General Introduction
- Where’s Michial teach again?
- Stuck in the middle with the soulless Calvinists
- The plan for November
Talking Back, Not Bach
- One hand in the hornet’s nest
- Forgive us, please
- David and Michial hate each other
What Is Emotion, Anyway?
- Good feelings and a warm heart
- The Presence of GodTM
- Biological emotion
- Talkin’ bipolar
- That’s when it hit me: That luv is a verb!
- Emotion as orientation of affection
Calvinism and Emotions
- Why are we so suspicious?
- Calvinist intellectualism
- St. Augustine’s distrust of emotions
- Where the big T fits in
- A New Kind of Schleiermacherian Emotionalism
- Engaging emotion with the Pietists
- Head knowledge and heart knowledge
- Let’s talk Being instead of heart
- Where the Neo-Orthodox get it right
- On desire, in German
- The Calvinist worship service and the redirection of affection
- But who are we to judge?
- And here come the negative emotions!
Emotion in the Psalms
- Psalm 22 and Christ on the cross
- Moving from lowliness to glory
- How much did Christ have in mind?
- How “As the Deer” got it wrong
- The Psalm of Asaph
- From emotion to understanding to emotion
Jesus Is My Boyfriend
- The strange sexual hang-ups of “In the Secret”
- Ah, but we digress: the Song of Solomon
- Parental advisory
Public and Private Worship
- Jesus is my personal boyfriend (in the Middle Ages, anyway)
- Feelin’ Icky (The Book of Margery Kempe Song)
- Are Americans uncomfortable with corporate worship?
- Leaving on the emotion
- Is a Manwich a meal or an hors d’oeuvre?
Closing Thoughts
- Yeah…we don’t like music
- We’re not terribly cuddly
- Eeyore and Tigger
- Worship beyond music
- Waiting for the end of the prayer
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Augustine. Confessions. Trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin. New York: Penguin, 1961.
Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics: A Selection. Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 1994.
Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960.
Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. New York: Penguin, 1985.
Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt, 1995.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Ed. Richard Crouter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.
Wetmore, Robert D. Worship the Way It Was Meant to Be: 15 Biblical Principles for Knowing and Loving God. Camp Hill, Penn.: Christian Publications, 2003.
Thus far in this series, I haven’t really discussed any theologian who might be rightly considered an existentialist, as opposed to an influence or proto-existentialist. (The exception is Karl Barth, whom I’ve brought up several times and who is existentialist to the core.) Having, I think, demonstrated the importance of religious sources for early formulations of existentialism, I will in this post examine what it is in existentialism–even in the atheistic forms represented by Sartre, Heidegger, and Camus–that made it so attractive to religious thinkers throughout the twentieth century; in so doing, of course, I will also describe what attracts me to this philosophy.
The easiest and most obvious answer is that religious thinkers have been drawn to existentialist thought because religious philosophers exerted such a strong influence on its formulation. (Kierkegaard is indispensible, of course, but Pascal is a clear influence on both Sartre and Camus, and Heidegger takes one of his major concepts–curiosity–right from Augustine’s Confessions.) I don’t want to downplay the accuracy of this explanation, but unless we’re to assume religious thinkers are outrageously small-minded and parochial, we need to find another explanation.
I’ve already suggested that the brand of atheism championed by secular existentialists is more self-reflexive and thus more acceptable to religious thinkers than the more rationalistic variety represented by the Logical Positivists and the nü atheists. This, obviously, makes a Paul Tillich or an Abraham Heschel more likely to associate themselves with Sartre than with Bertrand Russell (or, in our day, Richard Dawkins). This is certainly part of the equation; it’s easier for a believer to see the legitimate arguments in Nietzsche and Camus than in the nü atheists because one senses that, despite their occasional militancy, the existentialist atheists understand faith much better than Daniel Dennett does. The existential call is to take religious faith more seriously–not to blithely exchange it for a scientific certainty, a type of faith in and of itself.
But there must be more than this, for the existentialists are hardly the only atheists to take religion seriously. I think historical context will prove valuable here. Existentialism, broadly speaking, comes in three major waves: First, in the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky revolted against the ascendant rationalism of the Enlightenment. Then, in the period between the two world wars, Heidegger, Jaspers, and others revolted against Logical Positivism and the increasingly mechanized world in which they found themselves. The third movement comes after World War II, and especially in the 1950s and early ’60s, when existentialism hit pop culture. Here, Sartre, Tillich, Heschel, and many, many other philosophers, theologians, and novelists revolted against a world that produced chilling examples of “man’s inhumanity to man” on the one hand and a stultifying suburban culture on the other. (Mechanization was, obviously, still in the mix and played a big part in both the cruelty of war and the boredom of the suburbs.)
The concerns of the existentialists of all three of these eras–both in terms of what they reject and in terms of what they promote–just so happen to line up, in large part, with the traditional concerns of Jewish and Christian thought. The existentialists seek to rescue Western philosophy from those who would make the intellect the defining characteristic of man, to the exclusion of the rest of his being. They want to repudiate the psychologist who would claim that man is an unwitting slave to deep, unconscious drives. They want to elevate the concrete and individual self above all universal abstractions, be they “logic,” “ethics,” or “human nature.” Certainly they want to refuse the conformity of Stalin’s Russia and Eisenhower’s America. They want to demonstrate man’s position in the world without allowing him to be lost in that world. They want to point to the shattering nothingness at the very heart of being–knowing all the while that they can never explain it, only point to it.
Compared to the Enlightenment philosophers and the logical positivists, the existentialists, even the atheists in their ranks, have deeply metaphysical concerns. Heidegger’s last few years, in fact, are sometimes referred to as his “religious period,” even though he never gave up his atheism, to the best of my knowledge. In the same vein, Walker Percy classes Sartre as a religious novelist on the grounds that he “betrays a passionate conviction about man’s nature, the world, and man’s obligation in the world.”
The religious intellectuals of the twentieth century thus find in the existentialist corpus new skin for the old ceremony–a vibrant and up-to-date language in which to couch or tweak the ancient verities. For example, when an existentialist theologian speaks of “man’s alienation from God,” he draws from an enormous sea of connotations: he brings up not only Genesis 3 and its Jewish and Christian commentators but also Heidegger on “thrownness,” Sartre on anxiety, and Camus on absurdity. The latter shed light on man’s state before redemption, and the former provide an explanation for the origins of the mess in which we find ourselves. To put this in another way: the existentialists–more so, in my opinion, than any other group of modern philosophers–ask the important questions, the ones that both challenge theology in significant ways and request theological answers.
An example of how the results can vary for different theologians: In Being and Nothingness, Sartre distinguishes two kinds of being: être-en-soi (in itself) and être-pour-soi (for itself). The former is objective being, inanimate and without inner contradiction; the latter includes beings with consciousness. (Sartre does not reveal whether this category applies to nonhuman animals or not.) Être-pour-soi is rich with self-contradiction, for we are not, in Sartre’s terminology, what we are. The great sin (absolutely not Sartre’s word) of humanity is their attempt to become être-en-soi, to become perfect by becoming an object.
So far, so good. But theists have a problem here because Sartre allows only for perfect being without consciousness, or self-alienated consciousness. God, as traditionally conceived, is a perfect consciousness, a personal being utterly without self-contradiction. Thus, God is, for Sartre, utterly impossible. Nevertheless, Sartre is an important influence on the two most important Christian existentialists, Paul Tillich and Karl Barth, and if they are to respond honestly to his work, they must find a place for God in his two types of being. Their solutions differ in ways that get at the heart of their overall philosophical and theological divergence.
Barth, for his part, has little patience for the theological liberalism ascendant in the nineteenth century; it’s possible to read his entire project as a repudiation of the worst excesses of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Thus, his existentialism involves little change to traditional Christianity’s core principles. (There are a few breaks with the tradition, particularly in his early work, but on the whole Neo-Orthodoxy is as conservative as mainline theology gets–which doesn’t stop some Evangelicals from seeing Barth as a great enemy.) Barth does not, as far as I know, use specifically Sartrean terms, and yet I think his emphasis on what he calls the “Wholly Other” God can serve as a response to Sartre’s atheism. Hundreds of theologians before Barth, of course, had emphasized God’s transcendence–and the Calvinist tradition out of which Barth writes is sometimes accused of an overemphasis on this attribute–but Barth is, I think, new in the lengths he goes.
I talked in my previous post about Barth’s steadfast refusal to allow a path from man to God. The reason for this is that God is made of something absolutely different than the world. The end result is that He is utterly transcendent, utterly removed–absent, as some people prefer to say. We can find God neither by searching our hearts nor by searching creation, neither with logic nor with emotional response. His ways are not our ways, and no twist of logic will allow us to understand Him. This raises God above all simple dichotomies, be they Cartesian or Sartrean.
Many people’s understanding of Barth ends with God’s otherness, and it’s true that Barth is probably guilty of overemphasis, especially early in his career. But Barth certainly acknowledges the other side of God, His immanence. He denies natural theology because God is wholly other, but he points to revelation, God’s reaching down to man, which can happen only if God is also immanent. So God is above the duplicity of the en-soi and the pour-soi, but He reaches down into it. Barth gets around Sartre’s prohibition on God by breaking the circuit, then quietly putting it back together: God is en-soi, pour-soi, and simply soi, a sort of being beyond being–and He is all three simultaneously.
Tillich is famously less concerned with maintaining traditionalist formulations of Christianity. He begins his Systematic Theology with an attack on fundamentalism, which, he says, “fails to make contact with the present situation, not because it speaks from beyond every situation, but because it speaks from a situation of the past.” For Tillich, theology must be created anew for each generation; his own theology is quite clearly and explicitly an attempt to recreate Christianity under existentialist principles. The language changes. For Barth, alienation is a product of sin; for Tillich, sin is alienation. In the merger of these two systems of thought, Barth privileges Christianity. Tillich, his critics say, privileges existentialism.
So he absolutely has to deal with Sartre’s objection–and he can’t do so by elevating God beyond the dichotomous world, because he is far less comfortable with fideism than Barth is. His solution is to argue that God is simply not a combination of en-soi and pour-soi at all.He speaks of God less as a Person than as an idea, as when he says, in Systematic Theology 1, that
Philosophy necessarily asks the question of reality as a whole, the question of the structure of being. Theology necessarily asks the same question, for that which concerns us ultimately must belong to reality as a whole. . . . It must be the ground of our being, that which determines our being or not-being, the ultimate and unconditional power of being.
Commentators have disagreed on the extent to which this formulation dispenses with God’s Personhood (the part of Him subsumed under the heading of pour-soi) and places Him entirely in the consciousness-free world of the en-soi. It is certainly possible to posit God as both a Person and as the ground of all being; Abraham Joshua Heschel does so in Man Is Not Alone. But in my reading of Tillich’s books I’ve never seen him present God as anything more than ultimate concern. He never moves from metaphysical object to supernatural subject. This is a major break from historical Christianity, and it’s clearly born out of a deep engagement with existentialist ideas.
And this is only one example, meant to demonstrate the deep rejuvenation Christian and Jewish theology received from existentialism. For some, like Tillich, existentialism provided the impetus to make stale theology radically new; for others, like Barth, it asked questions that left nineteenth-century liberalism speechless. Either way, theology became important to public life in a new way. At the height of existentialism’s popular appeal, Christianity was represented by great minds like Barth and Tillich, and Judaism by equally great minds like Heschel. Today, we get Rick Warren and Shmuley Boteach. Res ipsa loquitur.
I grew up at the tail-end of the Evangelical Apologetics Explosion. Somewhat arbitrarily, I’m selecting as the apex of that movement the year 1999. (I use that date because of the publication of Josh McDowell’s New Evidence That Demands a Verdict, but that was also the year of Norman Geisler’s Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics and the year after Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ.) I was seventeen in 1999 and was just starting to be disillusioned with the church I grew up in. We weren’t terribly devoted to apologetics at my church–and I don’t mean to suggest that McDowell and Geisler are in any sense responsible for my alienation from the Southern Baptist Convention–but my youth group did attend a summer camp with a Creationist theme and a very obvious apologetics influence.
(A tangent: We sang a song there that suggested that the monster in Job 40:15-24 was in fact proof that human beings and dinosaurs co-existed: “Behemoth is a dinosaur / I know creation’s true!” Subtlety, let us say, is not a hallmark of the apologist’s creed, at least not as it is presented to teenagers. It was also at this camp that I first heard the Standard Evangelical Sermon on Premarital SexTM, in which amorous teenagers are instructed for half an hour that OH MY GOSH SEX IS AWESOME before receiving a brief disclaimer that “it’s much better if you wait until you’re married”–as if anyone could possibly experience both waiting and not waiting and thus be in a position to judge.)
I also took a mandatory apologetics course at my Christian college, in which I angered the Bible and theology majors around me by consistently failing to see the big deal–or, indeed, the point. We read Strobel and Geisler and a book by Paul Copan that promised to “deflat[e] the slogans that leave Christians helpless”–and I found them helpful on some level. But when it came to the actual purpose of the class–training us to prove the truth of the Gospel to unbelievers–I was left in the dark. I don’t remember for sure, but I suspect my classmates responded to my disinterest by citing 1 Peter 3:15: “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you” (NAS). For reasons I will go into in a bit, I think it’s entirely possible to obey this verse without subscribing to a Geislerian view of apologetics: that is, that Christianity is imminently reasonable and that unbelievers are faulty in their rational thinking.
We must have discussed Pascal’s Wager in that class; it is, after all, a standard in apologetics and an argument which nearly everyone encounters at some point. Its premises are familiar: Either there is a God, or there isn’t. The consequences for believing in a God that doesn’t exist are not much to speak of–but the consequences for not believing in a God Who exists and Who commands faith are infinite. Therefore, we should believe in God. This argument is full of holes, as any atheist (and not a few believers) can tell you. The biggest problem is that Pascal’s Wager can make no distinction among the hundreds of religious conceptions of God, most of them mutually exclusive. What if I choose to believe in the Christian God, and it’s the Muslim Allah Who is real? Suddenly the consequences of belief are much more serious!
The Wager also results, presumably, in a rather intellectualized and cold-fish faith, a fact that Walker Percy’s character Will Barrett points out in The Second Coming:
To the best of my knowledge, only one man in history ever made a practical proposal, that is, a proposal of which the rare sane unbeliever could at least make a modicum of sense. That was the famous wager of Pascal, who was the last French intellectual who was not insane. . . . But it is after all ludicrous to reduce the question to a crapshoot at Vegas. . . . The trouble with Pascal’s wager is its frivolity.
These very legitimate objections notwithstanding, Pascal’s Wager is important to existential apologetics for at least two reasons: (a) It assumes the mutual absurdity of faith and atheism; and (b) it posits faith as primarily an act of the will, rather than of the intellect or of the emotions.
That first point is, I suspect, forgotten or ignored by apologists of the Geislerian variety. But the Wager, though it’s a logical appeal of sorts, is built on several dozen pages of absurdist theology. Most notably–and this is, in my opinion, the single most profound sentence in the Pensées–he tells us that “It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that He should not exist” (¶230). The effect of this mutual absurdity is not merely to make religious belief into a leap of faith; it makes atheism into the same sort of leap. Agnosticism seems to be left as an option, but on a practical level there is no agnosticism, as you either live as if there is a God or as if there isn’t. Not only is (a)theism a leap of faith; it’s a leap of faith that everyone must take in order to exist.
The other contribution Pascalian absurdism makes to existential theology is that it makes faith into an act of the will. This, no doubt, displeases those who wish to posit Christianity as wholly reasonable and who see faith in Christ as primarily a matter of intellectual assent. But it’s not; it can’t be, not if the essence of Christian faith is a trust in Jesus Christ. St. James suggests as much when he says that “You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder” (2:19, NAS). What makes the difference is an active faith (built, James says to Luther’s chagrin, on works)–an act of the will. Intellectual assent without what William James famously calls “the will to believe”–forcing oneself to behave as though one believes, even if it doesn’t make sense at times–is fairly worthless.
As for the notion that faith is built on “feeling”–that idea stems from a faulty reading of Matthew 22:37: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” That heart implies emotion to the modern reader, but Christ is quoting Deuteronomy 6:5–and the seat of the emotions in the Hebrew Bible is not the heart but the bowels. If the author of Deuteronomy had wished to suggest that we ought to love God with our emotions, he would have instructed us to “Love the Lord your God with all your bowels”; as written, heart more likely refers to what we’d call the soul, and soul refers to something akin to life-breath.
Faith in Christ, then (and other religious faiths, as well), is an act of the will, that is, something we choose to trust in, even though it doesn’t always feel great or make perfect intellectual sense. For how this works, we must skip ahead several centuries from Pascal to Søren Kierkegaard. The Danish philosopher is famously resistant to attempts to force God into human understanding (which is, after all, the end results of much of modern apologetics). He remarks in his journals–and in the new beverage holder at the Christian Humanist Store, cheap at twice the price!–that “to stand on one leg and prove God’s existence is a very different thing from going on one’s knees and thanking Him.” He takes it even further in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and suggests that attempts to prove the existence of God end up accomplishing the exact opposite purpose:
To demonstrate the existence of someone who exists is the most shameless assault, since it is an attempt to make him ludicrous, but the trouble is that one does not even suspect this, that in dead seriousness one regards it as a godly undertaking. How could it occur to anyone to demonstrate that he exists unless one has allowed oneself to ignore him; and now one does it in an even more lunatic way by demonstrating his existence right under his nose?
The existence of God, strangely enough, is completely beside the point for Kierkegaard; he takes it as a given and expects from his “knight of faith” not a belief in the existence of God (after all, even the demons have that) but a painful, crushing–some might say “horrible,” and they wouldn’t be misreading Kierkegaard–trust in the invisible, perhaps unknowable, God.
His model for this is Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac, which he discusses in his most famous book, Fear and Trembling. Abraham is a Man of God specifically because, when the Divine approaches him, he asks neither for verification nor for a justification for the horrifying action demanded of him. Indeed, he commits himself wholly to God’s commandment–even though it contradicts both an earlier promise God made to him and every human law, including the law of logic, which is violated by the contradiction. What makes Abraham a knight of faith, in fact, is his ability simultaneously to believe God’s promise about making him into the Father of a Great Nation and to obey God’s later command for human sacrifice without active or passive rebellion of the Camusian variety. This process is the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” a Kierkegaardian phrase from which later scholars derived the concept of the “leap of faith.” The ethical sphere involves not only morality but all universal systems, most notably logic.
This is, obviously, a full-fledged attack on apologetics based on logical argument; God simply cannot be reached in this way. Karl Barth takes this bold assertion and runs with it, remarking in The Word of God and the Word of Man that “There is no way from us to God–not even a via negativa–not even a via dialectica nor paradoxa. The god who stood at the end of some human way–even of this way–would not be God.” (John Updike memorably quotes this passage in Roger’s Version, a novel about the seamy underbelly of fideism.) Hence, the need for revelation–God’s reaching down to man, reliably described, for Barth, in the New Testament. Logic isn’t revelation; it is trumped by it.
But there’s more to the story. Some people could do what God commanded of Abraham, Kierkegaard says, but they couldn’t do it in the spirit of faith:
If–in the guise of tragic hero, for higher than that I cannot come–I were summoned to such an extraordinary royal progress as that to the mountain in Moriah I know very well what I would have done. . . . I am fairly certain I would have been there on the dot, with everything arranged–I might even have come too early instead, so as to have it done quickly. But I also know what else I would have done. The moment I mounted the horse I would have said to myself: “Now everything is lost, God demands Isaac, I sacrifice him, and with him all my joy–yet God is love and continues to be so.” . . . And yet this is the greatest falsehood, for my immense resignation would be a substitute for faith.
The distinction Kierkegaard draws here between faith and resignation is helpful in uncovering the role of reason in the religious life. It’s important that he does not recommend a “teleological negation of the ethical,” but rather a suspension.
It may be helpful to go back to another familiar image here. Dante has Virgil, a virtuous pagan, lead him through Hell and Purgatory, but they must part ways. In like fashion, Dante seems to suggest (and Kierkegaard would surely agree), the believer must leave her reason behind the instant she believes. But there’s a third act: in Heaven, in the realm of belief, Dante receives a new and more perfect guide, Beatrice. In like manner, Abraham begins to sacrifice Isaac but “believe[s] that God would not demand Isaac of him”–and receives Isaac back. The believer suspends the ethical and the logical in order to receive a higher ethic, a higher reason, on the other side of faith. One believes in order to understand, in other words, and despite the apologists of the ’80s and ’90s, one does not understand in order to believe.
That’s not to say there’s no place for Strobel and Geisler and other apologists. Their arguments and books can help to bolster faith once a person has already made the leap–but they can’t lead people to God, at least not to any God worth believing in (that is, a God far beyond the limits of the human mind and its commitment to the Kierkegaardian ethical). Strobel’s book The Case for Faith thus has a nonsensical title: no case can be made for faith except the case made in and to faith.
Alienation is such a major fixation for existentialists that it can be easy to forget that they didn’t invent it. (Students, like me, of Christian existentialism are more likely to say that the Hebrew Bible invented the concept, which was then preserved like a faithful remnant in the writings of St. Augustine, Blaise Pascal, etc., etc., until Kierkegaard could pick it up and gift-wrap it for the twentieth century.) But there is an argument to be made–and, in fact, David E. Cooper makes it in his book Existentialism: A Reconstruction–that the history of philosophy is a history of human attempts to cope with deep-seated alienation; in Cooper’s opinion, that alienation is the product of “a whole distorted stance towards the relation between man and world,” and philosophy is less scientific thought than psychospiritual panacea:
[T]he deepest urge to philosophy may be the need to overcome, dissolve, or come to terms with the dualistic thinking which informs that stance. Neither puzzlement nor awe, neither a thirst for knowledge nor a craving for clarity, has been the abiding inspiration for philosophy. Rather, this has been the perpetual threat posed by the sense that men are hopelessly alienated from their world.
The advantage of the existentialist, then, is not that he recognizes the alienation at the heart of an individual’s relationship to the world–indeed, if Cooper is to believed, nearly every major philosopher has recognized this fact, implicitly or explicitly–but that he sees the degree to which the Cartesian split of the mind from the body exacerbates the alienation.
Alienation is certainly a good place to start from if one is interested in doing philosophy the way Plato and Socrates did it: as a quasi-religious ritualized quest for Truth. (After all, what is the Theory of Forms if not an attempt to impose a grand celestial order upon an earthly reality that appears chaotic and absurd?) And philosophers who admit that their philosophy proceeds forth from a nothingness coiled, to use Sartre’s image, at the heart of their being strike me as fundamentally more honest than those who, like the Logical Positivists, pretend to detachment and objectivity. The former relate to the world as we all do, from a position of what Heidegger calls “concern”; the latter attempt to create a clinical environment and, in so doing, manage to leave themselves out of their precisely defined worlds entirely. The problem is that a definition of the world that excludes the definer (a) is untrue in the sense that it fails to account for one of the most important pieces of the puzzle, the Self; and (b) propagates Descartes’s dualistic view of humanity, thus making alienation even worse. The moral of the story: Admit alienation before you begin to think, or else make your situation that much worse.
The Bible does not, technically speaking, begin with alienation but rather with an astounding unity in which is hidden a secret dualism: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Indeed, all matter and all substance flows forth, effortlessly, from this one divine source. And yet we have a split here, in that in the act of creating the world, God is not the world. But separation does not necessitate alienation, any more than finitude necessitates sinfulness. God and the cosmos, though split from the first moment of creation, nevertheless exist in perfect harmony for the first two chapters of Genesis. And when “the Lord God form[s] man of dust from the ground, and breathe[s] into his nostrils the breath of life” (2:7), Adam and Eve, too, exist in perfect harmony–with each other, with the world, with God, and with themselves. (Notice, too, that at least in this account of the origin of man, the body and the spirit [or "mind"?] appear to be mutually dependent; the body may come first, but Adam is not called “a living being” until God imparts to him “the breath of life.”)
So alienation enters Judeo-Christian theology in Genesis 3, with Adam and Eve shattering the dualistic harmony that has heretofore reigned supreme. Alienation, I’ll argue, manifests itself in four ways today and always–and it should come as no surprise that we find all four in the third chapter of Genesis:
The history of philosophy–at least according to the Hebraic origin story–is thus the 
history of alienation. Importantly, the forbidden fruit is from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (2:17), making intellectual and philosophical activity a double motion: It brings on alienation, and then it attempts to heal it. This double motion is important, as we shall see in a moment.
I give the theological background of alienation–and obviously, I’ve given only a small corner of a vast tapestry of alienation in the Bible–in order to point out that Cooper’s book, like the vast majority of general books on existentialism, fails to engage adequately with existential theology, as opposed to existential philosophy. Everyone discusses Kierkegaard, of course, and Cooper spends a bit of time with Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel, but he dismisses readers who view Buber theologically and says nothing about the most explicitly theological aspects of Marcel’s thought (specifically, his rebuttal to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, “Existence and Human Freedom”). He brings up Rudolf Bultmann in order to dismiss him, and he completely ignores the two greatest Protestant theologians of the last century, Barth and Paul Tillich, both of whom make very important modifications to existentialist thought. Not a word is said about Helmut Kuhn, the Niebuhr brothers, etc., etc., although John MacQuarrie gets brought up in a nontheological context.
As I said, Cooper is by no means alone in these exclusions; theological existentialism is so ignored in general histories of the movement that it may indeed fall to me to write a more inclusive one. But Cooper strikes me as a particularly egregious example, focusing on Heidegger and Sartre–existentialism’s most radical atheists–nearly to the exclusion of everyone else. He even tries to throw Kierkegaard out of the club, for reasons that are very telling. Kierkegaard, he tells us,
seems to enjoy the thought that men are aliens in their world. It is only if people do view themselves as “homeless” that they will then seek that personal relationship with God, which is the pivot of Kierkegaard’s concerns.
He gets the facts basically right but the tone wrong. Kierkegaard appreciates alienation (and its attendant psychospiritual affect, angst/dread/anxiety/whatever) for its ability to lead people to the precipice of faith, but he’s as interested in healing alienation as is everyone who follows him–he just believes that healing will come only when the individual leaps over that precipice. Thinking that a relationship with God is the only cure for spiritual homelessness is not, in fact, the same thing as enjoying the thought of spiritual homelessness.
Here, then, is where the bibically minded thinker (Jewish or Christian) must break with the defiantly secular existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre (and Cooper, to the degree he subscribes to the philosophy he summarizes). We’re told that “The Existentialist . . . follows Hegel and Marx in assigning to philosophy the task of curing people of the misunderstandings which promote a sense of alienation.”
The problems should be obvious: Alienation, for one thing, is not the result of anything so trivial as a misunderstanding; it is a deep-seated gulf at the very heart of humanity’s relationship to itself and everything else. And philosophy’s ability to heal alienation is exactly counterbalanced by its creation of further alienation, as the story of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil demonstrates. When philosophers attempt to “cure” alienation, it’s like trying to get a sliver out from under your fingernail: You may know what the problem is, but you lack the means for solving it. And the tomes on alienation–even the existentialist tomes, which see the problem much more clearly than most others–only push that sliver deeper in.
The existentialist theologians know this. Barth tells us that our attempts at reaching God–or our attempts to do what only God can do–are little more than Towers of Babel, created to be toppled. The solution is the one Cooper rejects out of hand: We must allow despair to lead us to the precipice, then close our eyes and jump beyond knowledge into the theological hole.
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