Christian Existentialism

[SamTP77]

I am working on trying to have a religious faith by embracing an objective uncertainty and thought this web site would be a good place to hash that out. Right now I think of myself as a person who is a roaming catholic.

I am studying some Existentialism as best I can, and I was reading in the Existentialism for Dummies book that God is dead which I understand what that means it is just an observation it isn't a celebration, and I thought about making the title of this thread "Being Religious isn't a 'Get out of jail free' card" which is explained very well in the book. I'll just share the last paragraph from that section summarized as best I can:

"After the church lost its privileged absolute status as the arbiter of truth about existence (which was even at the national level), the individual must reassert him or herself. Christianity - real, personal, passionate Christianity - once again becomes dangerous and once again becomes possible, but it isn't something that can be taken for granted. It's hard. Because Christianity as a dominant system has lost its mojo, lost its ascendancy, God is as dead for the christian as he is for the atheist, and this is attended with all the same pitfalls and turmoil." By Existentialism for Dummies authors Dr. Christopher Panza and Mr. Gregory Gale. I am definitely glad to have this book.

So I think that being religious is not a get out of jail free card, just because I pray and go to church and want to believe in Jesus the fact is that might not happen for myself no matter how much I may want it. For example I may want to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, but it is hard to do so when there is just so much evil in the world, and because of the death of God we really don't get any clear answers that have the weight of certainty to it at all. So I get what the author is saying here it isn't easy it is not going to get any easier to try to be a christian especially after being an atheist for four years. However with the help of my higher power I will carry on. Also getting stimulation helps with this, and going to church and praying, if I try not to worry about the theory so much it is easier that way, but I would like a belief that makes more sense to me in the world that I live in, something like a pan theist idea I believe.

So here is a question for you do you struggle with your faith too? I don't see why this would be easy given the total lack of certainty we have towards a lot of questions that have no definite answers frankly. So what are your thoughts on this?

 

[Tinker Grey]

So here is a question for you do you struggle with your faith too?

Well, not all of us have religious inclinations. So for me, the answer is no.

So let me ask,

I am working on trying to have a religious faith ...

Why?

 

[GrowingSmaller]

For example I may want to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, but it is hard to do so when there is just so much evil in the world, and because of the death of God we really don't get any clear answers that have the weight of certainty to it at all.

I think for Kierkegaard - the original Xtian existentialist - the fact that faith seemed irrational was not relevant. To believe was to believe in spite of it's being irrational. Abraham, who would sacrifice his son, was exemplary IIRC."What? Kill my son. Seems strange. But OK, I will, because it is commanded by faith!"

Secondly, the death of God, if that means the dominance of the Catholic Chirch as a cultural influence....

Lacking psychological certainty which you might have had does not mean if you had it (because of the dominance of an institution) you would therefore be closer to knowing. Epistemic certainty (objectively infallible in knowing x) is different from psychological certainty (I feel I can't be wrong about x).

I think for the existentialist all of there doubts and concerns are part of the bread and butter of a Christian's reflective existence - they are not in conflict with the faith but possibly even constitutive of it. IIRC there was een a 20th C existential thinker who said that to doubt was part of faith. To have faith in a liberated world of freedom of conscience is to suffer turmoil and engage in struggle, but it is more of an "authentic" self expression because it is more freely chosen.

 

[GrowingSmaller]

"Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith. "

Paul Tillich -
Christian existentialist philosopher 1886 - 1965.

 

[The-Doctor]

Being a fan of Kierlegaard myself I go with Growing smaller on the relevance of faith and belief.

I think you need to seperate religion with faith or belief. Religion, with all its rites and rituals, as someone once told me is a man made thing faith is personal to the individual.

I believe in God despite the bad things that happen in the world since God is not responsible for them Man is. We have the free will to choose what we do as adults though I like to think God can influence our decisions to a degree though He can be very subtle about it maybe. People have asked me why I believe in something I can't prove absolutely to be true (IE the existence of God) but that is the point of faith and equally I ask them can you prove that he does not exist?

Having doubts about the existence of God is normal in my view so don't worry about it. I recommend Isiah chapter 40 verses 12 to 14, it gave me hope when I doubted, sort of Gods way of saying "Well if you you are not going to believe in me then what are you going to believe in?"

How do I explain my faith?...there have been far too many coincidences in my life for them to be explained as coincidences. Something is at work even if I can't see it at the time. Like I said He can be subtle and as my quote says "SOmethings are true whether you believe them or not"

Hope that helps.

 

[GrowingSmaller]

I am inclined to mention Thomas Aquinas here, probably one of the greatest Christian philosophers and theologians to date. He wrote an estimated 8 million words. Yet, apparently his biographer relates how, a year before his death he experienced a heavenly vision which made all he wrote seem like straw!

Also, I remember reading about the phrase "God of the philosophers". It apparently originated with the romantic, poet and mystic (eta No It was pascal, not Coleridge doh!!)...Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and is meant to refer us to the fact that the God of the mystic is different from the dry academic God of the philosophes. IIRC!!! Mind I must add that Coleridge used drugs.

The underlying theme might relate to existentialism in the same way that the epoche of the phenomenologists is relevant to analysing phenomena. The epoche was to bracket and sideline all of one's theoretical assumptions about the world in order that we might experience the phenomena as they showed themselves, in themselves. For the existentialist this meant access to facts about man's bare existence rather than trying to see via the tainted lens of theoretical presumptions like the conceptual edifices of Kant or Plato.

Whilst not everyone may have a mystical experience, what they relate might help us to understand that the personal God revealing Himself is on another level from the "theoretical" abstractions of the great thinkers. Thus, when in prayer we might soemtimes bracket natural theology for a time and try to relate to God on a more fumdamental and personal level, even if that means we are at a loss. Would you prefer to be called by a name or a number?

 

[GrowingSmaller]

bump to draw attention to my dumb mistake (see edit in previous post).

 

[Received]

Actually, the case can be made that Pascal was the first Christian existentialist; it's just that his title as such has been muffled out because of the slew of Enlightenment thinkers during and after his life.

He may not be as defined as Kierkegaard in his thinking (after all, the Pensees were scattered and at times contradictory collections of thoughts, often kernels of thoughts), but the themes were there.

It also should be mentioned that there really are no clear criteria for what it takes to be an existentialist. Nor are there any historical figures who we call existentialists who accepted the label (or arguably would have if given it).

 

[GrowingSmaller]

It also should be mentioned that there really are no clear criteria for what it takes to be an existentialist. Nor are there any historical figures who we call existentialists who accepted the label (or arguably would have if given it).

I thought Sartre actually welcomed and used the label (eg in ther short book "Exstistentialism and Humanism").

 

[Received]

Yeah, but he didn't consider himself an existentialist. Which is actually a fine line, sure. You could say that Sartre came closest to accepting the label, even if he denied it with regards to himself.

 

[SamTP77]

I appreciate your responses. I see my faith as something like drawing two magnets together and keep up the tension to have faith, like the tension you would get when pushing the north end magnet to another north end magnet, and I try to imagine the strength of these magnets as very strong. The opposite of faith is despair and that can be represented when the magnets repel each other and there is no tension. I feel I could live in despair and not lead an authentic existence as a christian existentialist if the tension should subside such as being spiritually lax and resigned to some rational thought about an ontological argument or perhaps just slide back into rational atheism and I don't want that.

I feel though that faith is a very personal issue and I am glad to have discovered existentialism, which I feel does a good job giving me some tasks at finding meaning in life when absolute systems fail to provide this for people. I feel that science too is just not equip at addressing most or even any real human concerns. Also, what answers I will get in this life about existence, I definitely feel they won't be final absolute answers, but they will be the only answers that I can get, and I do feel some anxiety about that because there is no certainty to it, which is just how it is really.

Thanks for sharing again, I appreciate it.

 

[Received]

It's important to distinguish faith as it's commonly used from faith as Christian existentialists (particularly Kierkegaard) use it. Faith and despair are antithetical in the sense that living for a God-given goal is antithetical to, well, not living for a God-given goal in the midst of the flesh-and-blood moment of human existence. For Kierkegaard faith is the continual fulfillment of the implicit goal (or command) given by God. For one person it could mean preaching the word and, at a different moment (and more trivially), getting away from the computer and focusing on schoolwork. Both of these choices (which is the limit to human freedom) to fulfill these commands (and the potentially infinite number of others) provides the immediate feedback (literally coexistent with the choosing to fulfill the goal) of salvation (or happiness, or blessedness, or whatever). Kierkegaard divided despair into two categories: weakness, which is where the individual just doesn't have the snuff to push out and choose the goal; and defiance, where the individual rebels against the goal by adhering to its own (artificial) ones -- such as choosing to fulfill goals relating to being a professional swimmer when in reality God is calling you to be a missionary in Africa.

In very brief, layman terms (which is how Kierkegaard thought it should be understood), faith means doing the will of God for your life, and despair (which is also sin) means not doing it -- even if this means not knowing about it (a condition he called "spiritlessness").

This is really what makes existence meaningful, because the response to a life lived by faith results in happiness (or blessedness, or whatever term you would use). No principled life which finds its habitat in the sphere of science or philosophy can even come close. The point to living is to fulfill the goals that are most relevant to you, which in a religious context means that goals (or single goal per moment) that God has handed down to you.

Of course, this in no way proves God's existence. That's just how Christian existentialists play the meaning game.

 

[Received]

Double.

 

[GrowingSmaller]

Ithought that for Kierkegaard the happy (aesthetic) life was not the same as the religious life. The latter might be in submission to God but result in misery as the religious life is not always pleasing, and it is God centred, not man centred. Please comment.

 

[lutherangerman]

I find this a very interesting conversation going on here. I'm learning a lot from it.

What piqued my eye was that you said, there cannot be certainty in matters of faith. Yet scripture, the book of Hebrews specifically, says we must draw near to God in perfect faith. So either certain faith is to be found, or uncertain faith can be perfect too, but in another way.

In scripture, Matthew 5 (sermon of the mount) ends with Jesus telling us to be perfect like God, and specifically being perfect in love. Perfect faith needs love or it is empty and meaningless, Paul writes elsewhere.

So what you need is faith, the ability not to care too much about reality and circumstances, making yourself stick with God regardless. And for that weak and "imperfect" faith to become perfect, you need love. For this God, for every human, and for yourself, and for all of the creation. This is really what it boils down to. It seems impossible, but I would say reason (which can never be safely ignored .... sometimes we must act against our reason, but mere ignoring is never good) demands that "every human" means everyone with whom we have a meaningful relationship, and it means to care for having such relationships. We can't be a Mother Therese to absolutely everyone, that's Christ's domain. But we can be kind to everyone, accepting to everyone, like we accept ourselves and continue living no matter what we do.

Somehow you love God, Sam, and you must allow yourself to know that you love God. You can have some self esteem. And in this love which you need to believe that you have it, is the willingness to accept your faith, and not to consider it imperfect anymore, even while intellectual certainty is a bit of a myth and not attainable, as far as I can see. We shouldn't let intellectual problems make our faith life miserable and dry and boring and empty. There are other areas like our sense for the romantic and how reality is romantic, which should give us so many reasons to love life and God.

Our will is in the way of perfect faith, that's why belief in God must be accompanied with love for Him, so that, eventually, our evil will gives in, becomes faith, becomes free.

 

[Received]

Ithought that for Kierkegaard the happy (aesthetic) life was not the same as the religious life. The latter might be in submission to God but result in misery as the religious life is not always pleasing, and it is God centred, not man centred. Please comment.

Indeed, and this all centers on what we mean by the term "happiness". We can use it to refer to the aesthetic; there's something superficial about the term, and morphologically it implies fortune: the root "hap" means precisely this.

So maybe we could say that salvation or blessedness (or again, whatever word you'd use) is a much stronger, fuller term for happiness.

The Christian isn't exempt from suffering, which would by definition annul the point of the aesthetic (namely, getting away from pain and maximizing one's immediate experience); for K, being a Christian means suffering by definition, but at the same time there's an undeniable higher reward here that makes the suffering more worth it than a life lived without it. This much becomes obvious from a passage in his For Self Examination, where he compares the lives of a martyr and a family man -- using long and beautiful setups for both, then concluding with the punch: that they're both equally happy (or blessed).

Of course, the family man is more a reflection of the ethical than the aesthetic, but this passage brings home an important point often forgotten when reading Kierkegaard: the aesthetic is contained in the ethical and the religious. Judge Wilhelm in Either/Or makes a point like this much more directly when he says that the ethical is the true aesthetic (or something similar in verbal effect). So happiness is a term often associated solely with the aesthetic, and (as said above) does indeed reflect some shallowness and limitation. But with the ethical and religious spheres of existence, the term has a fuller connotation, you could say -- or else another word is used entirely (blessedness, salvation, etc.).

 

[SamTP77]

I thought I would share that what I am attempting to do as a religious existentialist is not live a happy life, but a purposeful life. Specifically I have had problems with being a reflective aesthetic, living in my own head dreaming about possibilities separate from carving out a meaningful life that chooses a road to follow, with the help of a belief in God in an existential sort of way. I believe I have found something in my life that gives me purpose a purpose so strong that is like an over arching goal in my life which is to achieve serenity and maintain it as well. I feel by performing the task of a religious existentialist this will give me more direction in meeting my goals in life, by developing a relationship with Jesus Christ as I understand him. What has been helping me to do this is prayer, going to church and reading "Existentialism for dummies."

I just thought I would share an interpretation of the Garden of Eden with Adam when he choose to eat the fruit. Perhaps God's intention was to create humans who like Adam could choose to have a belief in God and follow God through faith or choose to not have a belief in God and reject him or her through sin? This is explained pretty well in the for dummies book for sure. Either way, that seems to be the case for me that is for sure, and it feels good to pray again, and tell people I'll pray for them as well.

Sincerely,

Sam

 

[Gracchus]

Either way, that seems to be the case for me that is for sure, and it feels good to pray again, and tell people I'll pray for them as well.

And praying is going to make the omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent deity change his mind?

 

[Tinker Grey]

Well, if it makes you happy, Sam, then I am happy for you.

 

[GrowingSmaller]

What about Bultman's existentialist demythologisation. Does it lead to atheism?