Existentialism and Historic Christian Faith

It is always a risk to divine the future, but perhaps it is not foolhardy to say that theological controversy in the next quarter century will be centered in the questions put by existentialism. It is true that denominational lines still persist and their respective theologies will continue to occupy the attention of scholars. It is also true that the ecumenical movement will continue to grow and discussions of faith, order, life, and work will press for a hearing. But the real stage of theological controversy must necessarily be where the great battle of our entire age is being fought. The locus of this critical struggle may be found where the creative minds of our day are shaping the sounds, the colors, the forms of the brave new world that is coming to birth.

The plays of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Jean Paul Sartre, the poetry of W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, the painting of Picasso, Bracque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, the music of Bartok, Milhaud, Hindemith, the architecture of Saarinen, Rudolph, Le Corbusier—these are some of the forces that have been shaping the structure of the world in which we live. These in turn have been shaped by nineteenth century iconoclastic thinkers like Sören Kierkegaard, Fedor Dostoevski, and Franz Kafka. If we are to understand the times in which we live, we must come to know what these names mean and what has been said about them, otherwise we will be shouting against the wind and our preaching will be what Dean Inge said it is: “Merely spouting water over a host of narrow-necked bottles.”

Theology properly speaking is not an aspect of culture, but culture is the product of basic theological underpinnings. Nevertheless, there are certain theological movements which follow the pendulum swing of history, and in this sense we may say that the theology of Kierkegaard, Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, Tillich, and Niebuhr is largely the existentialist reaction to the liberalism of Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Harnack.

Liberalism, grounded in the work of Lessing, is an idealist philosophy with a historical method for ascertaining truth. Lessing said two things: 1. revelation is the education of the human race, and therefore truth is to be found by studying the historical relations of things; and 2. no historical event can be the basis of eternal happiness, and therefore one must find truth in a rational, idealist philosophical system. Thus it happened that, in the liberal line of theology that followed, historicism, fully appreciating the relativities of history, was coupled with a naïve faith in the inevitability of social progress as well as the optimism of individual moral perfectability. Moralism found expression both in the search for a genuine experience of personal piety and in the social gospel.

The liberals busied themselves with the search for the real Jesus in an attempt to find what is essential to Christianity so that they might attach themselves to this historical Lord and bask in his moral influence. Harnack concluded that the essence of Christianity is the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the kingdom of Christ as a community of love. Clearly the Bible was not understood as the gift of God in which he declares news of salvation through his Son. Rather the Bible was seen as an achievement of human history. But the quest of the historical Jesus ended in failure. By 1901 Schweitzer was ready to admit that the historical Jesus is forever lost and that all we can say about him is that he was a mistaken apocalyptic visionary.

LIBERALISM WEDS EXISTENTIALISM

Liberalism is dead today because it had within it the seeds of its own decay. When the quest of the real Jesus failed we might have expected the liberals to abandon their historical methodology, but this did not occur and historicism still dominates the modern mood. The side of liberalism which did collapse, however, was its cavalier optimism, exposed as it was by the two wars and the great depression. But out of its shallow grave arose a new spirit for our age. This is the principality or power which we call existentialism. The term is vague and almost indefinable. As diverse views as those of Eastern Orthodox Nikolai Berdyaev, Roman Catholic Gabriel Marcel, Swiss Reformed Karl Barth, Lutheran Rudolf Bultmann, Atheist Jean Paul Sartre, Jew Martin Buber, and non-Christian Martin Heidegger have all been jammed into the same theological closet.

The broadest definition of existentialism is that it is a realist reaction against the shallow optimism and easy rationalism of the nineteenth century liberals. But this does not say enough. Actually the existentialist spirit, in spite of its sophistication, is naïvely realist and therefore historicist. In that it adheres to historical methodology, one would not be wrong to say that existentialism is still fundamentally liberal, howbeit a chastened form of liberalism. It follows the old nominalist tradition in saying that existence is prior to essence. Indeed all reality is in historical experience. Essences are only abstract names. There is no real existence beyond history, neither in an ideal or mystic sense above history nor in an eschatological sense in future at the end of history.

This being the pervading spirit of our age it becomes necessary for us, says Bultmann, to interpret the Christian message in terms which are relevant. This he ventures to do in his realized eschatology which makes both forgiveness and judgment present realities. He applies all the resources of his abundant genius to manipulate the tools of form criticism to demythologize the New Testament so as to strip away irrelevant offense. All pre-scientific myths, he says, must be cut away, such as the Jewish myth of an apocalyptic cataclysm, the gnostic myth of the pre-existent Lord, the futurist myths of heaven and hell, the historical myths of angels, demons, miracles, virgin birth, empty tomb, and resurrection. What is left is the Cross and the kerygma of justification by grace through faith.

REDEFINING BASIC DOCTRINES

A great amount of energy and erudition has been expended by the existentialists on the subject of sin. Even the term original sin is accepted, but it is redefined to mean the limitation of human existence. Man finds himself bound by the all-pervasiveness of death, guilt, and meaninglessness. Sin does not enter through a fall in a mythical garden of Eden. Sin posits itself. Man is thrust into an existence in which he suffers a desperate calamity. He is inextricably the product of his past, yet he must accept full responsibility for himself as he is and not shift blame to either heredity or environment. He needs freedom from the past for his future within history. This he can find in the decision for Christ which brings him a believing self-understanding, a release from the powers of this world for service of that Power which man cannot control. Redemption is not through the objective work of a personal Lord but through the human decision made possible by the event of God’s grace in Christ. In this moment we stand before God and accept our acceptance, thus freeing us from the dead past for a living future in history.

How does existentialist theology affect some of the historic doctrines such as Christology, Resurrection, the Church, the Word?

1. According to Bultmann the historical Jesus is the Christ, but not in the traditional sense as the personal Lord whose body was raised from the tomb. Rather Jesus is the occasion for the encounter between the Cross and the sinner who makes the decision for the Ultimate. Apart from this encounter there is no more significance to Jesus than any other martyr in history. Really it is not the Jesus of history that concerns the existentialist theologians, but the revelation we meet in the moment of decision.

2. Resurrection is redefined to mean not a future life in an incorruptible body in a new heaven or eternal age, but a regenerate life here and now free from the frustration of death. Although death is inevitable we do not fear it because we accept it. As Niebuhr says: “Because of original sin man’s destiny is to seek after an impossible victory and adjust himself to an inevitable defeat.” Redemption is not a future victory. It is a present adjustment.

3. The concept of the Church is quite radically changed by the existentialists because of their category of Inwardness or Subjectivity. This subjectivism is not the romantic subjectivity of the liberals which was centered in a feeling of dependence upon God. Such a feeling would make God a projection of the human heart. Existentialists would consider this the idolatry of using God as a disposable object, and God is never an object. Always he is Subject; always Thou, never It. The divine Thou can never be manipulated. He can only be spoken to in answer to his call. The call comes to me inwardly, not objectively or mechanically or casually. God always treats me as subject too and never as an object. Hence the relation between man and God is neither a cognitive one which can be apprehended by means of a set of propositions nor an emotional one which can be grasped by a genuine feeling. The relationship is rather one of speaking and responding to God’s Word, hence it is one of decision. But no man can make this decision for another. Each must do his own believing just as he must do his own dying. The result of this doctrine, which is a one-sided truth, is an extreme individualism with no proper place for the sacramental community of the Church. Indeed for most existentialists the Church, as a visible structure, only gets in the way of the decisive conversation between the I and the Thou. There seems to be no place for the Church as the body of Christ, as Paul teaches, the living, historically continuous organism with prophets, apostles, martyrs, and saints in personal communion with the risen Jesus as head and Lord.

4. The same observation applies to the relation between the living Word and Scripture. The existentialists find the written Word to be a troublesome obstacle in the way of their decisive moment. How can an I meet a Thou if he has the written Word in between? The existentialists take the same offense in the written Word that the Jews took in Jesus: “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” So they look at the written Word and say: “Is not this document of human hands, whose historical antecedents we know?” As a result the living Word is separated from the written Word and we are left without a rule or norm of authority. This is a new subjectivism, voluntaristic rather than intellectual or emotive, but just as earthbound as either rationalism or pietism. Moreover, as we might expect, the sacraments are embarrassing to Bultmann and the existentialists because in their concern to worship the hidden God they find the sacraments too terribly visible. The existentialists separate what they call Christ from Jesus, from the Church, from Scripture, and from the sacraments.

RELEVANCE VERSUS CONFORMITY

Is there anything good that can come from existentialism? We must go back to Sören Kierkegaard for answer. It is salutary that we should avoid alliance with rational systems whether of Aquinas or Hegel. Quoting Shakespeare, Kierkegaard said it is better to be well hanged than ill wed. But we may extend this to include the liaison with existentialism too. In our well-meaning concern to make the Gospel relevant, we must be careful not to identify the Gospel with any of the periods of the historical pendulum.

Kierkegaard was a much needed theological gadfly. It was good for him to awaken us from our dogmatic slumbers and ask us what it means to be a Christian. The resulting new emphasis upon inwardness and the hidden God is also helpful so long as we keep it free of subjective voluntarism, and so long as we recognize that the hidden God is only the God of wrath whom the Jews and the muslims also have. Nor does the hiddenness of God preclude his general revelation in nature, history, and conscience. We are Christians and our God is the revealed God, our Lord Jesus Christ, the babe in the manger and the man on the Cross. The realistic correction of liberalism’s optimism and moralism has certainly proved acceptable. It is good for the Church to be reminded that she is still in this world and she may indeed get in the way between man and God. The Church like the Christian man is simul Justus et peccator. One of the most alarming but nevertheless true judgments is that the world often articulates the kerygma more effectively than the Church as in the case of Sartre’s play The Respectful Prostitute. This is the world’s way of telling the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican. It is time the Church learns to speak her message in the clear idiom of our day lest by default we give the message to the world and allow it to be perverted by the silky deception of Satan.

Dare We Follow Bultmann?

“Germany is just as nearly ‘Bultmannian’ today as it was ‘Barthian’ a generation ago, ‘Ritschlian’ half a century or more ago, and ‘Hegelian’ still earlier; and Bultmann’s works and ideas have become Germany’s dominant theological export throughout the world.” That is the verdict of Dr. James M. Robinson, in A New Quest of the Historical Jesus (1959). And Dr. Nels F. S. Ferré, reviewing Dr. Karl Barth’s The Humanity of God (1960), remarks that “for the alert the age of so-called ‘Neo-orthodoxy’ is over” (Interpretation, Oct. 1960, p. 455).

In this issue CHRISTIANITY TODAY publishes the first of an important series of essays on the question: “Dare We Follow Bultmann?” The articles will appear at intervals during the remaining months of 1961, and will be contributed by outstanding evangelical scholars in Europe and America.

The series is prefaced in a general way by the preceding article, “Existentialism and the Christian Faith,” by Dr. Robert P. Roth, Professor of New Testament Theology in the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, Columbia, South Carolina.

The first essay in the series also appears in this issue (turn the page), by Dr. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, a translator of Barth’s Church Dogmatics and a constructive critic of Barth’s theology from an evangelical perspective. Bromiley’s specific assignment was to summarize Barth’s criticisms of Bultmann.

The next essay in the series, scheduled in an early issue, is by Dr. Herman Ridderbos, Professor of New Testament in the University of Kampen, The Netherlands.

The third essay will be from the pen of Dr. Johannes Schneider, Professor of New Testament in Humboldt University, East Berlin, East Germany. Other essays by European and American scholars will follow.

ED.

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.

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