Of all the contemporary efforts to transform man’s understanding of his own being, the existential philosophy is among the most notable. Bernard Ramm calls it “a radical new departure in philosophy that was anticipated in Pascal and worked out more systematically by Kierkegaard.”¹

In order to appreciate this radical new philosophical approach to life, it needs to be borne in mind that almost all the philosophers of the nineteenth century were intent on solving the mysteries of the universe by an objective examination that would, it was confidently predicted, eventually solve these problems, even that of life itself.

Hegel spoke of “The Hidden Spirit of the Universe” which was “powerless to resist the might of thought: it must unclose itself before it, revealing to sight and bringing to enjoyment its riches and depths.” “God the Universal” and “God Exists for Thought” were two dominant thoughts in his famous The Philosophy of Religion.²

Contemporary scientists developed this attitude to the point where all mysteries would bow before the power of thought, and the whole universe would stand naked and revealed to the mind of man.

It was due in part to this Hegelian philosophy, and in part to the pretense and formality of institutional religion, that Soren Kierkegaard, the introverted, brilliant Danish writer, offered his resounding protests,- disturbing protests almost ignored at the time, and unknown to the English-speaking world till Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans revealed and re-interpreted this “Danish Pascal” to the theological world.

Leslie Paul, professor at Queen’s College, Birmingham, England, comments as follows on the scientific outlook of the nineteenth century, which was too naive for Kierkegaard to accept:

Sooner or later, the average scientist thought, everything will be known: there will be nothing left in the universe which is not explained. Man had only to pursue untiringly the scientific studies he had already begun in order to account for everything. The astronomical discoveries, the evolutionary hypothesis, the vast progress in both vital and mechanical sciences promised not only that soon man would know everything, but would more or less be able to do everything. This scientific world view also confidently expected that it would in the end account for man: that he too would be scientifically explained and objectively known.³

Soren Kierkegaard set in motion a train of thought, largely ignored by his own century, on which subsequent existential philosophies are built. He categorically refused to objectify everything in the universe; he vehemently and persistently refused to ignore the subjective, and to regard everything, even God, as an object to be scientifically examined. To him, what mattered above all else was the transcendence of a living inward experience. A man must believe what he professes; he must be what he pretends to be.

Blaise Pascal had acknowledged human reason, and also the realm of the heart as the two highroads to the acquirement of knowledge. Reason reigned where objective knowledge was concerned, and the heart dominated in religion. Kierkegaard, knowing nothing of Pascal, also developed two roads to knowledge. First was the way of approximation whereby objective knowledge of physical surroundings, science, mathematics, become known to man. Then came the way of appropriation, by which the existent man could know the salient facts of religion,- Christ, God, salvation. Kierkegaard was averse to mixing these two highways to knowledge.

The Primacy of Personal Experience

In the existential philosophy, existence precedes essence. That is to say, personal being, selfhood, is basically more important than any ontological or metaphysical processes by which a man comes to understand the realities of the surrounding world.

Kierkegaard grasped this as he searched for truth, and he said,

. . . truth exists for the particular individual only as he himself produces it in action. . . . Truth has always had many loud preachers, but the question is whether a man is willing in the deepest sense to recognize truth, to let it permeate his whole being, to assume all the consequences of it and not to keep in case of need a hiding place for himself, and Judas-kiss as the consequence.⁴

He was so insistent on the primacy of personal sincerity and dynamic experience, that he even went so far as to say that as existents we need not be primarily concerned with true propositions, but we should be supremely concerned about being personally “in the truth.” When we respond with faith and passion to Christ as the Incarnate One, then we are in truth.

Only when a man is alone can he face the Eternal. And the act that is called for at this point is not one of mere noetic recognition. When all is known that can be known, the responsible core of the will in the man has still to yield. He must act, he must choose, he must risk, he must make the leap. For in an existence where qualitative differences remain, there is no other entry into the deepest level of existential living as an individual. Only by this leap on faith could one know the release of guilt, the sense of commitment, the acceptance of a vocation, of a calling in whose service is perfect freedom.⁵

To read Purity of Heart in long sessions is to catch the author’s haunting refrain embodying the prayer to know God as the one thing that matters, to possess “a life that has willed one thing,” to experience sorrowing repentance and “victory in the day of need. to will only one thing.” And to do the same with Kierkegaard’s Edifying Addresses is to hear his cry across the years to live before the Eternal “as an individual.”⁶ Unfortunately, this personal “self” does not mean the same thing in the hands of some other philosophers and theologians. To one man “self” is tangible, to another intangible; to one it is “body” and “soul,” to another a unity, or a psychosomatic unity; still others have talked of the substantiality of self, but Heidegger and others have severely criticized this. Many avoid definitions and speak of self as a unity.

The Christian student recognizes, of course, that, beautifully as some Christian existentialists have expressed themselves on the importance of self in relation to God, their ideas are not new. They are, though not intentionally so, a re-emphasis of the Christian doctrine of conversion and regeneration, which embodies confrontation, total commitment, as expressed also in various other experiential terms in the existentialist vocabulary. Men are groping for terms in which to express their helplessness, their dread (to use a frequent existential term), and their desperate need. A recent issue of The Ecumenical Review refers to “the current revival of interest in conversion among Christian communions,” and states that “an impressive array of books has been published on the subject.”⁷ The differences between existential commitment and Christian conversion serve only to denote the search for reality and authenticity in the moral and spiritual forces dominating the life of man.

The Seventh-day Adventist Christian will acknowledge the vital necessity of living faith and complete personal surrender of the individual. He knows that his denominational literature is replete with the appeal for “unconditional surrender” of the self to Christ, for acknowledgement that “all that we have and are is consecrated to Him.”⁸ At the same time he will confess that his trouble is not to find official theoretical expression of such ideals, but to find adequate response in his own living experience. He knows that he must fight the tendency to settle into a nominal or dead Christian adherence, and he must ever seek a vibrant, living, personal faith. Can we as Christian existents galvanize ourselves into this existential dynamism, or do we need outside help provided through the Holy Spirit? Only in some such a way or ways can doctrinal beliefs be translated into a semblance of relevance to the contemporary situation.

It is precisely at this point of specific standards of belief and conduct that modern theology, including Christian existential philosophy, falters in its attempts to provide struggling humanity with anything like secure anchorage. Confrontation must be more than an ecstatic experience; and the subsequent commitment must be to some ideals and standards of life, or all ends in futility. Commitment must be to a transcendent God whose revealed standards are requirements NOT under man’s control. D. S. Lewis maintained the futility of setting up human reason or the self, as the yardstick by which all is judged. “Unless the measuring rod is independent of the things measured, we can do no measuring.”⁹ Lewis was a scholar, lecturer, author of repute, who was also a thorough-going supernaturalist who to the end remained an apologist for Christian fundamental beliefs. It is seriously open to question whether Kierkegaard’s dictum that truth is reached only as a man “produces it in action” is correct, except in the sense that a man must live known truth in order to perceive more truth. This requires an initial revelation which is beyond human contrivance. It is untenable to us that man creates his own moral standards.

A glance at some of the basics in Christian belief as viewed by modern existentialists reveals some things which should suffice to bring concern to Seventh-day Adventists.

I. Deity

From the time that Nietzsche proclaimed that God is dead, and non-Christian existentialists like Jean Paul Sartre declared that the idea of God was impossible, modern philosophic theologians have tended in some cases to drift into a “God is dead” consciousness. They assume that gods have died continuously throughout human history, and now Christian institutionalism and the Christian God are on the decline. Thus John Wild, a distinguished philosopher, teacher, member of the Society for Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy, says:

That this is happening once again is indicated by the sense of the absence of God which is expressed by several discerning and sensitive religious thinkers of our time, such as Heidegger, Paul Tillich, and Simone Weil. God has withdrawn from the realm of machines and . . . these great systems of technology are unable to help us in understanding ourselves as responsible persons, to say nothing of transcendence, the source of our human freedom. We cannot even conceive of God in this way. So he has withdrawn, as the philosophers have seen and have said in their own peculiar way.¹⁰

If, as John Wild suggests, existentialism is one of several alternatives to modern radical theology, it surely needs something more to offer to restless, lonely mankind, than the uncertain philosophy that God may be absent, even though He is not dead.

Paul Tillich, prince of modern existentialists, was strongly averse to the Christian doctrine of a personal God, and declared:

Many confusions in the doctrine of God and many apologetic weaknesses could be avoided if God were understood first of all as being itself or as the ground of being.¹¹

“Personal God” does not mean that God is a person. It means that God is the ground of everything personal and that he carries within himself the ontological power of personality. He is not a person, but he is not less than personal. It should not be forgotten that classical theology employed the term persona for the trinitarian hypostases but not for God himself. God became “a person” only in the nineteenth century, in connection with the Kantian separation of nature ruled by physical law from personality ruled by moral law.

Ordinary theism has made God a heavenly, completely perfect person who resides above the world and mankind. The protest of theism against such a highest person is correct. There is no evidence for his existence, nor is he a matter of ultimate concern. God is not God without universal participation. “Personal God” is a confusing symbol.”¹²

This is not intended to attach any atheistic stigma to the brilliant Paul Tillich. Nevertheless, any Seventh-day Adventist Christian who does extensive reading of Tillich is certainly left with extremely attenuated ideas of the Deity, the divinity of Christ, the miraculous, etc., and if Rudolf Bultmann’s ideas on the supernatural are added, then the conclusion seems inevitable that simple Christian faith as the Seventh-day Adventist understands it, cannot comprehend such negative witness.

Martin Heidegger presents the views of many neo-orthodox existentialists on the doctrine of a personal, sovereign deity. In objecting to the universality of a highest being, he comments:

Whoever has come to know theology from within its development, both that of the Christian faith as well as that of philosophy, prefers to remain silent today in the realm of thought about God.¹³

In the same article Wolfhart Pannenberg calls attention to the idea of a dispensable God to which existentialists, as well as many others, are contributing:

Whoever tries to speak of God today can no longer count on being directly understood. At any rate, this is the case if one has in mid the living God of the Bible as the reality which determines everything, as the creator of the world. Talk of the living God, the creator of the world, is threatening to become a hollow sound today, even a hindrance, in understanding the reality of the world in which we exist, determined as it is by science and technology.

The attack on Christian ideas of God has always existed, and in Protean forms, but in the long years of church history, the attack from within has probably never been as virulent as it is today. Man suffers from a sense of alienation, and the more he submits himself to philosophical examination, the more he feels like “an alien in an alien universe.” A hostile universe complex has led a vocal minority to attack the idea of a person, superintending Deity. When this idea is surrendered, then, as one editor recently commented:

We have the paradox of a Church that, according to certain influential spokesman, does not know what it is and what it is to do, presuming to speak to men and women who do not know who they are.¹⁴

Small wonder that so many people no longer believe our Lord’s prediction concerning His church: “The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”¹⁵

In the discussion of existential alienation, Christian men might be expected to exercise restraint, lest they be logically compelled to take the succeeding steps that surrender all belief in a personal God, whose superintending control, though not always seen and understood, leads on to pre-determined ends. The disruptions brought upon us by the mystery of rebellion and perversity, have produced inexplicably confusing conditions of life; and nothing but faith in the unseen but guiding hand of God can solve the problems of the individual self under these conditions. Call this “the Kierkegaardian leap of faith,” or the “total commitment” of existentialism, it remains true that God is known only to the man who exercises faith to the extent of total surrender of the self to Him.

Helmut Gollwitzer, in his recent book, The Existence of God as Confessed by Faith¹⁶ asserts anew the idea that God becomes known only through “Christian proclamation,” and that all Christian ideas about God come from “the concrete and contingent experience of being addressed by God,” Karl Barth has propounded the view that “God can be known only through God.”

How does man get to know God? Does “Christian proclamation” connote a previous “address by God?” Could this address by God be identified with the orthodox Christian doctrine of grace, which is God’s initiative in seeking man? These are some of the questions which we Christians must answer if we hope to place the basic Christian beliefs in a relevant contemporary existential context.

II. Revelation and the Supernatural

Exploring and elucidating the Christian faith in a perplexed and hostile world is both thrilling and hazardous. Beliefs must be intelligently held, and they must withstand some scrutiny, even though they may be beyond complete human rationalization. The only source of Christian basics is in the New Testament, and the modern philosophical theologian finds it hard to believe some of its content. He is presumably prepared to accept some historicity and facticity in salient events such as the existence, ministry, trial, and death of Jesus of Nazareth. But he soon feels caught in a web, for there are miracles, such as the incarnation, wonders like angels sent by God, and resurrection from the dead,-and these things are incomprehensible to modern man. The attitude of the existential theologian has quite recently been set forth by John Macquarrie:

But we soon discover that even those passages which seem to be readily intelligible are closely entangled in other passages with which the case is very different. The general picture which the New Testament offers is a strange and almost fantastic one to anybody with a modern outlook. What do we make of the stories of wonders and miracles, of voices from heaven and angels sent from God? How do we understand the mysterious “principalities and powers” those demonic forces of darkness under which the world is said to be held in subjection? What does it mean to speak of the death of Jesus as a “ransom for many,” or as a “propitiation” for the sins of the world? Can we attach any significance to the story of Christ’s descent into the underworld, where he preached to the “spirits in prison”? Can we make sense of the strange incidents that are reconciled in connection with his resurrection? With our ideas of the universe, can we understand his ascension into heaven, where he is exalted at the right hand of the Father? And what are we to say of those pictures of the coming end, when the Son of Man will return in the clouds and the faithful will meet him in the air?¹⁷

Emil Brunner is prepared to accept his own version of the New Testament tradition, provided he can delete the virgin birth, the empty tomb, the forty-day post-resurrection ministry, and the bodily ascension into heaven. And there are many other existential theologians to share his views. How far can we go in these attempts to de-historicize the New Testament, and to undermine its facticity?

Macquarrie mentions a comparison with our fathers’ ideas of a compact three-tiered geocentric universe with heaven above, the underworld beneath, and man’s earth in the middle. In the hands of less careful men, this comparison becomes a furious iconoclastic attack on almost everything sacred to Christian belief.

The problem becomes a very real one when such vitals as the ascension are said to have been “perfectly intelligible to men who entertained the old picture of the world, but it has become unintelligible to us in the post-Copernican era.”¹⁸

In its wider aspects this tends to vitiate the whole question of revelation, so far as the evangelical Christian is concerned. He may accept this and thereby surrender his loyalty to the church’s historic teaching on Biblical revelation, or he must find an adequate defense of orthodox Biblical faith against these sweeping assertions.

It is clear that such things as confrontation with, and commitment to, a divine Person, takes on new meaning in an existential philosophy which tends to destroy the God with whom the orthodox Adventist has practiced daily communion, the One in whom he lives and moves and has his being. Conversion, meditation, the study of the revealed Word is to him the immediate confrontation. Death is to him the gateway to the ultimate confrontation with the Person, and is not the dread that it was, and is, to so many philosophers. In fact, Kroner records that Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit dealt so much with death that it “transformed this philosophy of life into a philosophy of death,” and even gave it academic respectability.¹⁹

III. Eschatology

Among evangelicals generally, the last things play a meaningful, climaxing part in Christian theology, but it is difficult to escape the conviction that existentialist liberalism, in the hands of admittedly earnest and brilliant men, has dimmed “the blessed hope” not a little. Bultmann’s treatment is set forth succinctly by George W. David:

To be sure, he [Paul] does not abandon the apocalyptic picture of the future, of the parousia of Christ, of the resurrection of the dead, of the Last Judgment, of glory for those who believe and are justified. But the real bliss is righteousness, and with it freedom. The reign of God, he says, is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (Rom. xiv. 17). And that means: the conception of bliss is thought of with regard to the individual: and this state of bliss is already present. The believer who has received baptism is “in Christ.” . . . The time of bliss, promised by Isaiah, is present. . . .

In Bultmann’s understanding, eschatology is that which opens the door to authentic life; that is, to that which overcomes sin and death, making the future sure. In this sense, the [first] coming of Jesus is eschatological in character, as are also his death and resurrection, since these events profoundly affect the life of man both in this world and in that to come.²⁰

In R. H. Fuller’s translation of Bultmann’s Primitive Christianity and Its Contemporary Setting,²¹ he refers to New Testament eschatology as a “renunciation of the world,” “escapism,” “asceticism,” “otherworldliness,” and says that “Jesus was mistaken in thinking that the world was destined soon to come to an end.” He views the first advent of Jesus Christ as “the eschatological event” which brought the old world to an end, and the second advent is to him, in the first instance, the coming of Christ into the human life by the act of faith, and in the second instance, it is “continual obedience” and readiness for the “inevitability of divine judgment.” It is incomprehensible to Bultmann that a dead body can rise again, and bodily resurrection is to him “the legendary concretization” of the early church that God had exalted the crucified One.

Bultmann is admittedly a happy hunting ground for such modernistic views. But other existential philosophers and theologians provide similar views,-views that destroy the evangelical conceptions of divine transcendence, of the primacy of external revelation of truth, of an inspired Holy Word, of terminal judgment of the world, and the life to come. It would be possible to deal with other doctrinal emphases, such as redemption, atonement, grace, sin, faith, creation, the last judgment, the incarnation, and to show in every case that liberal existential philosophy is permeated with modernist conceptions that are far removed from fundamental evangelical doctrinal teachings. In suggesting that existential philosophy offers some profitable ways of making New Testament truth relevant to our time, John Macquarrie makes this admission:

A Christian existentialism has its own gaps and unsolved problems. It runs the danger of so subjectivizing the historical element in the New Testament message that the distinction between history and fiction gets blurred, and one would have to inquire about the importance of this problem. Again, while it saves dogma from a sterile intellectualism, it might seem to sweep away any ontological implications of dogma, and one would have to inquire about the importance of this problem also. It is doubtful whether existentialist philosophy in itself would be adequate for investigating either of these problems.²²

Conclusion

We have acknowledged in this paper, and in others in this series, that Christian existentialism has some lessons of value in the realm of dynamic living. The most difficult thing in Christian ministry is to get people to live according to their profession of truth, to meet God in absolute commitment. This commitment must involve standards of truth. If we accept the self-revelation of God as the source of spiritual and doctrinal truth, then at that point we shall be compelled to steer away from any philosophy that does not accept some basic Christian conceptions in this area of revelation, and of divine superintendence. The Biblical conception that a universal Deity can be at the same time personal to every believer, should not be impossible for the man of faith to accept. It has found acceptance, with certain modifications, in Roman Catholicism, Calvinism, Armenianism, and in most branches of Protestantism.

Somewhere between the Calvinistic and the Arminian conception of the sovereignty of God we must take a firm stand on this basic divine sovereignty, out of which most of our other basic Christian conceptions are derived. We Adventists are not one hundred per cent Arminian in this writer’s opinion, and we are even more surely not one hundred per cent Calvinistic. The exact intermediate point does not matter, but basic truth common to both does matter.

It is interesting to note two not dissimilar statements on divine sovereignty, the first from a Calvinist and the other from an Arminian source:

The sovereignty of God! What do we mean by this expression? We mean the supremacy of God, the kingship of God, the Godhood of God. To say that God is sovereign is to declare that God is God. To say that God is sovereign is to declare that He is the Most High, doing according to His will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth, so that none can stay His hand or say unto Him, What doest Thou? (Dan. 4:35). To say that God is sovereign is to declare that He is the Almighty, the possessor of all power in heaven and earth, so that none can defeat His counsels, thwart His purposes, or resist His will (Ps. 115:3). To say that God is sovereign is to declare that He is “The Governor among the nations” (Ps. 22:28), setting up kingdoms, overthrowing empires, and determining the course of dynasties as pleaseth Him best. To say that God is sovereign is to declare that He is the “only Potentate, the King of kings, and the Lord of lords” (1 Tim. 6:15). Such is the God of the Bible.²³

In the annals of human history the growth of nations, the rise and fall of empires, appear as dependent on the will and prowess of man. The shaping of events seems, to a great degree, to be determined by his power, ambition, or caprice. But in the word of God the curtain is drawn aside, and we behold, behind, above, and through all the play and counterplay of human interests and power and passions, the agencies of the all-merciful One, silently, patiently working out the counsels of His own will.²⁴

These are strong assertions, but they contain some undergirding truths that are clearly Biblical, and they have given assurance to Christian saints throughout the ages. Can we surrender them to the onslaughts of modern philosophy which would leave us with a well-nigh meaningless explanation of life?

If we could concentrate on dynamic living that embraces the practice of truth as we now understand it, we could lead the church through the stormy seas that bring us to deeper faith and love, and to increasing light and truth-all based on the reassuring, undergirding truth that God is still “the Sovereign of the universe.”²⁵ In other places in our own church literature He is called “the Sovereign of the world, the Ruler of the universe.”²⁶ The assurance of “the guiding hand of God”²⁷ is needed among us, otherwise philosophy which is not based on the external Source of Truth will eventuate in unavoidable experiential and doctrinal confusion. Existentialists do not like to be described or classified, which has led some writers to call their philosophy a state of mind, an obsession with self, or even “a symptom of acute spiritual exhaustion.”²⁸ As such it cannot give spiritual stability to the life.

We are not depreciating the existential philosophy when we say, on the one hand, that whatever is bright and alluring in its teachings we can find already in the Christocentric presentation of our Biblical teachings, and, on the other hand, whatever is lacking in its modernistic doctrinal emphasis is offered to us in the balanced, conservative, reassuring content of the Advent Message.

It is said that in Hebraic thought the word “truth” conveyed fundamentally the ideas of solidity, security, faithfulness, steadfastness. In New Testament Greek thought the word suggests that which is disclosed and free from falsifying appearances. Both meanings are seen in such expressions as “O Lord God of truth;”²⁹ “Thy testimonies are very sure.”³⁰ Jesus Christ is called “the true”³¹ because He completes the purposes of God in salvation and judgment. Truth is found in the written Word³² and the gospel is called the “word of truth, the gospel of your salvation.”³³

The knowledge of the truth is not theoretical, but “existential,” a living reality rooted in the self-committal of the whole man.³⁴

Truth, above all else, is something to be believed, and then acted upon. Only thus can Christian existentialism find a true and satisfying meaning.

If we have lacked the holy fire of dynamic Christian commitment, the altar is still aflame for our rekindling; if our emphasis on dogma has been untouched by the divine agape and has therefore tended to be as cold as the stars in the wintry sky, there is still eternal and redeeming love to inject into meaningless doctrine to make it meaningful and attractive in a dedicated life.