Existentialism and Christianity: A Meager Introduction

What follows here is an ankle deep discussion of existentialism, its effects on Christianity, and the implications of a communal response to individual existential issues from a basis of Biblical teaching and Church Tradition. Following is the tenative projected post dates for this.

I. Existentialism and Christianity: A Meager Introduction (Aug 18)
II. Existential Individualization of the Gospel Message (Aug 25)
III. The Communal Existential Question (Sept 1)
IV. Practical Implications (Sept 8)
V. The Eschatological Fulfillment of Communal Existentialism
(Sept 15)

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The New World Dictionary of American English, states that existentialism is: “ a philosophical and literary movement, variously religious and atheistic, stemming from Kierkegaard… based in the doctrine that the concrete existence takes precedence over the abstract.”

Unfortunately for us a dictionary definition of existentialism is as useless as a definition of Christianity would be. A movement, a set of beliefs, such as existentialism has too much depth, breadth, and life to be described in a few sentences. Authors ranging from Hemmingway to Kafka, and philosophers as diverse as Sartre and Tillich, have all been lumped into the camp of thinkers who probed the meaning of man's existence. What is it all about? At its most basic it is about the search for the meaning of our individual existence. It is a movement all about asking the questions most related to the meaning of our existence. Perhaps the questions themselves best describe in a nutshell what existentialism is really about: Why am I here? Who am I? What is life about? What am I supposed to be doing? Is all of this pointless? How am I not myself? How do I become myself? How do I seek a more authentic existence?

It has been nearly a half-century since Western popular culture began to fully adopt the tenets, practices, and questions of existentialism into its mainstream. By the 1960’s the system of thought that had once only been exercised by European philosophers was adopted by the broad counter cultural movement and nearly every college campus in the country. Existentialism it seemed had triumphed, and indeed, it had. A quick survey of today’s world finds a landscape in which nearly every facet of life bears the mark of the early existentialist thinkers and writers. Nowhere is this truer than in the Church.
At first existentialism was basically atheistic. Thinkers such as Sartre openly touted the death or non-existence of God as the essential key to man understanding his own existence. For many of these earlier atheistic thinkers man could only be free to understand his own existence once he had dispensed with the materialistic and pacifying gods of the complacent middle class.* Soon, theistic existentialists picked up on these themes and “baptized” them so to speak. Much of this was the result of theologians who were thinking in the same vein as Martin Heidigger (who rejected the existentialist label) and Rudolf Bultmann. It was in Bultmann’s theological system that the existential terminology we are well acquainted with today took form. Central to most contemporary Christian views of existentialism (and much of contemporary Christianity at large) Bultmann understood Jesus Christ as mattering “decisively for each individual transition from inauthentic to authentic existence.”**

Within no time many more Christians where speaking of the gospel of Christ as “the key to understanding our essence or existence”. The order of salvation slowly shifted from being a plan and formula in the 1950’s and 60’s to being a journey or experience in the 1990’s. As the emergent church grows in strength these attitudes only seem to grow. Now it is utterly uncool to present the way to salvation as a plan displayed on a gospel tract. Rather, it is far more common to understand salvation as “self-discovery” or as “a way to find meaning in life.” All of this is neither inherently good nor ill, it just is, but the influence of existentialism on the Church and the culture in general has had a great impact on where the Church has gone and where it will go in the future. We simply need be aware of why we are heading in the direction we are and how to best speak to the situation. We also need be aware of the extreme dangers posed by evangelistic and theological systems, which rest upon an “individual and existential” framework.

*A Casebook on Existentialism - William V. Spanos
** Companion to Christian Thought