Reclaiming Existential Theology

Part 3, Back From the Grave?

Having sketched the main idea of existential theology--replacing strong metaphysical beliefs with existential experiences and concerns--we should attend to the criticisms leveled against it before turning to a reclamation project. 

I've said that existential theology has, among many modern theologians, been rejected as a dead end. And the theologian who is primarily responsible for this widespread opinion is Karl Barth. 

Karl Barth is famous for many things, but one of those things was his attack upon his German theological professors when they en masse threw their support behind the war effort in WWI. Barth expressed this same criticism a few decades later when the German Christians threw their support behind Hitler. 

The theological tradition Barth turned against so vociferously was deeply existential. Following theologians like Friedrich Schleiermacher, German liberal theology attempted to ground religious belief in human experience, just like I described in the last post using Paul Tillich as an example. Rudolf Bultmann, for example, espoused the theological project called "demythologization," where the purportedly "mythological" aspects of the Bible, its metaphysical cosmology, should be stripped away to reveal the existential and moral kernel within the New Testament. For example, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead wasn't literal. Rather, the followers of Jesus experienced Jesus' continued presence in their midst. The resurrection was existential, a felt human experience, rather than historical. The resurrection of Jesus is a warm glow in your heart and not a physical body with nail scars in its hands and feet.

Barth's attack on all this, which started with his commentary on Romans, was devastating. When "God" becomes a cipher for "us," when faith is reduced to human experience, then nothing protects us when humanity goes dark. Which is exactly what happened to German theology in WWI and WWII. A wholly existential understanding of Christianity lacked the prophetic resources to reject war, Hitler and the Holocaust. God had become captured by the prevailing moral and political worldview of the German people, as it had to if the word "God" just pointed toward human conceptions of right and wrong. 

To protect God from this capture, Barth sought to eliminate the human element from our conceptions of God by declaring God to be "Wholly Other." Barth introduced a deep, uncrossable abyss between human experience and God. This was strong medicine, to be sure, and many think Barth went too far, but few dispute that this was precisely what the times demanded given what Barth saw going on in German Christianity. Hitler and God had to be on opposite sides of an abyss, so any bridge being built between them by the German Christians had to be burned. 

It took awhile for Barth's criticism of German liberal theology, which was deeply existential, to make its way into American seminaries. Barth visited America in 1962, when American theology was still steeped in existentialism. In 1966, Time magazine ran its famous "Is God Dead?" cover, which promoted the existential "death of God" theologies in vogue at the time. That Time cover was the high water mark of existential theology. Barth's visit to America was the beginning of the end of existential theology as an influential trend in American theology. Today in American seminaries, Barth is widely considered to the most influential theologian of the last century. Tillich, by contrast, is hardly mentioned, and when he's mentioned it is often scornful and dismissive. Trust me, I've seen the sneers.

So I have my work cut out for me. The title of this series "reclaiming existential theology" is provocative, given that existential theology has beed dead for quite some time. Everyone knows Barth killed it. Consequently, every fan of Barth reading this blog has their knives out. How dare I suggest that the weak and insipid theology that allowed Hitler to come to power see the light of day again? It's like a corpse, long dead and buried, has crawled back out of the grave.

This is my challenge. How to rehabilitate and reclaim existential theology given its well documented problems and demise? 

I'll turn to that question in the posts to follow.