My forgotten Existential Theology

Paul Tillich 1886-1965

Existentialism was huge 60 years ago, it's totally forgotten today, being out of sink with the zeitgeist of scientism. I don't care I am an existnetial9sit, it give meaningto my life ant existentialism with his self authentication must beprepered to disregard popilarity. How do I define the term? Existentialism, is an intellectual movement, essentially a philosophy but it's themes developed beyond philosophy and sppread over all hummanties.It centers upon the notion that humans are compeslled to be free, It seeks to find one's meaning in the realization of what to do with freedom. It tends to be highly individualistic and not systematic those are reflections of the consequences of freedom which culentates in individuality. It is often associated with niotion of life as meaningless or absurd. Exitentialissm has aso been associated with atheism and it is from the rootless notion of the abyss in place of God that existentialists such as Sartre and Neitzshe base their notions of life as meaningless and absurd.

As an intellectual movement that exploded on the scene in mid-twentieth-century France, “existentialism” is often viewed as a historically situated event that emerged against the backdrop of the Second World War, the Nazi death camps, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of which created the circumstances for what has been called “the existentialist moment” (Baert 2015), where an entire generation was forced to confront the human condition and the anxiety-provoking givens of death, freedom, and meaninglessness. Although the most popular voices of this movement were French, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as compatriots such as Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the conceptual groundwork of the movement was laid much earlier in the nineteenth century by pioneers like Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche and twentieth-century German philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers as well as prominent Spanish intellectuals José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno. The core ideas have also been illuminated in key literary works. Beyond the plays, short stories, and novels by French luminaries like Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, there were Parisian writers such as Jean Genet and André Gide, the Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, the work of Norwegian authors such as Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun, and the German-language iconoclasts Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke. The movement even found expression across the pond in the work of the “lost generation” of American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, mid-century “beat” authors like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, and William S. Burroughs, and the self-proclaimed “American existentialist,” Norman Mailer (Cotkin 2003, 185).[1]

I was strongly drawn to existentialism when I was an atheist, when I became a Christian I was naturally interested in findig out about Christian existetialism.I had heard of it, it seemed silly to me from an atheist point of view. Wth religious experience it suddenly made a lot of sense I began to define myself as a christian existntaist.To me this means an empnasis upon personal relationship with God,meakomga leap of faith, placing above systematic theology and chruch authority, although it's not an excuse to ignore either. It also means an awareness of God as the source of meaning and rationality in life.

Free Will and The Leap Of Faith: The Christian Existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers: (1883-1969) argued that the concept of Free Will makes all Faith essentially (pun intended) Existential:  that one is ultimately free to choose or not choose faith, or, for that matter, which or what faith to choose from:  you must choose whether to be a Catholic, or a Baptist, or a Hindu, or a Muslim, or an atheist. Ultimately, you and you alone are responsible for this choice.[2]

Soren Kierkegaard(1813-1855). SK is super nuanced and provides the reader witha rich world one could spend one's life in his writtings,I aca only toucj the surface SK lived in a society where everyone was a christian,what that meant in his setting was that everyone went to chruch follow teachings by wrote and never had to think about it the ret 0f the week, For Kierkegaard this was abhorrent,for his faith was an individual choice based upon a leap of faith.[3]

In 1846, Kierkegaard wrote, "The leap becomes easier in the degree to which some distance intervenes between the initial position and the place where the leap takes off. And so it is also with respect to a decisive movement in the realm of the spirit.[4]

Twp Other major christian existentialists are Paul Tillich (1886-1965) and Reinhold Neibhur. Tillich was a major thinker of the 20th century and led the way in Christian eistential thought. He was German and came to America in the 30s to escape the Nazis.His popularizing work on Christian existentialism is The Courage to Be.[5] But one of my favorite books from which on can learn a great deal about theology, including the existential, is Tillilch's History of Christian Doctrine.[6]Tilluch jas been ny favrite theologian for a long time,I am especially drawn to his notions about God as tye object of humanities ultimate concern. Out of this notion that God is being itself. He also put that as God is the ground of being.

Niebuhr (1892=1971) was German American. He is best known for his great great book Moral Man, and immoral Society.[7] One doesn't hear much of Neibuhr now days but he was a major figure in the 20th cetntury.He was oneof the firt acadmics to oppose the war in Vietnam.Two things I like about his thought: (2) People can be moral but in group and as society they have a harder time, it's much easier to be carried away by class interests in the group. (2) He translated the literal view of doctrines like the Genesis creation myth in terms of Anxiety broughto y sekf transcedence is what leads to sin. One finds this in his major work, The Nature and Destiny of Man, in two volumes.[8]



NOTES

[1] Kevin Aho, "Existentialism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(Summer 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = .

[2] "Christian And Theological Existentialism," University of Idaho, no date https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/engl_258/lecture%20notes/christian_existentialism.htm

[3]Ibid.

[4] Soren Keirkegaard,"concludig unscientific post script to Philosophical fragments....," Translated from the Danish by David F. Swenson, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941, pp. 326–327.

[5] Paul Tillich, The courage to be,New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.

[6]______________, the history of christian thought, New York City:Touchstone books, 1972.

[7]Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society two volumes,Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013, originally published by Scribner in 1932

. [8]_______________, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol I, and II, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press; 1996/ first published 1943 taken from his Gilford lectures.