provides the methodological framework for such engagement.[13]
The philosophical foundation of Bedford-Strohm’s discourse model lies in Habermas’ theory of the public sphere. Whereas the early Habermas, following a logic of secularization, limited the role Christianity could play in the public sphere, the later Habermas reassessed Christianity in a postsecular society as a significant public resource that offers meaning in life and moral insight.[14] Bedford-Strohm argues, drawing on the later Habermas, that Christianity and secular reason should engage in a complementary process of mutual learning in which each seeks to understand the normative insights of the other.[15] He understands contemporary democracy as a public sphere in which diverse worldviews and value systems compete and communicate, with Christianity as one of the sphere’s legitimate participants. Yet Christian social participation cannot proceed by applying the language of Christianity directly to society. Christianity has to maintain its theological identity while translating its theological language into a civic language that citizens from diverse backgrounds can understand and examine.
Bedford-Strohm conceptualizes this discursive practice as “bilinguality.”[16] Within the community of faith, the church expresses its identity and the grounds of its judgments in the language of Scripture and the gospel; within civil society, it translates those theological insights into a publicly accessible language. The two languages neither belong to separate spheres nor is either subordinated to the other. A theology that takes up this bilinguality embodies the message of Christ drawn from Scripture while also acquiring social responsibility within the public discursive sphere. Translation, then, is not a matter of diluting the content of the gospel into secular language but a process of converting theological conviction into a form of expression that can be examined and shared within a pluralistic society. Bedford-Strohm’s notion of bilinguality closely parallels Habermas’ “institutional translation proviso,” particularly in its emphasis on translating religious claims into publicly accessible secular language without abandoning their religious grounding.[17] In other words, religious citizens have the right to participate in public discourse and to express and justify their political convictions in religious language, and at the same time, they recognize that only secular reasons can serve as the basis for political decision-making once arguments cross the institutional threshold into the formal institutions of the state. The translation requirement alone, however, cannot determine the normative content of public theology, for public engagement requires not only procedural legitimacy but also a substantive conception of justice.
Bedford-Strohm, by adopting John Rawls’s concepts of public reason and overlapping consensus, presents a methodological framework through which public theology can participate in a pluralistic democratic society. [18] Public reason is the principle that, when deliberating fundamental political questions, citizens should not merely appeal to their own particular convictions but justify their positions on the basis of shared political values that other reasonable citizens can accept.[19] Meanwhile, overlapping consensus refers to a stable agreement in which citizens, each grounded in their own convictions, nevertheless come to endorse the same political conception of justice.[20] This is not an intentionally engineered balance of power or a mere political compromise, but a consensus formed when different citizens, for different reasons, converge on the same conclusion. Accordingly, the church, guided by these two methodological principles, can contribute to the formation of public consensus within a pluralistic society without abandoning its own faith identity.
Bedford-Strohm draws on Rawls’ “difference principle” as a normative criterion of substantive justice toward which public theology is oriented.[21] Rawls agrees that the difference principle does not negate social and economic differentiation, but holds that it can be justified only when it maximally benefits those in the most disadvantaged position in society. Accordingly, a just society is one whose basic institutions and distribution of resources are structured toward improving the conditions of the most vulnerable. Bedford-Strohm notes that Rawls himself recognized an affinity between the difference principle and the Catholic ethical principle of the “preferential option for the poor,” and brings Rawls’ theory into dialogue with his own theological ethic of the preferential option for the poor.[22]
In this way, Bedford-Strohm’s public theology presents a coherent theological system, grounded in a christological ontology and oriented toward the realization of human dignity and justice within the democratic public sphere through an ethic of responsibility. Yet this very coherence also exposes a critical tension. If the principles, methods, and even the realization of justice in public theology are ultimately mediated through the discursive conditions of the democratic public sphere, the question remains as to how the publicness of those who are excluded from that sphere before they can even enter into its discourse can be recognized and secured.
3) The Internal Tensions of Discursive Public Theology
Bedford-Strohm’s public theology begins with the ontological principle of “one reality.” Yet, the way that principle is realized in history ultimately depends on the discourse and procedures of the democratic public sphere. The question is whether this discourse-centered publicness is in fact equally open to everyone. At this point, a public theology mediated through Habermas needs to examine an inherent tension within itself.
While Habermas continues to think the problem of power in the language of the state, sovereignty, and law—legitimacy, procedure, rights, Foucault holds that returning to this very language conceals how power actually operates. Foucault criticizes the democratic values of openness and transparency as technologies of power that place individuals under surveillance and compel them to police themselves. He sees modern society as speaking as though equal rights and law were given to everyone, while in fact it is composed of unequal systems of discipline. Foucault sums this up by observing that the Enlightenment, which discovered freedoms, also invented disciplines.[23]
For Foucault, then, the public sphere is not a neutral domain where free and equal citizens meet, but a field constituted by specific norms and power relations. Seen from this vantage point, the bilinguality or translation requirement—the demand that religious language be translated into publicly accessible language—is not a value-neutral procedure either. It presupposes a particular form of rationality, and this can have the effect of granting the right to speak only to those subjects who have acquired that form. In such a case, discourse functions at once as a means of overcoming power and as a way in which power reproduces itself.[24]
Nancy Fraser suggests that Habermas’ concept of the “public sphere” remains valuable in principle as an arena of critical discourse conceptually distinct from the state and the official economy, yet argues that the “liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere” he idealizes rests on problematic assumptions.[25] She contends that the assumption allowing interlocutors to bracket status differentials and deliberate “as if” they were social peers appears to be something of a fiction. Such bracketing, she suggests, tends mainly to obscure inequality rather than eliminate it. She further points out that the very styles of discourse within the public sphere—modes of speech, decorum, and rhetorical conventions—can themselves serve as markers of status inequality, tending in practice to marginalize women and members of the plebeian classes. On this basis, she raises the concern that the Habermasian conception of the public sphere risks conflating ‘the lifting of formal restrictions on public sphere participation’ with ‘participatory parity’ in a substantive sense.”[26]
From a postcolonial perspective, public theology faces an even sharper critique. Maluleke questions the very possibility of the inclusive public sphere presupposed by public theology, describing it as a “grand and unstable assumption.”[27] The Habermasian framework of “deliberation among civil strangers” and “citizens freely assembling without coercion” becomes fictitious in societies where people are not recognized as citizens on equal terms in the first place. Yet Maluleke argues that this fiction applies equally to European societies. His satirical question—where exactly can one find this public sphere in which strangers meet with civic civility, perhaps in Paris overlooking the Eiffel Tower?—suggests that such an idealized public sphere has never fully existed even in the European context from which the model originated.[28]
These critiques show that a discursive public theology needs to treat, as a matter of real importance, the formation of the discursive subjects who take part in the public sphere itself. Bedford-Strohm, to be sure, does not overlook the importance of the marginalized people participating in the discursive sphere as equals rather than as objects of charity. Yet if those on the margins gain their standing to participate only through a kind of “granting” bestowed by those at the center, a public theology that seeks to “resist the flow toward the margins” will remain a distant prospect. Explaining how beings who have not even attained standing to enter discourse come to emerge as public subjects, and how the suffering and cries that the rules of the public sphere fail to capture come to be turned into historical utterance, is a matter of real importance for realizing the original aim of public theology.
2. Minjung Theology as Evental Public Theology
1) Bonhoeffer’s Public-Theological Legacy in Minjung Theology
Bedford-Strohm’s public theology and Ahn Byung-Mu’s minjung theology belong to the same theological lineage insofar as both inherit Bonhoeffer’s conviction that the church should move beyond the religious sphere and bear witness to the reality of God within history and society. Yet the central questions they address to Bonhoeffer differ. For Bedford-Strohm, Bonhoeffer serves as a theological resource for reconstructing the church’s public responsibility in a democratic society. For minjung theologians, Bonhoeffer marks a theological turning point that enabled them to rethink how the suffering minjung break through structures of domination and emerge as subjects who participate in the realization of the kingdom of God.
Korean theologians began to engage Bonhoeffer in earnest around 1975, the thirtieth anniversary of his martyrdom.[29] This was also the period in which minjung theology began to emerge under its own name amid the severe repression of the Yushin dictatorship. Korean theologians at the time were especially interested in Bonhoeffer’s human freedom, secularization, and religionless Christianity. [30] These three themes show where Bonhoeffer’s public-theological legacy was received and appropriated within the framework of Minjung theology.
Ahn Byung-mu likewise draws substantially on Bonhoeffer’s thought—religionless Christianity, worldliness, engagement with historical reality, and being for others. Yet what most strongly attracted Ahn’s attention to Bonhoeffer was, above all, the insight that theology begins anew within historical events. Ahn regarded the decisive turn in Bonhoeffer’s theology as taking place in Letters and Papers from Prison, [31] a theology that had made “a new departure out of the actual experience of life,” one in which the historical reality of the Nazi regime and imprisonment reshaped theology itself.[32] What Ahn inherited from Bonhoeffer, then, was the conviction that historical reality can itself become a source of theological reflection.
This reading of Bonhoeffer contributed to the process by which minjung theology sought to reposition itself theologically in the 1970s. Ahn recalls that whereas Korean theology in the 1960s had largely remained at the level of introducing Western theological concepts and systems, in the 1970s the locus of our theology shifted from the church to the reality of Korea.
This turn toward reality in Ahn’s theology also marked a significant shift in how he understood Jesus. For Ahn, Jesus was no longer approached primarily as an object of faith or as a historical figure of the past; rather, Jesus was to be understood as a divine event (Ereignis) made present in the life and suffering of the Minjung. The identification of Jesus with the Minjung, on this reading, arises because the place where the Jesus-event becomes present is precisely the Minjung’s suffering reality. It was from this vantage point, grounded in historical reality, that Ahn arrived at a new reading of the Gospel of Mark, in which he came to understand the ochlos-Minjung as a collective subject through whom divine revelation becomes concrete within history. If Ahn’s theology may rightly be regarded as public theology, its public-theological character lies in the theological perception that God is present as an event within history, together with the Minjung. In this respect, his Minjung theology unfolds as a public theology of the event, one that understands publicness as the presence of God disclosed in historical events.
2) Event-Centered Public Theology
Minjung theology’s novelty lies in identifying the Minjung’s suffering as God’s salvific event. The event is the locus at which the reality of Minjung and the reality of God meet. Ahn Byung-mu states the meaning of the event in this way: “Jesus is an event! God is an event, too! (…) [You are] wrong to see Jesus as a persona.”[33] When he speaks of God’s essence as event, event indicates a mode of divine existence that resists objectification and cannot be made an object of contemplation. God, in this view, is not the eternal, immutable substance abstracted by metaphysical ontology, but a dynamic and open reality encountered within historical events and movements. When he speaks of Jesus not as a persona but as an event, he indicates a mode of Jesus’ presence inseparable from the Minjung.
Ahn critiques the Western Christological tradition that has explained the mediator Jesus through the two-natures doctrine (hypostatic union).[34] For him, Jesus’ mediating role is constituted by the event. If the event is the point where the two separated realities of God and Minjung intersect, then Jesus fulfills his mediating role not through persona but through the event. For Ahn, then, “Christ Jesus” names the collective event of Jesus-and-minjung rather than functioning as his proper name. Ahn describes the Jesus-minjung event of two thousand years ago as having “continued to recur, both within the church and in history in general,” comparing it to lava that flows beneath the earth’s surface and periodically erupts—”Jesus is the great volcanic lava of the minjung event.”[35] The Jesus-minjung event, while recurrent, is not a self-enclosed, completed occurrence but remains open toward the future. It is significant that Ahn locates the event within recurring openness, since this suggests he grasped it as something that resists being sealed into a fixed historical result or as fully determined within any particular historical situation.
When Ahn speaks of the minjung event, he distinguishes between ochlos and laos, the two Greek terms he associates with the minjung. He notes that the author of the Gospel of Mark deliberately distinguishes between the two terms: “There are two Greek words in Scripture that refer to Minjung: laos and ochlos. The former corresponds to what we today call citizens of the nation, referring to those who hold the right to protection within the boundary of a given group. The latter refers to those outside that boundary who are denied this right.” [36]
Read through the lens of Alain Badiou’s ontology, laos names those counted and represented by the state of the situation according to clearly articulable legal predicates.[37] Ochlos, by contrast, is the void: it remains outside the counting of the ‘state of the situation’ while nonetheless still present within the situation, treated as though it did not exist. This void, however, is the site that discloses only one thing—that the claim of a state order to represent the totality of its members is bound to fail, and that no representational order can count the situation in its entirety.[38] For instance, discourse formed within a public sphere around positions already named and represented—”worker,” “woman,” “the poor”—however fair that discourse may be, remains merely a rearrangement internal to the representational system of the state of the situation. Such change is merely a readjustment among terms already counted; it does not touch the rule of counting itself. An event, by contrast, can occur only at the edge of the void, the point the state’s counting cannot in principle reach. The event is an arrival that suspends the law, rules, and structure of the situation and creates a new possibility.
For Ahn, that the ochlos could be reconstituted as “the subject of history,” beyond the sociological stigma of “the poor, tax collectors, prostitutes, and the sick,” was possible because they occupied the site of the void—a site not reducible to any particular category. The universality of the ochlos, then, does not come from some substantive identity they represent, but from the ontological fact that they were never counted under any identity to begin with. It is precisely this uncounted void—the ochlos as Minjung—that constitutes the sole condition under which an event can occur for them, since only at a site captured by no predicate can a novelty arrive that the existing count could never have anticipated or permitted. The ochlos minjung, who lived as an “absent” presence beyond the reach of the counting performed by the Judean temple system or the Roman Empire, encounters, precisely at this site of being uncounted, the event of being granted subjectivity under the name “children of God.”
As a result, the minjung event discloses those whom the existing order had excluded as a subject of universal truth, and it is from such subject that genuine public discourse oriented toward social justice arises. In the public theology of the event, the Minjung are no longer those to be protected in their rights or represented in the public sphere. The event manifests the silenced being as a historical subject who speaks and acts on its own, and this self-manifestation becomes the starting point of the subject that constitutes public-theological discourse.
3) The Complementarity of Evental and Discursive Public Theology
Bedford-Strohm and Ahn Byung-mu both draw on Bonhoeffer as a theological resource. Yet, the very direction in which that resource links theology to secular reality runs in opposite ways. For Bedford-Strohm, theology grounded in the ontological principle of Christ’s reality moves from the given truth of the Christian faith, through the methodological practice of discursive justification, toward the normative orientation of social justice.
Ahn likewise shares with Bedford-Strohm the conviction that there is one reality in which both church and world stand under God’s sovereign rule. He takes as his starting point, however, the unity in which God’s reality is already present within history and among the Minjung, and he relativizes the distinction itself— the claim that theology requires its own distinct language and its translation into public discourse—as secondary. Thus, whereas for Bedford-Strohm the church’s own theological language exists first and reaches one reality by being translated into secular language, for Ahn the minjung reality itself is the evental site from which theology sets out.
This public theology of the event circumvents structurally the danger that the public theology of discourse, as discussed above, carries within its formally unequal structure of the public sphere—circumventing it by not presupposing that structure to begin with.
Seen in this light, the public theology of the event and the public theology of discourse appear to stand in a polar relation to one another. Yet as Paul Tillich suggests, what stands in polarity need not stand in a relation of mutual exclusion. Tillich presents dynamics and form as one of the fundamental polarities of being, a pair that, while standing in opposition, is mutually constitutive, each requiring the other.[39] Dynamics that has not attained form remain mere chaos, not yet anything at all; conversely, form that has lost dynamics hardens into an empty form—a dead husk that merely repeats procedure and rule. Applying this logic of polarity to event and discourse clarifies why the difference between the two resolves into complementarity rather than opposition.
An event, if not given the form provided by discourse, remains mere dynamics that dissipates into a fleeting eruption; conversely, discourse, losing the dynamics of the event, hardens into an empty form that merely repeats procedures and rules. Despite this difference between the two public theologies, they are complementary in that each seeks to secure the publicness of theology at a different level. First, the event requires discourse. An event constitutes a rupture that suspends the existing order and opens the possibility of something new, but it is not complete in itself; for that possibility to unfold into truth, it requires the procedure of fidelity—naming and declaring—which is to say, linguistic form. An event that is neither articulated in language nor brought into public discourse risks being reabsorbed into the situation or disappearing altogether. The event, therefore, becomes actual only by passing through the discursive field that sustains it.
Conversely, discourse also requires an event. Discourse presupposes only the existence of subjects already capable of speech; it does not address how those who have not yet attained the standing to speak can emerge as subjects who constitute discourse. What fills that lack is not discourse itself, but the event that arises from the void and brings forth a new subject. Just as an event attains actuality only through discourse, so discourse, too, sustains its vitality only through the dynamics of the event. In this way, the event dissipates without discourse, and discourse cannot account for what it has excluded without the event; the two stand, then, in a complementary relation—each necessary to the other without either being reducible to or replaced by the other.
The complementarity of event and discourse has a cyclical character. The event takes discursive form when shared through bilingual interpretation, and discourse, through the procedures of an equal public sphere, may advance toward “a greater measure of justice.”[40] Yet a discursive structure, once proceduralized, can harden again into a fixed order and give rise to new exclusions—yesterday’s ochlos becoming today’s privilege order, capable of excluding yet another ochlos in turn. No discourse, therefore, should regard itself as a completed order; it must remain continually open to the event as it newly emerges. This relation, in which event vitalizes discourse and discourse actualizes the event, cycles, and renews itself without end. Within this cycle event and discourse stand in a complementary relation, each requiring the other while resisting reduction to either.
This cyclical, complementary relation is already embedded in the self-critical character of public theology—a character through which public theology, too, does not evade public scrutiny by “exposing itself to the critique of discourse.”[41] Pursuing a responsible practice that testifies truthfully to the suffering of the marginalized while remaining open to critique resonates with Bonhoeffer drew in distinguishing the ultimate from the penultimate.[42] This is precisely why public theology should not absolutize its own discourse and institutions as the ultimate, but should always leave them in the provisional form of the penultimate event. In this respect, the public theology of the event expands the theoretical horizon of contemporary public theology by driving the publicness of discourse to renew itself repeatedly rather than settling into stasis.
III. Conclusion
Bedford-Strohm’s and Ahn Byung-mu’s public theologies, this study has shown, both develop from a shared Bonhoefferian theological legacy into two distinct trajectories. Despite these differences, The public theological models of event and discourse stand in a complementary and cyclical relation, together constituting the emergence of public subjects and the ongoing formation of just public discourse, respectively. Public theology needs to encompass the entire process of sensing, testifying to, and institutionalizing the subject who emerges through the event. The church has to continually reflect on whose experience its public language carries and whose voice it erases; the theologian, rather than occupying the position of translator who speaks on behalf of the excluded, needs to adopt an attitude of solidarity and participation that allows the excluded’s own stories and actions to acquire public force on their own terms. What is called for is a responsible practice that joins the “prophetic courage (parrhesia)”[43] to speak out against the world’s injustice without falling silent, together with a self-critical posture that humbly submits one’s own claims to the scrutiny of public discourse.
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[1] Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, “Nurturing Reason: The Public Role of Religion in the Liberal State,” in Liberation Theology for a Democratic Society: Essays in Public Theology (Zürich/Berlin: LIT, 2018), 24.
[2] The term “discursive” is used here in the Habermasian sense of communicative and deliberative rationality, rather than in the Foucauldian sense of discourse as power/knowledge.
[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, DBWE 6, ed. Clifford J. Green (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 58.
[4] Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, “Public Theology and Political Ethics,” in Liberation Theology for a Democratic Society: : Essays in Public Theology, Theologie in der Öffentlichkeit/Theology in the Public Square 7 (Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2018), 5, 10–11.
[5] Bonhoeffer, DBWE 6, 58-59.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Hans Joas, “Kirche – gesellschaftskritische Instanz oder Moralagentur?,” in Kritische Öffentliche Theologie, ed. Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Peter Bubmann, Hans-Ulrich Dallmann, and Torsten Meireis (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2022), 49.
[8] Bonhoeffer, DBWE 6, 60.
[9] Bedford-Strohm, “Public Theology and Political Ethics,” 9-10.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid., 26–27; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Berlin: 1932–1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke, Bd. 12, hrsg. von Larry L. Rasmussen (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1997), 309.
[12] Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, “Biotechnologies and the Human Person: Contemporary Challenges to the Image of God and Living in Koinonia,” in Liberation Theology for a Democratic Society: Essays in Public Theology (Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2018), 306.
[13] Bedford-Strohm identifies three inadequate models of Christian public engagement: the Caritas model, which restricts the church’s public role to charitable service; the fundamental critique model, which proclaims the normative claims of the gospel without adequately mediating them into concrete political and social realities; and the policy advisory model, which seeks political influence at the risk of diluting its theological identity. As an alternative, he proposes the discourse model, in which theological convictions enter democratic public discourse while remaining faithful to their own theological integrity. Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer als öffentlicher Theologe,” Evangelische Theologie 69 (2009): 330–331.
[14] Bedford-Strohm, “Nurturing Reason: The Public Role of Religion in the Liberal State,” 29-36.
[15] Ibid., 35.
[16] Bedford-Strohm, “Public Theology and Political Ethics,” 14.
[17] Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 130.
[18] Bedford-Strohm, “Public Theology and Political Ethics,” 17-18.
[19] John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 573–615.
[20] John Rawls, “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 421–447.
[21] Bedford-Strohm, “Nurturing Reason: The Public Role of Religion in the Liberal State,” 33-34; John Rawls, Collected Papers, 594.
[22] Rawls, Collected Papers, 594.
[23] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, 2nd Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 207.
[24] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990 [1978]), 101.
[25] Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): 62–65.
[26] Habermas himself acknowledges that the bourgeois public sphere failed in practice to realize its ideal of open and equal access. Yet he treats this failure as a contingent and remediable shortcoming of an incompletely realized utopian ideal, rather than as a constitutive feature of the bourgeois public sphere itself. Fraser challenges precisely this assumption. For her, the problem is not simply that the ideal of equal participation remained unrealized; rather, the ideal itself—the assumption that participants could become equal merely by bracketing differences in social status—was possible from the outset only through the exclusion of particular classes and social groups.
[27] Tinyiko Sam Maluleke, “The Elusive Public of Public Theology: A Response to William Storrar,” International Journal of Public Theology 5 (2011): 85.
[28] Ibid., 80-81.
[29] The introduction of Bonhoeffer’s life and thought in Korea began with Moon Ik-hwan’s translation of Life Together. This was followed by translations of The Cost of Discipleship (1965) and Letters and Papers from Prison (1967). Alongside these translations, numerous short articles appeared before 1970, focusing primarily on the themes of religionlessness and secularization, often discussed from the perspective of the “Death of God theology.” Park Bong-rang’s The Religionlessness of Christianity (1975) was a textbook-like introduction that offered a comprehensive account of Bonhoeffer’s theology. It was not until 1974, however, with a dialogue between Ahn Byung-mu and Suh Nam-dong, that minjung theologians began collectively and seriously engaging Bonhoeffer’s theology from within their own minjung-theological concerns. This engagement gained further momentum following the 1975 symposium, “Bonhoeffer and Korean Christianity,” held to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom. From this point onward, Bonhoeffer emerged as a major theological interlocutor for minjung theologians.
[30] Maeng Yong-gil, Park Bong-rang, and Suh Kwang-sun, “Roundtable Discussion: Bonhoeffer and Korean Christianity,” Sinhak Sasang [Theological Thought], no. 12 (1976): 178-191.
[31] Ahn Byung-mu and Suh Nam-dong, “Theology of Liberation and Participation” [“Haebang-gwa Chamyeo-ui Sinhak”], Wolgan Joongang [Monthly JoongAng], (1974): 117.
[32] Ibid., 129.
[33] Byung-Mu Ahn, Stories of Minjung Theology: The Theological Journey of Ahn Byung-Mu in His Own Words, trans. Hannah In, ed. Wongi Park, International Voices in Biblical Studies 11 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2019), 18.
[34] Ibid., 65.
[35] Ibid., 19.
[36] Ibid., 18.
[37] Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005), 143–144.
[38] Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 52–59.
[39] Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 178–186.
[40] Wolfgang Huber, “Why Ethics,” Stellenbosch Theological Journal 1 (2015b), 162, quoted in Christian Polke, “Kleine öffentlich-theologische Vorschule der Rechtsethik,” in Kritische Öffentliche Theologie, ed. Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Peter Bubmann, Hans-Ulrich Dallmann, and Torsten Meireis (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2022), 197.
[41] Florian Höhne, “Die Verantwortung kritischer Öffentlicher Theologie,” in Kritische Öffentliche Theologie, ed. Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Peter Bubmann, Hans-Ulrich Dallmann, and Torsten Meireis (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2022), 122.
[42] Bonhoeffer, Ethics, DBWE 6, 151-154.
[43] Jeong Seung-hoon, “Yeokja hugi” [Translator’s Afterword], in Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Gonggong Sinhak-gwa Simin Sahoe [Public Theology and Civil Society], trans. Chae Su-il and Jeong Seung-hoon, originally published as Liberation Theology for a Democratic Society: Essays in Public Theology, ed. Michael Mädler and Andrea Wagner-Pinggéra (Seoul: Daehan Gidokgyo Seohoe, 2026), 467.