-:- an Existential Reading List by Katharena -:-

the Realm of Existentialism | What is Existentialism? | Basic Themes of Existentialism | Existential-Speak | Existential Themed Books and Reviews | Magnetar, an Existential Think Tank | Existentialism and the Human Situation | Existentialism and the American Consciousness | Existentialism and Moral Individualism | Subjectivity and Existentialism | Existentialism, Choice and Commitment | Irrational Man : A Study in Existential Philosophy | Existentialism's Dread and Anxiety | Existentialism : Man and Human Relationships | Existentialism and the Significance of Being | World, Limits, Existence -- Existentialism | Problems of Existentialist Theology | Modern Existentialist and Phenomenological Studies | What is Phenomenology?

Existentialism has a theological dimension. Though Martin Heidegger rejects the label of atheist, he also denies to the Being of which he speaks the essential qualifications of divinity, inasmuch as it is not the ultimate cause and the Good. But Karl Jaspers, in his last writings, emphasized more and more the religious character of faith in transcendence. Faith is the way to withdraw from the world and to resume contact with the Being that is beyond the world. Faith is life itself, in that it returns to the encompassing Whole and allows itself to be guided and fulfilled by it. Jaspers has even developed a theology of history. He speaks of an axial age, which he places between the 8th and 2nd centuries before Christ, the age in which the great religions and the great philosophers of the Orient arose--Confucius and Lao-tzu, the Upanisads, Buddha, Zoroaster, the great prophets of Israel--and in Greece the age of Homer and of classical philosophy as well as Thucydides and Archimedes. In this age, for the first time, man became aware of Being in general, of himself, and of his limits. The age in which man now lives, that of science and technology, is perhaps the beginning of a new axial age that is the authentic destiny of man but a destiny that is far off and unimaginable.

For Bultmann, the theologian of the demythologization of Christianity, inauthentic existence is tied to the past, to fact, to the world, while authentic existence is open to the future, to the nonfact, to the nonworld; i.e., to the end of the world and to God. Thus, authentic existence is not the self-projection of man in the world but, rather, the self-projection of man in the love of and obedience to God. But this self-projection is no longer the work of human freedom; it is the saving event that enters miraculously through faith into the future possibilities of man.