Copyright holder: Tyndale University, 
3377 Bayview Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M2M 3S4 
Att.: Library Director, J. William Horsey Library

Copyright: This Work has been made available by the authority of the 
copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research 
and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright 
laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. 

Copyright license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International 
License

Citation: Shepherd, Victor A. The Committed Self: An Introduction to 
Existentialism for Christians. Toronto: BPS Books, 2015.

***** Begin Content ******

TYNDALE
UNIVERSITY
3377 Bayview Avenue
Toronto, ON
M2M 3S4

TEL: 416.226.6620

www.tyndale.ca

Note: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely
for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced
except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from
the copyright owner.

Shepherd, Victor A. The Committed Self: An Introduction to Existentialism for
Christians. Toronto: BPS Books, 2015.



THE COMMITTED SELF
An Introduction
to Existentialism
for Christians

VICTOR A. SHEPHERD

BPS books 

Toronto and New York
www.lbpsbooks.com



Copyright © 2015 by Victor A. Shepherd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher.

Published in 2015 by
BPS Books
Toronto and New York
www.bpsbooks.com

A division of Bastian Publishing Services Ltd.

ISBN 978-1-77236-000-4 paperback
ISBN 978-1-77236-001-1 ePDF
ISBN 978-1-77236-002-8 ePUB

Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available from Library
and Archives Canada.

Cover: Daniel Crack, Kinetics Design, www.kdbooks.ca
Text design: Pressbooks



Contents

Preface	ix

1. What Is Existentialism? .... 1
2. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Dialectic .... 35
3. Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Abraham, and Other Key .... 61
   Themes
4. Søren Kierkegaard: What Is Faith? What Is a Christian? .... 91
5. Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling .... 123
6. Friedrich Nietzsche: Superman and the Last Man .... 145
7. Friedrich Nietzsche: The Gay Science and Twilight of the Idols .... 173
8. Martin Buber: I-Thou and the Primordium of the Person .... 201
9. Martin Buber: Two Papers by Emil Fackenheim .... 231
10. Martin Heidegger: Dasein in the World .... 261 
11. Jean-Paul Sartre: Possibility, Meaning, and the Weight of .... 293  
    Freedom
Bibliography .... 329
Index .... 337

[ Page ] vii



[ Page ] 1

What Is Existentialism?

    Introduction: Existentialism as a Mode of Philosophizing

The first thing to note about Existentialism is that, unlike many other
philosophies, it begins with the human person. It does not begin where
the Aristotelian tradition begins, where Realism begins.1 But neither is
it a type of Idealism. Unlike Idealism, which begins with the human
person but is interested primarily in mental processes, Existentialism is
interested in the whole range of human existence. Spanish philosopher
Miguel de Unamuno said, “It is the man [or woman] who
philosophizes.”2 In other words, it is the whole person who philosophizes,
not just the head. Other schools of philosophy, the Existentialists
maintain, reduce humankind to a severed head; but it is not a severed
head that philosophizes, it is the human self in the totality of its existence.
Existentialism begins with the person, not as thinking subject engaged
in detached reflection, but as existent—embodied, in the world, and
having to act in the theatre of life where decision cannot be suspended.

	Existentialism represents a departure from two major streams of
traditional philosophy, Realism and Idealism. Idealism, in capsule form
and for the purpose of distinguishing it from other schools of thought, is
the notion that reality is mind-correlative or mind-coordinated: objects
are not independent of the minds that perceive and categorize and think
about them, but exist only in some way correlated to those mental

	1. For the briefest discussion of Idealism and Realism I am indebted to The Cambridge
Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: C.U.P, 1999), 412, 562-3.

	2. Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J. E. C. Flitch (New York: Barnes and
Noble, 1990), 28.

[ Page ] 1



[ Page ] 2

operations. Kant and Hegel are Idealists. Kant maintained that we never
know any object as such but only as it is “for us,” as it appears to us,
through categories engendered by our own minds and by which we
order the welter of sense-perception. All we can know is appearances,
because the structure of knowing is determined by the mind.

	The other tradition, Realism, is the notion that objects exist
independently of our own existence or our knowledge of them, and
have properties independent of the concepts through which we
understand them or the language we use to describe them. The whole
Empiricist tradition, the tradition of scientific investigation arising
largely from the Enlightenment, is Realist.

	Generally speaking, Plato is an Idealist, while Aristotle is a Realist.
According to Aristotle, there is nothing in the mind that was not first
in the senses; all mental operations presuppose sense perception of some
sort. Plato, by contrast, insists that there is a great deal in the mind
that is not in the senses, because the intellect can apprehend the world
of eternal forms—the good, the true, and the beautiful. The eternal
forms may be embodied in material objects perceived by the senses, but
the philosopher, at least, can apprehend the forms as such through the
process of the intellect.

	Existentialism is neither Realist nor Idealist. Unlike Realism, it does
not consider persons and other things as existing somehow discretely,
independent of one another. At the same time, it finds Idealism one-
sidedly and unrealistically cerebral. The key point for an Existentialist is
that it is the whole person who philosophizes, not just the head.

	Existentialism also represents a departure in terms of its main themes
or concerns. Traditionally, Western philosophy has been preoccupied
with epistemology, that is, questions of knowing: What is it that we
know? How can we know? What are the limits and conditions of
knowing? In fact, epistemology has been the preoccupation not only of
philosophy in the West but also of theology: What is it to know God?
How do we know God? Is God knowable at all? If so, what are the
limits of that knowing?3 Existentialism, on the other hand, eschews such

	3. This takes it into a doctrine of revelation, of course, which has been a primary concern of
theology from the Reformation onward.



[ Page ] 3

speculations. It is concerned with matters of concrete human existence,
such as the anguished and ambiguous ethical choices we regularly face,
the prevalence of the absurd in life, the overwhelming arbitrariness of
what is, and our inescapable mortality. It is preoccupied not with mental
abstractions but with the inescapable conundrums of living, aspects of
human existence that no reflection can forestall, deny, or avoid.

	From Descartes on, a central concern of Western philosophy has
been the self as thinking subject. Everyone has heard of the Cartesian
cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” The senses deceive all the time,
said Descartes, but the one thing beyond doubt is the fact or truth that
I am thinking. Even if I am reflecting on a deception produced by
my senses, at least I can know for sure that I am thinking. Descartes
therefore defines the human being as a thinking thing: the human is that
which thinks (animals apparently not sharing humankind’s capacity for
thought).

	The Existentialist regards Descartes’ reasoning and conclusion, first
of all, as shallow or one-dimensional. Human beings do many things
that animals do not, such as cook their food and mate all year round.
Why not say, then, that to be a human being is to be a cooking thing,
or a copulating thing? Why not say, “I bury my dead, therefore I am”?
Moreover, in saying, “I think, therefore I am,” Descartes is presupposing
an “I”—a massive presupposition. The Existentialist asks, “Who is the
I that thinks?” And as soon as you try to answer this question by
reflecting on the I that thinks, the I is no longer the I that thinks, but an
object of thought. Any attempt to get behind this introduces an infinite
regression; by definition, no amount of reflection will disclose the I who
is the subject and condition of that reflection. Then is the I that thinks
the same as the self that acts? Does Descartes’ “I” allow us to know what
sort of I it is? Sartre, for example, says that Descartes’ conclusion, “I
am,” from an examination of self-consciousness, is logically unjustified;
Descartes could have concluded only that there is thinking—a conclusion
that gets us nowhere.4 Existentialists, then, find the Cartesian cogito to be
indefensible as the starting point for philosophy.

	4. See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert
Kirkpatrick (New York: Noonday Press, 1957), 45f.



[ Page ] 4

	From a theological perspective, we would say that the “I” that I am
is what God has created and addressed. The characteristic of the living
God is that he speaks, and his address constitutes me as “I,” a subject. But
for a philosopher who disregards this theological notion, where and how
does the I or self arise? Existentialism is preoccupied with this discussion.

	All Existentialists are also characterized by their refusal to sidestep
the tragic or absurd element in life, the contradictions of human
existence. In our youth we may not notice these contradictions, but the
more we see of the world, the more we recognize that life abounds
with absurdities and contradictions. Take, for example, the fact that the
problem of infertility occupies the cutting edge of medicine, while at
the same time medical ethics seeks to rationalize feticide and even (to
all intents and purposes) infanticide as medical procedures: in a partial-
birth abortion, a child whose head and body are extruded can be killed
as long as its feet have not yet emerged. In one tragic instance, a woman
who was pregnant with twins, one of which was found to have a serious
defect while still in the womb, decided to abort the twin with the
defect and carry the other to term; but the wrong twin was aborted.
A newspaper account of the error persisted in using the word fetus for
the unwanted twin that remained alive in the womb, while the defect-
free twin that had been aborted was a baby, even though it was never
born. There is an undeniable absurdity here of the kind that abounds
everywhere in life. Existentialism refuses to sidestep such absurdities or
rationalize them away.

	“Nothingness” is another concern of Existentialists. Sartre, for
instance, is best known for his work Being and Nothingness (L’tre et
le Néant). Heidegger, too, says much about nothingness: “Das Nichts
nichtet," he writes; that is, nothing brings to nothing, or nothing reduces
to nothing. Before anyone dismisses this as a near-pointless observation,
we should note that Christian thought is also concerned with
nothingness. For example, we believe that creation was fashioned by
God out of nothing—not out of some kind of formless “stuff,” or out of
his own being, but out of nothing at all. We find this notion difficult
to grasp; we keep wanting to imagine some sort of raw material out
of which God made the universe. But creation out of nothing is a



[ Page ] 5

central doctrine for people of biblical faith, because it establishes both the
independence of God from creation and his lordship over it.

	Or take the commandment not to bear false witness, not to lie. A
lie is a statement to which there corresponds nothing; there is no reality
to which the statement refers. Is a lie something, then, or nothing?
What is its ontological status? If a lie is strictly nothing, completely
vacuous, then telling a lie must be no different from remaining silent.
But telling a lie is different from remaining silent. When we tell a
lie, have we not told something? Lies have terrifying power; they ruin
people and reputations. Obviously a lie is nothing, in one sense, yet it
is also something that can have tremendous effect. In the same way, is
a vacuum something or nothing? By definition it is nothing, yet it has
the power to suck in everything around it. Is nothingness ever merely
nothing, then? Or is nothing also, somehow, something?

	Existentialism is also concerned with finitude. God may be infinite,
if he exists, but everything else is finite. Even the universe, though
immeasurably large, is nonetheless finite. We humans are also finite, and
this finitude—not only our inexorable mortality, but the limitedness of
our power, understanding, and experience—is existentially problematic
for us. No less so are guilt, alienation, and despair, all of which are
characteristic concerns of Existentialism.

	One of the most prominent themes for Existentialists is freedom,
which they regard as essential to human existence. Animals may be
biologically determined without remainder, but humans are not. We
are, of course, subject to a certain degree of biological determination
(among other kinds): if the level of our blood sugar falls, we faint;
and if someone drives an ice pick into our brain, invariably we think
differently (and likely are found to have a different “personality”). Yet
biological determination is not definitive in human beings; nor are the
many other determinations to which we are subject, such as gender
or psychology or nationality. We always remain more than any one
such determination or even the sum total of them. We are characterized
by our ability to choose; and this freedom is what underlies our
responsibility.



[ Page ] 6

	We might say of a person who is acting shabbily that he is behaving
inhumanly. Someone might rebuke him with the words, “For goodness’
sake, be a man!” as though he were not one. We never reproach any
other creature in this way—for example, by saying to an alligator that
is dismembering another animal, “Be an alligator!”—because other
creatures cannot be anything else. But somehow, you and I can be
human yet fail to be human at the same time. This seems paradoxical,
like the nothing that is also something. Can we really be human and
yet not be human? From a theological point of view we cannot, because
the imago Dei can never be forfeited; it can be denied, contradicted, and
defaced, but it can never be effaced or forfeited. The Existentialist, on
the other hand, speaking philosophically, would say that if we forfeit or
abdicate our freedom, our existence is not authentically human. Freedom,
decision, integrity, responsibility, authenticity: these are the core of
personal being, and hence central concerns of Existentialism.

	Existentialism is concerned with the affective or emotional
dimension of human existence. Most schools of philosophy tend not
to be concerned with this, as philosophers like to think of themselves
as affect-less, uninfluenced by emotion. The affective dimension has
traditionally been assigned to psychology; psychology is interested in
how people feel, whereas philosophers want to know how people think.
This is a false dichotomy, however, because our thinking and feeling
are bound up together to a far greater extent than we like to imagine.
It takes very little to alter the way someone thinks in a given situation:
all you have to do is threaten their self-interest or sense of security, or
offend their pride. Touch their emotions, and their thinking changes
accordingly. After all, in the long run do we not all think and act in
conformity to what we love?

	Once feeling or affect has been relegated to psychology, it moves
into the social sciences as an object of quasi-scientific analysis.
Existentialism, however, includes the emotional not as material for social
science, but as an aspect of the lived human. Existentialist philosophy
is always concerned with the human, not simply as detached thinker,
but as lived human, involved and committed. Recognizing that our
affective dimension has much to do with our self-commitment—that



[ Page ] 7

is, our involvement in others and in the world at large—Existentialism
is concerned especially with the feelings that hamper that self-
commitment, such as anxiety, boredom, and “nausea.”

	“Nausea,” it turns out, is another key theme in Existentialism, but
not as the uncomfortable sensation in your stomach that makes you
want to vomit. Nausea is the condition of feeling overwhelmed by the
superfluity and sheer arbitrary givenness of what is. This is a big theme
in Nietzsche’s work, and an even bigger one in Sartre’s: in Sartre’s
famous novel La Nausée, the distressing issue is that there is no reason
for what is, and no meaning to it; it just is. The sheer superfluity of
being, inherently meaningless, spills over everywhere. Why should that
tree behind me be a pine tree rather than a maple? And why should
it be there instead of ten feet to the left, or ten feet to the right? And
why is there anything at all? Ultimately, there is no reason. There is
simply a randomness, a glut of meaningless being, of facticity,5 that the
Existentialist finds overwhelming.

	Existentialism Contrasted with Other Philosophies

It will help to understand Existentialism if we put it side by side with
other major schools of philosophy and see how they differ.6 Take
Empiricism, for example. Its method is detachment for the sake of
observation. You as scientific observer are detached from the peanut in
front of you, the object you are looking at. Moreover, as an observer
you are concerned particularly with nonhuman things: rocks, microbes,
reptiles, weather—or, in the case of the social sciences, the human with
humanness subtracted, the human made quantifiable. Just as you can
measure blood pressure and cell multiplication, you can measure how
many people in a group do X or Y, and whether that figure is higher
or lower in a crowd, in a prison, or on a ship. The social sciences
deal with things that are quantifiable, but to the extent that behaviour
is quantifiable, you have abstracted humanness from the human. In

	5. The notion of facticity will be explored more fully below.

	6. In the following paragraphs I have been stimulated by John Macquarrie, Existentialism
(London: Penguin Books, 1973), 26-34.



[ Page ] 8

other words, the Empiricist, who is concerned with objectivity and
measurement, never deals with humans in their humanness.

	Existentialism is just the opposite: it is always concerned with what
is specifically, uniquely human—not what we share with animals, not the
behaviour of nameless people in a crowd, and not what we are in terms
of the sum total of our biological, economic, and social determinations,
but the specifically, irreducibly human self.

	According to Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, Empiricism
triumphs wherever Existentialism is ignored,7 with unfortunate results.
The first result is that the object is estranged from the subject. The
best instance of this today is the environmental crisis, where human
beings are experiencing the terrifying consequences of hundreds of
years of estrangement from the rest of nature. Second, the unrepeatably
particular person is absorbed in the universal; the individual human
disappears into the mass of humanity, the social class, or the nation.
Third, freedom is crushed and concealed, and multiple determinisms are
deemed definitive.

	We must acknowledge, of course, that (as noted earlier) there are
multiple determinations, operative for every one of us: I am a male; I
have no perception at all as to what it is to be a woman, because I cannot
get out of my maleness. A gender determination is operative there. I also
happen to be white, in a society in which it is easy to be white: there is
a racial determination to me that I, at least, find non-problematic. I am a
Christian and a clergyman, so I am subject to a religious and professional
determination. I am socially influenced by the fact that I belong to the
middle class. All of these determinations are operative, but they are not
definitive: I cannot be reduced to the sum total of these determinations.
Berdyaev says that where Existentialism is ignored, people are reduced to
their multiple determinations, which then become determinisms.

	The fourth consequence of the triumph of Empiricism, says
Berdyaev, is the destruction of character through socialization. Social
existence finally comes down to what we share with the crowd and
how our behaviour is formed by the crowd: how the mob renders us
moblike so that we fit into the mould. Character is submerged. In short,

	7. Referred to in Macquarrie, Existentialism, 27.



[ Page ] 9

everything championed by Existentialism—human self-commitment,
particularity, freedom, character—is buried by Empiricism.

	The relationship of Existentialism to Humanism is a little more
complex. Humanism is not, strictly speaking, a philosophy. Renaissance
Humanism, which prevailed from approximately 1450 to 1650, signalled
the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modernity, which was
followed by the Enlightenment. Renaissance Humanism was primarily
a literary movement, crowned by poetry (there was a chair of Poetry
in every humanist university), and it produced very little philosophy as
such—in fact, its contempt for Aristotle, and for the stifling metaphysical
hair-splitting characteristic of medieval philosophy, gave it a distinctly
counter-philosophical tone. But it did become a worldview. Sartre has
famously asserted that Existentialism is a kind of Humanism.8 However,
Existentialist philosophers find the usual expression of Humanism too
one-sidedly rosy, even Pollyannaish, and insufficiently critical in its
understanding of the human being. Humanism magnified human
richness, especially as nourished by literature and the arts; it saw the
human being in a positive, optimistic light, and regarded human
existence as eminently sensible. Existentialists, by contrast, see human
existence as immersed in contradiction and absurdity. They are more
intent on wrestling with evil, alienation, despair, and death, and with the
way that death in the future reaches back into the present to unhinge
everything.

	Pragmatism has certain features in common with Existentialism:
like Existentialism, it protests against abstract intellectualism, and
maintains that the demands of concrete life force us to make decisions
before we can complete a rational analysis of them or arrive at theoretical
grounds for them. We must make decisions every day without being
able to gather all the information we would like. What we would all like
to do when faced with a major decision is suspend it until we have more
information. But how much is more, and how much is enough? The
truth of the matter is, we have no way of knowing how much relevant

	8. Sartre. Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Methuen & Co., 1948).
Note that for Sartre, Humanism entails atheism. This was not the case with Renaissance
Humanists, many of whom were Christian.



[ Page ] 10

information is available, or whether any of it is available. Yet these
decisions ultimately concern our total existence, and avoiding them is
not an option: we may be unable to make up our mind, but we cannot
help making up our life, because we will end up doing something (or
nothing—which, remember, is a kind of something). If we say, “I can’t
decide whether or not I should study tonight; I just can’t make up my
mind,” then we have already made it up: we will not be studying. Some
people say they are unable to decide whether to marry or remain single,
but as long as they dither, they have made up their life: they are single.
It is impossible not to decide, say the Existentialists. Even if you decide
to suspend your freedom for now, and let whatever happens happen,
that, too, is a decision that you make freely. Moreover, it is an ignoble
decision, because it means that you are living in bad faith,9 pretending
that you are not free.

	But whereas Pragmatists agree with Existentialists about the
unavoidability of deciding, the Pragmatists’ criteria for decision-making
are biological and utilitarian, with virtually no concern for what
Existentialism calls “inwardness.” Inwardness sounds like a highly
abstract, semi-Romantic, psychological notion, but it is a dimension of
human being that deeply concerns Existentialist philosophy, although
different philosophers understand it differently. For Kierkegaard, who
was a Christian, inwardness is one’s relation to oneself before God.10 Not
only do I relate to my neighbour, to my family, and to the world at
large, but I also relate to myself. I think about myself; I relate to myself.
The way that I relate to myself before God is what Kierkegaard calls
“inwardness.” Obviously, nontheistic Existentialists will have a different
understanding of the concept, but it figures largely in the thinking of
all of them. To eschew inwardness is to live in shallow phoniness. Eight
hours a day spent mindlessly in front of the TV, for example, would
involve minimal inwardness; anyone who did that would be considered
a pitiful instance of a human being by Existentialists. What can a person

	9. Exactly what is meant by “bad faith” will be specified below, especially in the chapter on
Sartre.

	10. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, ed. and
trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 390.



[ Page ] 11

be after hours of TV, except little more than a ghost or phantasm,
a shallow phony? Moreover, insists the Existentialist, such a person is
accountable for being a shallow phony; no one twisted his arm into
watching TV. He could have turned it off, or pulled out the plug. But
Pragmatism, knowing nothing of inwardness, does not trouble itself
with such issues.

	Like Humanism, Pragmatism tends to be more optimistic than
Existentialism. Pragmatism was developed by Charles Sanders Peirce
at the turn of the twentieth century in America. It was easy to feel
positive about humankind in that place and time; Americans had had
no devastating war in their own nation since the Civil War. But those
living in Europe fifty years later, in the time and place where
Existentialism arose, had had war after war after war on their own
soil—especially World War I and World War II, followed by the Cold
War. People in Europe at mid-century did not feel so unqualifiedly
positive about human existence; on the contrary, they had discovered
that having to act as a true human was excruciating. Existentialism
maintains that acting in truth is painful and disruptive, and may even
involve martyrdom. It costs everything to be authentic, and nothing to
belong to “the herd.”11 Pragmatism does not understand this cost.

	Nihilism, on the other hand, is extreme skepticism, the denial of
meaning and truth. The word Nihilism comes from the Latin nihil,
meaning “nothing.” According to the Nihilist, there is no substance
to traditional social, political, moral, or religious values; they are
meaningless. Certain Existentialists are sometimes called Nihilists,
particularly Camus, Sartre, Heidegger, and Nietzsche, because they offer
a fundamental critique of traditional value systems. In fact, however, all
of these Existentialists deny Nihilism, because they advance a philosophy
that promotes human integrity and authenticity. Obviously they find
meaning somewhere for human existence. On the other side of seeming
Nihilism, they see new possibilities for existing, a new understanding of
truth, and a “transvaluation of values.”12

	11. See chapters 6 and 7 for Nietzsche’s use of “the herd.”

	12. For more on Nietzsche’s use of this expression see chapters 6 and 7.



[ Page ] 12

	The above is an expression frequently used by Nietzsche,
who maintains that Western values, which are a carryover from
Christianity, need to be “transvalued” because they are degrading: they
promote self-loathing, exalt weakness, and lead to bitterness and
resentment. He points out that the earliest Christians (for example, in
Corinth) came from the lowest classes of society, including the slave
class, resulting in a slave mentality in Christian ethics: we cower before
God as “miserable offenders,”13 believing that we deserve condemnation,
and grovel for forgiveness. It is a pathetic valuation of human existence,
says Nietzsche. Moreover, because the earliest Christians were from
the underclass, they envied and resented the privilege of their social
superiors. This resentment14 seeped into the Western tradition: there is,
says Nietzsche, a characteristic contempt in Christian ethics for worldly
success, for wealth, for the power others wield; historically, Christians
have paraded this contempt as virtue when it is nothing more than
thinly disguised resentment. Even the convention of kneeling to pray
was repulsive to Nietzsche. It is ostensibly a sign of submission to God,
but he explained it as merely a holdover from the peasantry kneeling
before their earthly superiors, a humiliation which was then projected
onto God.15 The Christian value system is an exercise in human self-
rejection; it promotes self-loathing as virtue, and should be jettisoned.

	Nietzsche has identified something important here. Christians tout
humility as paramount, but they frequently express it in terms of self-
belittlement: “I am nothing; I am a worm, I am a miserable wretch.”
Genuine humility is not self-belittlement or self-rejection, but self-
forgetfulness. As long as you are belittling yourself, you are preoccupied
with yourself; you may say you are nothing, but in insisting on your

	13. Nietzsche would bristle at this language in the Book of Common Prayer. At the same time
he would have failed to grasp what it has in mind.

	14. Ressentiment in Nietzsche’s writing; he wrote in German, but retained this French word.

	15. For this reason the Puritans, who repudiated that humiliation, refused to kneel for prayer.
Jews also do not kneel to pray; they stand, believing that prayer is a response to the God who
has spoken to us, and that his address dignifies us. Occasionally people in the Bible are said to
kneel at prayer, but this is a sign of overwhelming distress and not the usual posture. Jesus knelt
in Gethsemane, and Daniel knelt in exile because he was devastated by the situation of his
people. But normally, Jews have stood to pray, right up to the present day.



[ Page ] 13

own nothingness you remain self-preoccupied and so make yourself
everything. Moreover, so-called humility is often a cover for abdicating
proper human initiative; it degenerates into lack of resolve, and ends up
exalting weakness. Hence Nietzsche and other Existentialists—including
Kierkegaard—said that the values in Christian Western culture need to
be transvalued. But it was not as Nihilists that they said so.

	Distinctive Features of Existentialism

The whole philosophical tradition stemming from Plato privileges
essence over existence. Reason ignores what is changeable, contingent,
and particular in favour of what is unchanging, eternal or necessary, and
universal. Traditionally, therefore, philosophy has concerned itself with
humankind in general rather than with individual human existence.
But Existentialism is concerned with the concrete specificity of the
individual’s existence, which it considers more real than humankind
or any putative human “essence.” Humankind is an abstraction; some
people would even say it does not exist. We have all met specific persons,
but has anyone ever met humankind? If not, then does it exist at all? And
if it does not exist, why are we preoccupied with it? Existentialism, on
the other hand, always insists on the priority of existence over essence,
reversing or inverting the philosophical tradition. For Plato, the form of
something, in the eternal world of forms, has a reality more profound
than that of the object which embodies it. Existentialist tradition inverts
this: it is the concrete, the particular, that is real.

	To exist—existere in Latin, literally “to stand out”—is specifically to
stand out from nothing, because nothing threatens us at every moment.
We are always tempted to surrender our freedom—as if we
could—because it is too great a burden. We want to surrender our
responsibility, because we would rather not be answerable for our
actions. Nothingness laps at us every moment, and to exist is to stand out
from that nothingness. There is an old Christian hymn that says, “Oh to
be nothing, nothing.. .Only to lie at His feet.”16 All Christians, of course,

	16. Georgiana M. Taylor. Each of the three stanzas begins, “Oh, to be nothing,
nothing!” Victorious Life Hymns (Dayton, OH: Heritage Music Press, 1975), #45.



[ Page ] 14

want to be rendered useful to God, but what is he to do with nothing?
Of what use to him is nothing? For the Existentialist, an aspiration to
be nothing is a complete abdication of being human. To exist is to be
someone, to be self-enacted, to stand out from nothing.

	We are back again to the question of nothing, because it is so
important in Existentialist thought. What do we understand by nothing?
If nothing is nothing, can there be anything in it to understand? We can
understand a chair, a pop can, or a rock, because it is something; but can
we understand nothing?

	We can ask the same question about evil, another preoccupation of
Existentialism. What is it? Everyone has been, at some point, a victim
of evil, and everyone has been a perpetrator of evil; we know that it is
something, and that it is terrible. But if God is good, and his creation
is good, what is the origin of evil? Does it have any ontological status
at all? Is it amenable to our understanding? People say that evil is the
corruption of what is good. We can understand that; we can understand
a corrupted good. But surely evil as such, evil for the sake of evil,
cannot be thus explained or understood. One aspect of evil’s evilness is
its incomprehensibility, its sheer unintelligibility. To just the extent that
an event can be understood, it fails to be evil; if it can be understood,
then there is a reason for it. Influential everywhere, evil appears to be
something, yet as “nothing” it is utterly un-understandable, groundless,
and meaningless.

	Non-Existentialist philosophies aim at an intellectual grasp or
conceptualization of reality. Existentialist philosophy, on the other hand,
maintains that reality cannot be intellectually grasped. The only thing
that can be grasped intellectually is that which is artificially abstract;
what is concrete can never be intellectually grasped; it can only be lived.
The difference is like that between being married and reading a book on
marriage: the reality of marriage is the interpenetration of two specific
lives committed to each other in a relationship they aspire to let nothing
terminate except death. No amount of reading a book on it will yield
the reality, just as no amount of reading a book on swimming will make
you a swimmer: at some point, you must let go of assorted securities and
risk all by jumping into the deep end of the pool.



[ Page ] 15

	If reality cannot be grasped intellectually, neither can it be
conveyed by direct communication. We can directly communicate
statements, truths, propositions, principles—but not reality. For that,
indirect communication is essential. Think about the difference between
fiction, or literature generally, and philosophy as traditionally practised.
The abstraction that is in my mind I endeavour to communicate to your
mind; we sit and discuss Plato’s theory of the forms, or Kant and the
transcendental unity of apperception, and try to finesse the concepts so as
to make clear by our words and arguments what we mean. We ask one
another, “Do you see? Do you understand?” and answer one another,
“Oh, yes, I get it.” We are communicating directly something that is
itself no more than a concept, and a highly abstract one at that.

	But fiction, or poetry, communicates indirectly by inviting us into a
reality that we live by means of the imagination. As a philosophy student
I took only one course in English literature in my entire university
career, but I often ate lunch with students who were majoring in English
literature. I thought they were soft in the head: I was a philosopher, a
rigorous thinker, whereas they merely filled their heads with emotional
mush spewed onto a page. And then in 1963 I read Northrop Frye’s
informative little book The Educated Imagination, in which he describes
how literature functions.17 Literature creates a world, and the writer
invites your participation: you will not understand what the novel is
about unless you step into that created world and live in it. Once I
perceived this, the world of literature was suddenly delivered into my
hands.

	I also started reading parts of the Bible besides the epistles. The
epistles are highly abstract: “In Christ God was reconciling the world to
himself.” “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God
through our Lord Jesus Christ.”18 But in the gospels, Jesus walks along,
engaging living persons in the course of his daily encounters, some of
whom accost him with questions like: “Why do you eat with ne’er-do-
wells?” Jesus never answers them with an argument or explanation. He

	17. Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination (Toronto: CBC Publications, 1963).

	18. 2 Corinthians 5:19 and Romans 5:1, respectively. Unless indicated otherwise, all biblical
quotations are from the Revised Standard Version (Oxford: O.U.P., 1973).



[ Page ] 16

does not say, “I’ll tell you why; here’s the reason.” Instead he spins a
yarn beginning, “Once upon a time a man had two sons. And he said
to one...” and so on. The parables of our Lord are pure fiction, but
they are his favourite means of communicating. He never communicates
directly, because the reality of the Kingdom of God is such that while
it can be pointed to described, and commended, it cannot be conveyed
intellectually and so known at a distance, from the outside; it cannot be
known until we step into it. The traditional philosopher thinks we can
know something while remaining detached from it, and would even say
that detachment from it is the condition of knowing it; the Existentialist,
by contrast, says that commitment to something is the condition not
only of knowing it, but also of knowing oneself as transformed by it.
Jesus’ answer seems to confirm this. To those who will not commit
themselves to the Kingdom until the Master has proved its nature and
presence, he only says, “You want a sign of the Kingdom so that you can
decide in advance whether it is worth entering or not. There is no sign.
Either you abandon yourself to it, or you will never know. To commit
yourself unconditionally to the Kingdom is to know both Kingdom and
self; to withhold such surrender is to know neither.”

	The conversation in John 10 is another good example. People say to
Jesus in John 10:24, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are
the Christ, tell us plainly.” Jesus does not take pity on these people who
are uncomfortable being kept in suspense, and say to them, “All right.
I’ll tell you if I am the Christ or not. Listen up....” Rather, he insists he
will not tell them. And the reason is that if he tells them he is the Christ,
they will say, “Oh, good, because some of us thought you were.” And if
he tells them he is not the Christ, they’ll say, “Oh, too bad; some of us
thought you were.” But either way they are no different. The only way
they will ever know whether Jesus is the Christ is through committing
themselves to him.

	Again, ponder Mark 8:12. Jesus asks, “Why does this generation
seek a sign? Truly, I say to you, no sign shall be given to this
generation.” People want a sign; that is, they want Jesus to authenticate
himself to them independently of their commitment to him. He refuses.
He says, “I will not authenticate myself to you and leave you detached



[ Page ] 17

from me. The only way you will know who I am is if you abandon
yourself to me. As long as you do not abandon yourself to me, you
will never know who I am, no matter what I say or do.” Prior to
a commitment to Jesus, no sign is sufficient; following such a
commitment, all signs are superfluous.

	Once I moved past my inexcusable prejudice against imaginative
literature (thanks to Northrop Frye), the gospels came alive for me—and
so did the Old Testament, because so much of it is cast in the form of
story. Nearly all evangelical preaching comes out of the epistles, because
their explicit reference to concepts like justification or reconciliation
makes them seem like an easier way to communicate than preaching
from the gospels or the Old Testament narratives. But Jesus invites us to
live in the reality of justification by telling us the story of two men who
go to the temple to pray: it is the second one, the reprehensible person
devoid of moral merit, who goes home justified. Similarly the truth of
reconciliation is grasped existentially through Jesus’ action as he pulls the
contemptible Zacchaeus out of the tree and invites himself over to lunch
in Zacchaeus’ house—the outcome of which is that Zacchaeus is rightly
related to God.

	In short: reality, according to Existentialism, can be pointed to,
commended, or urged on others, but it cannot be communicated.
Martin Luther said that everyone has to do his own believing, just
as everyone has to do his own dying. Similarly, Jesus says that only
you can enter the Kingdom of God for yourself. And only you, says
the Existentialist, can exercise your own unforfeitable freedom so as to
become an authentic self.

	The question that metaphysics asks is: What is real? Metaphysics
asks about reality abstractly and speculatively. But the question that
Existentialism asks is: On what am I willing to stake my life? And none
of us is going to stake our life on an abstraction. We stake our life only
on that which is utterly real for us. Neither abstraction nor speculation
nor mere concept meets that criterion.

	The reality that Existentialism commends is not unknowable. It
can be known, but it is known by experience, and the evidence of
this knowledge is personal transformation. Here we encounter another



[ Page ] 18

distinctive feature of Existentialist philosophy. If I were to ask you, “Do
you know pain? Do you really know pain?” I would not be asking
whether you have a scientific understanding of the neurophysiology of
pain, how it works, what sort of thing is likely to cause it, and what
its function is. I am asking, first of all, whether you have had much
experience of pain; and secondly, whether that experience of pain has
been so intense and profound as to make you forever different. You
know pain to just the extent that it has made you different.

	Similarly, what does the prophet mean by the question, “Do you
know God?” It is not a question whether you can pass a Systematic
Theology examination. The prophet is really asking, “Have you
encountered God? Do you have an experience of God? And is your life
forever different as a result?” When Isaiah says on behalf of God, “This
people, Israel, does not know me,” he is not complaining that they lack
theological information—the Israelites are the best theologians in the
world—but that their lives remain unaltered by an experience of God.
They remain unaltered because, despite their theological sophistication,
they have yet to meet the One of whom theology speaks, the One to
whom it points. They do not know God.

	For the Empiricist, to know is to have information about the
properties of something. But knowing persons, or knowing God, is
never a matter of acquiring information about properties; it is a matter
of being transformed by an encounter with someone. Martin Buber’s
writing is characterized by this notion, as we shall see. I have been
married forty-five years, and if you were to ask me whether I know
my wife, I could tell you that she is five feet tall, weighs hundred and
five pounds, and speaks French, all of which is true. I would be giving
you information about her, the same information that is knowable by
anyone, but I would not be answering your question. The question, “Do
you know your wife? What do you know of your wife?” is answered
in this way: “What I know of my wife is exactly the difference that
living with her has made to me.” If I have lived with her for forty-five
years and am no different for it, then I do not know her at all, regardless
of how much information I have. In an Empiricist or Enlightenment
model of knowing, knowledge is information gained from detached



[ Page ] 19

observation of an object, but in an Existentialist model, knowledge
is personal transformation undergone through the commitment of a
subject to another subject. There is no object; knowledge involves the
commitment of a subject to another subject.

	Note that knowing of this kind is no less knowing. There is more
than one form of knowing. We live in a society so infatuated with
scientism19 that we tend to assume an Empiricist model as the only
model of knowing. It is indeed one kind of knowing, and an important
kind, but not the most important kind. What is the information gained
about any object, compared to the transformation of yourself through
intimacy with a fellow human? Our society is reluctant to use the word
knowledge for this. But the Existentialist says that, on the contrary, it
is the only kind of knowledge worth anything. Kierkegaard faults the
church relentlessly for having substituted intellectual apprehension of
doctrine for intimacy with the One of whom doctrine speaks. To be
sure, we should never minimize the place of doctrine, for doctrinal truths
describe the Lord who is Truth (in the sense of “reality,” as in John’s
gospel). Yet however much doctrine describes Jesus Christ and points to
him, it can never convey him. Only the Holy Spirit conveys Jesus Christ
to us, and does so only in the course of our abandoning ourself to him.

	Moreover, real knowledge, according to the Existentialist model,
arises only with the radical commitment of the whole person. Intellectual
commitment is necessary, but it will never suffice. Knowledge of reality
arises only through the radical commitment of the whole person,
because it is only in such commitment that reality itself occurs. In other
words, strictly speaking, we do not come to know an already-existing
reality; rather, the reality arises only in the instant of our knowing it. This
is different, of course, from all Empiricist models: if you are examining
the properties of aluminum in a laboratory, says the Empiricist, the
aluminum exists independently of your knowing it and is unchanged by
your knowing it. But in an Existentialist model of knowing, the reality

	19. Scientism is (among other things) the illegitimate encroachment of the scientific method
into non-empirical areas of life, with the result, for instance, that scientific knowing is deemed
to be the only mode of knowing.



[ Page ] 20

is not that which you apprehend; rather, the reality occurs or arises in the
course of your commitment.

	Buber, a Jewish Existentialist thinker, presses this point with respect
to God. On the one hand, God exists independently of us. However,
says Buber, we have no access to God in himself independent of our
engagement with him; in fact, we do not even know there is a God to
engage with until we engage with him. Reality for Buber is what he
calls “the between.” It is the encounter, the engagement between God
and us, the small-s subject with the capital-S Subject.

	We have noted that for all Existentialists, theistic or not, reality is
not simply apprehended; strictly speaking, it occurs in the moment of
self-commitment. Reality, in this view, is not the same thing as actuality.
The objects in our environment are elements of actuality. To say that
a desk is actual is to say that it is not imaginary or mythological. But
is it real? From a Christian perspective, reality is the effectual presence
of Jesus Christ in his engagement with us, drawing us into intimacy
with himself. From a nontheistic Existentialist position, reality is the
transformation that occurs in our existence in the course of our self-
commitment to someone or something. This squares with Buber’s
understanding of what it means to know someone, according to which
the measure of our knowledge of someone else is precisely the difference
made in us by our unreserved engagement with that person. In other
words, in an Existentialist model, to know is always to be transformed,
and that process of transformation is reality.

	Consider the Hebrew notion of      (teshuva), or repentance.
In the Christian tradition, as Nietzsche liked to remind us, repentance
has typically meant feeling wretched about oneself. But in the Hebrew,
teshuva means to make a 180-degree turn, to turn around, to make an
aboutface that re-orients us towards God in fresh commitment to him.
Fallen human beings do not seek God, although they think they do;
we have to be turned around to face God. Since we customarily flee
God, repentance is a turn back towards him. The Hebrew Bible has
three major metaphors for repentance, and every one of them has to do
with relationship, with reviving one’s commitment to another person.
The first is an adulterous wife returning to her husband (we could just



[ Page ] 21

as easily say, an adulterous husband returning to his wife); the second
is idolaters returning to the true and living God; and the third is rebel
subjects returning to their rightful ruler.

	The adulterous wife who returns to her husband has violated him
and disgraced herself, but she returns to long-standing, patient, freely-
accepting love. When idolaters put away their idols to worship the Lord,
they are turning from what Hebrew calls “the nothings” (literally) to the
real, true, living God.20 And when rebel subjects return to their rightful
ruler, they turn from disorder and chaos to order and integrity. The
Bible understands all of these radical transformations as commitments
to a relationship. While I am not suggesting that a straight line can
be drawn from Existentialist philosophy to the Hebrew Bible or to the
ministry of Jesus, there are clearly more than a few affinities.

	We have observed that, according to the Existentialist, knowing
is transformative and is impossible without radical commitment. The
next crucial point to note is that, in the course of such a radical,
transformative commitment, the self is forged. Before that, you are a
pre-self, a non-self, a sub-self, or a ghostly self. The self is “forged”
according to Sartre, and “chosen” according to Kierkegaard, but for
both, it arises from commitment. Recall that Existentialism opposes all
forms of Essentialism, which sees the self, or human nature, as given. It
is not the case, say the Existentialists, that everybody has a self: rather,
one becomes a self. Nor is there a human nature that determines our
behaviour: for Existentialists, blaming human nature is an indefensible
evasion. Nobody has to behave in a particular way. There is no
generalized, universal human nature which is given, only a self that you
enact. That is why Existentialists speak of the human ‘condition’ rather
than of a human ‘nature.’

	It is true, of course, that things in our personal history, especially
our childhood, have shaped us to some degree. There are many things
about my childhood and my upbringing that I relish and want to
perpetuate, and many other things that I want to avoid duplicating

	20. Incidentally, this brings us back to the Existentialist preoccupation with nothingness. An
idol is by definition nothing, in that no deity corresponds to it. But just like a lie, it is a
‘nothing’ that is also, in some sense, something, and exerts power over people.



[ Page ] 22

in my own parenting. The Existentialists would call all such matters
“facticity.” These are things we cannot change, but we can always
choose the way we respond to them.

	Facticity also includes external circumstances. For example, you
may be out hiking one day and come upon a steep hill.21 A variety of
responses are possible. You may decide the hill is too steep and the day
too hot, and turn back. Or you may say to yourself, “This is a wonderful
challenge! 1 wonder how fast I can run up that hill?” Or you may reflect
on the fact that the purpose of your hike was to get to a village five miles
away, and the hill is no more than a minor impediment on the way. But
the one thing you cannot say is that the hill made you turn back, or that
it defeated you, or that it made you do anything at all, because the hill
is non-essential; it is mere facticity. You did not have to respond to it
in the way you did. Of course, neither could you have moved the hill,
or reduced its size. The Existentialist would maintain that, like the hill
on your hike, many features of the world are unchangeable aspects of
our facticity; after all, only a deranged person believes he can create a
world of his own imagining. But we do have an irreducible, inalienable
freedom with respect to our response—and therefore responsibility with
respect to that response.

	Responsibility is a heavy burden. Sartre did much of his writing
during the German occupation of France, where people who were
found to have joined the Resistance movement were tortured and
executed. Many people were sympathetic to the Resistance movement,
but stood on the sidelines and did not join; they collaborated with
the Nazi occupation instead. “What choice did we have?” they said.
“We just wanted to survive until the war ended. And if this meant
capitulating to Nazism for the time being, what alternative did we
have?” Others, however, belied this rationalization by making a different
choice. Jacques Ellul, a lawyer, sociologist, historian, and Protestant
Christian thinker, joined the French Resistance even though the British
strongly urged people not to do so because the cost outweighed the

	21. Sartre has made this illustration notorious. He refers to it and examples like it throughout
Part Four, “Having, Doing and Being,” of Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New
York: The Citadel Press, 1965).



[ Page ] 23

return in terms of helping the war effort: the Resistance actually
accomplished very little in turning the tide of the war, and its members
were tortured and killed if discovered by the Nazis. After the war, Ellul
was asked why he had joined. He replied that if he had not, he could not
have lived with himself; he would not have known who he was, would
not even have been a self. The military efficacy of the Resistance, and
the risk of torture or death, did not finally matter as much to him as the
significance of that choice in becoming a self.

	We always have a choice, says Sartre, though it may carry a heavy
price. That is something we often prefer not to hear. In many situations,
we would rather pretend that we have no choice, that our background
and past experiences have deprived us of the ability to choose. The
Existentialist will have none of that. Existentialism, far more than most
philosophy, is concerned with the self and the forging or choosing of the
self, and maintains that it is only in committing oneself that one becomes
a self.

	Notice again the similarity here with biblical teaching—especially
in the terms used by Kierkegaard, who was a Christian. Kierkegaard
spoke of self-abandonment, or surrender of the self, as the condition
of becoming a self. What else is Jesus saying when he declares that
you gain your life only when you lose it, and that whoever tries to
preserve his life forfeits it? Kierkegaard even goes so far as to say,
paradoxically, that self-abandonment is the self. Only in the act of
radical commitment do we become the self we then recognize, in the
light of which we also recognize the non-self we were before. Peter
says to Jesus, “We have left everything and followed you.”22 Here Peter
anticipates the Existentialist, because until we make that commitment
of leaving everything, of self-abandonment in the midst of what others
regard as radical insecurity, we are not a self at all.

	Socrates is an illustration of this kind of commitment, even though
he was not a Christian; he lived in the pre-Christian era, and there is
much in his philosophy that a Christian cannot agree with. Socrates
was imprisoned by the Athenians for his teaching, and was told that his
life would be spared if he recanted. He refused. His friends, seeing that

	22. Mark 10:28.



[ Page ] 24

he would not recant, offered to sneak him out of jail and into another
country, and so save his life. He refused that as well. These two choices,
his refusal to recant and his refusal to escape, indicate that he was so
utterly committed to the reality of which he spoke that he was that
reality. He had staked his very self on it.

	One might well ask, at this point, whether it matters at all to the
Existentialist that we abandon ourselves to one thing or person rather
than another. That is, are all commitments of similar value? Given equal
levels of commitment, is the mobster as authentic as the missionary?
Existentialist ethics, as will be seen in the chapter on Sartre, maintains
that the exercise of my freedom ought not to curtail anyone else’s; and,
no less telling, that the choice 1 make concerning myself I implicitly
make for all.23 One thing we can say on behalf of the Existentialist is that
even a commitment to what someone else regards as an improper end
is nonetheless a self-forging and a self-forming. We choose the self we
become. It is not that we choose among alternative available selves, like a
child at an ice cream counter looking at all the flavours and choosing the
one she fancies. Rather, in the act of self-commitment the self arises for
the first time in our lives.

	Presuppositions of Existentialism

Obviously, Existentialism rejects determinism. We are free to make
decisions, in the sense that we are not finally determined biologically,
psychologically, politically, and so on. We are all subject to many kinds
of determinations; but these manifold determinations do not add up to
determinism.

	Second, Existentialism holds freedom to be inalienable. We are
condemned to be free, says Sartre; we cannot repudiate our freedom.
Anyone with Christian theological training will recognize two different
understandings of freedom here; in any case, however, according to
Existentialism freedom is something we cannot abdicate. We are entirely
responsible, and cannot blame anybody or anything for our decisions.
Nor can we avoid deciding: not to decide is itself a decision.

	23. This concept is explained further in chapter 11.



[ Page ] 25

	Third, meaning does not inhere in things independently. Meaning
is not given to us by features of the thing we are contemplating, nor
created by an articulation of concepts; rather, meaning is brought forth
by our response. The meaning of an event, encounter, or opportunity
is forged in a response-as-commitment, and is disclosed in the
transformation of the person who experiences it. That which makes no
difference to one’s life has no meaning, no human significance.

	In light of the above, it is less important to try to understand
something, such as evil, than to respond to it. As was noted earlier, to
the extent that evil is meaningful, it is not evil. Consider the Holocaust,
for example, and the millions of people who were gassed and whose
remains were incinerated in the crematoria, or the millions of children
who were simply thrown alive into the crematoria. To claim to have
found meaning in it is to trivialize the event and demean its victims. One
of the mythologies of our society is that everything in the world must
ultimately be made transparent to our understanding. For Existentialism,
however, meaning always pertains more to response than to
understanding. Hence the question we ought to be asking about evil is
not: What does it mean? but rather: What are we going to do about it?
What is our response to horror that paralyzes comprehension even while
our responsibility in the face of it is undeniable?

	The features and assumptions we have been talking about can be
illustrated in the following way. Consider the statement, “All humans are
mortal.”24 Everybody agrees with that; we all know we’re going to die
one day. But now suppose you are told, “You are going to die today.”
This bites a little more, because there is a turning from the universal to
the particular, from the objective to the personal, and from the abstract
to the concrete. And if Jesus says to you, “Fool, this night your life is
required of you,” that bites even more, because now there is a turning
from mere statement of fact to a call to responsibility. And now, suppose
you decide to change your priorities because of this, to do certain things
and speak to certain people in your life: this is a turning from detached
reflection to committed response. These five turnings capture the heart

	24. For several illustrations I am indebted to Roger L. Shinn, The Existentialist Posture (New
York: Association Press, 1959), 15-18.



[ Page ] 26

of Existentialist thought. In this fivefold turning, for the first time in
your life, your self appears, because it now is; it can appear only once it
has come to be. Prior to that, you were a potential self, a putative self, a
semi-self, or a ghostly self, but you were never real. Only now, in this
fivefold turning, have you become real.

	When the Existentialists say that you were not real before this
fivefold turning, they are not denying your facticity or actuality. There
was always an actual you, weighing so many pounds, living in this or
that place, member of a certain social class, and so on. These things are
not nothing, but they are not you, they are not the real you, your self.
Until this fivefold turning occurs, the real you has not appeared, because
it has not yet been forged.

	How one understands the foregoing hinges on whether one is
a Christian (theistic) Existentialist or a secular (atheistic) Existentialist.
From the point of view of biblical theology, fallen human beings are
nevertheless human; they have not become something less than human,
or some other kind of creature. But there is something grossly defective
about the fallen human being. The image of God in which we were
created can never be forfeited or effaced, but it can be tarnished, and it
can be defaced. Every fallen human being is made in the likeness and
image of God, but that image is so pathetically defaced that it provides
no transparent insight into God’s nature. My brother is made in the
image and likeness of God, and that image cannot be forfeited; therefore
1 have no excuse for ever treating him as less than fully human. But the
image of God in him is not evident, and in that sense one might describe
it as “nothing”; it does not correspond to the reality it is intended to
reflect. There is a recognition in Christian Existentialism that, while no
human being is a nothing, we become our real self—we find our real
identity—only in the act of abandoning that self to Christ in radical
commitment.25

	25. C.S. Lewis’ discussion of hell gives an insight into the Christian notion of selfhood, or
lack of selfhood. He talks about hell as the state wherein one becomes radically
depersonalized—not psychologically, in the sense that one feels depersonalized, but in an ontic
sense, so that one exists somehow only as a subperson in a sort of shadowy existence. See C.S.
Lewis, The Great Divorce (Glasgow: Fontana Books, 1972).



[ Page ] 27

	Threats to Selfhood

Existentialists are keenly aware of threats to selfhood. One such threat
is the common identification of human beings as machines, as
neurologically programmed. The growing edge of psychology today is
neuropsychology, which often risks reducing psychological states and
events to neurological impulses in the brain by a sort of neurobiological
determinism. If this is the last word about the human, then we are
mechanistically determined, whether we like to think so or not. This
understanding is reflected in the current aim of technological innovation
to approximate ever more closely the thinking and decision-making of
a human being. If, to all intents and purposes, we are machines, what is
the self?

	Another threat to selfhood is our tendency to seek comfort above all
else. A great deal of so-called common sense is mere comfort-seeking.
What people mean when they say, “Well, it only stands to reason...”
is that we understand the behaviour of anybody who promotes her
own comfort, and find irrational the behaviour of someone who is not
preoccupied with her own comfort. If we are fundamentally comfort-
seekers, there is no place for guilt, anguish, or sacrifice, whereas these
things are key to what Existentialism is finally all about: they are the
furnace in which the self is forged.

	Yet another threat to selfhood is the view of the human as
commodity, as a thing that supplies labour to the process of production,
rather than as a person who labours. We all recognize Karl Marx as
the thinker who most notably exposed this threat. Marx thought that,
prior to the revolution, people exist in a kind of subhuman, shadowy
state, thoroughly determined by their capitalistic overlords, and that
only through revolutionary activity do they become selves. He
maintained that by collapsing ourselves into our labour, we reify,
objectify, or “thingify” ourselves, so that we become depersonalized and
alienated from ourselves. And once reified and self-alienated, we can
become a self only through radical commitment to the revolution. Marx
was not considered an Existentialist thinker, but there is enough overlap
to conclude that he is at least a semi-Existentialist: certainly he shares
Existentialism’s criticism of Hegel.



[ Page ] 28

	Then there is the view of humans as animals. There is more than a
little truth to this view. In the biblical story of Creation, human beings
and warm-blooded animals are made on the same day; they are both
“sixth-day creatures,” as it were. Moreover, we are not the only creatures
whom God loves, because God also loves the animals; he protects them
and provides for them. If it is not the love of God that distinguishes
human beings from animals, what does? According to Scripture, it is
the address of God: everywhere in the Bible, human beings are the only
creatures to whom God speaks. We are the only creature to whom God
relates via word. We do not know how he relates to the other animals,
but he relates to humans by means of word, and pre-eminently in the
Word become flesh.

	There are very significant commonalities between animal
psychology and human psychology. Those who think they are
wonderfully superior to the beasts do not know whereof they speak;
they are denying their own creatureliness. If we are deprived of certain
physical requirements, for example, we become very suggestible—a fact
exploited by cults in their methods of indoctrination. People who are
kept hungry or denied access to the toilet will believe anything they
are told, and people who are not allowed to sleep will soon lose their
ability to think properly. Casinos commonly do not have windows,
so that patrons cannot see when it is getting late; they continue to
gamble, because they lose their sense of the passage of time. The air is
superoxygenated, keeping everyone unnaturally alert so that there are
no bodily cues (such as fatigue) to tell them they should stop gambling
and return home. In short, we are biologically influenced to an extent
that is easily taken advantage of.

	Some people use this commonality as grounds for declaring that
we are no more than animals, but that is not true from a Christian
perspective. Christians and theists would say that human beings differ
from animals in that we are made in the image of God and are the
recipients of God’s address. Existentialists who are not theists would say
that we are distinguished by our self-consciousness, which gives us the
capacity for reflection and abstraction. An animal has consciousness, but
it does not have the neural complexity that supports self-consciousness.



[ Page ] 29

It may even be able to recognize words of human language: the most
intelligent dog has a vocabulary of about 200 words, but they are all
words that pertain to things in its immediate environment, like slipper,
newspaper, walk, and water. A dog has no capacity for reflection or
abstraction. The shift from consciousness to self-consciousness is huge,
and for many Existentialists, it is in that shift from consciousness to
self-consciousness that human uniqueness lies.26 The Christian, while
acknowledging the uniqueness of human self-consciousness, would say
that the image of God in us cannot be reduced without remainder to
self-consciousness; rather, self-consciousness is a precipitate or predicate
of God’s address to us.

	Theistic and Atheistic Expressions of Existentialism

	All theistic Existentialists insist on a distinction between religion and
faith. Kierkegaard presses this point tirelessly. In the Bible, the prophet
Elijah stands on Mount Carmel with the priests of Baal. He does not
see the encounter as a contest of religions, the religion of Baal versus
the religion of Yahweh, as if they were two things of the same order.
Rather, he proclaims to the priests of Baal that Yahweh is going to act
in such a way as to expose their deity for the utter non-entity that it
is.27 Religion, says Karl Barth, is humankind’s attempt to justify itself
before an arbitrary and capricious god; it is what people do to try to stay
on the good side of a deity they are not too sure about. Faith, on the
other hand, is our knowledge that God of his own free grace has already
justified us.28 This is a crucial distinction.

	Jewish Existentialist thinker Martin Buber declared that modernity
is open to religion but closed to faith.29 There is no difference between
these two in the eyes of most people, including most people in church;
but for theistic Existentialists there is every difference. Regardless of the

	26. Readers of Existentialist literature should be aware that it regularly uses the term
consciousness to refer to self-consciousness.

	27. See 1 Kings 18.

	28. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics Vol. I, Part 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1970), section 17,
passim.

	29. Martin Buber, Eclipse of God (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), chapter 5.



[ Page ] 30

place given to great statements of theology, faith occurs only at the
level of trust or commitment. At the time of the Reformation, faith
was understood as understanding, assent, and trust—in Latin, notitia,
assensus, and fiducia. First we must understand something of the gospel,
however minimally; then we must say “Yes” to it, acknowledging that
it is true. But then we must commit ourselves to it, abandon ourselves
to it, and this is where faith really begins for both the Reformer30 and
the Existentialist. Of this fiducia, or trust, the biblical archetype in both
testaments is Abraham. Abraham abandons himself to the God who is his
only future, and for this reason Kierkegaard spends an enormous amount
of time and thought on the example of Abraham.

	Another way of understanding this is to notice the difference
between faith as an act on our part and faith as content, the things we
believe. The former is fides qua creditur, or that by which we believe—the
act of believing, expressed as commitment and action. Fides quae creditur
is that which we believe. What we believe is of course necessary for the
act of believing, but it is never sufficient.

	Objectivisms of every sort ask, What is truth? But Existentialism
asks, Am I truth? Kierkegaard says that truth is “an objective uncertainty
held fast in the appropriation process of the most passionate
inwardness.”31 The “objective uncertainty” is God: there is no proof of
him. But a Christian holds fast to this objective uncertainty in the most
passionate inwardness. She will stake her life on the truth that God is
and loves, even though she cannot prove it. That is what Kierkegaard
means by “an objective uncertainty held fast in the appropriation process
of the most passionate inwardness.” Kierkegaard also says that faith
is precisely the contradiction between that passion of the individual’s
inwardness and the objective uncertainty; your inwardness, recall, is

	30. Luther maintained, “Faith resides in the personal pronouns,” by which he meant that as
long as I say, “Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world,” I remain remote from the Kingdom.
When I can say from my heart, “Jesus Christ is my Saviour,” then I am a person of genuine
faith. See, for instance, “A Meditation on Christ’s Passion” in Timothy F. Lull, ed., Martin
Luther's Basic Theological Writings, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012).

	31. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 203. For a statement that is virtually
identical see p. 611.



[ Page ] 31

your relationship to yourself before God, and that is everything for you
when you have no proof of God at all.

	This passion, and this recognition of objective uncertainty, are
something we need to recover as Christians. What Kierkegaard deplores
under the name Christianity is virtually the same as Nietzsche’s “death
of God”: both men contend that Christianity has reduced God to a
laughingstock. Kierkegaard, a Lutheran, remained a Christian
nevertheless, whereas Nietzsche, whose father and grandfather were
Lutheran ministers, did not—if he ever was one.

	In addition to theistic Existentialism, there is atheistic Existentialism.
This category includes people like Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, and
Nietzsche. Given Sartre’s philosophical agenda, God’s existence would
be no more significant than his non-existence, for if authenticity arises
solely through self-commitment, my self-commitment will make me
authentic whether God exists or not. However, says Sartre, a God of
the kind Christians apparently believe in—namely, One who is infinite
transcendence, omniscience, and omnipotence—must be repudiated,
because such a God, in his towering, overwhelming objectivity, would
denature the human person; that is, he would reduce every human being
to a thing. Such a God would leave no room for humans, making human
authenticity impossible. Therefore, he must be denied. Christians have
little patience for this kind of talk, but atheistic Existentialists must be
heard; they hold up the mirror to Christian deficits. Perhaps God is not
as Christians have traditionally described him.

	Cautions and Commendations

Existentialism has reclaimed the orientation that, when combined with
the logic of Scripture, characterizes the best of philosophy in the
tradition of Socrates—namely, its insistence on courage and
commitment, without which humans are mere wraiths. Existentialism
also reminds us of life’s complexities, contradictions, and absurdities.

	Moreover, Existentialism prompts us to a healthy re-examination
of traditional statements about God. Luther said at the Heidelberg
Disputation of 1518 that the classical God—the God posited and
espoused by those not informed by the gospel of God’s self-definition



[ Page ] 32

as Israel’s crucified One—is indistinguishable from the devil.32 How
many people have we met who uphold what can only be a satanic
deity? Someone suffers from a severe physical or mental disability, or a
community is wiped out by natural disaster, and people attribute it to
the will of God. Such attribution only slanders God. Consider, rather,
the incident in Luke’s gospel where Jesus comes upon a woman who
has been bent double for eighteen years. By that time many people have
undoubtedly told her that her infirmity is the will of God and she must
come to terms with it. Jesus, however, hisses, “Satan has done this,” and
straightens her.33 Existentialists remind us that no relationship can be had
with a putative God who is sheer power, sovereignty, transcendence,
and impassivity. Only in Jesus Christ is the God of the gospel knowable.

	At the same time, Existentialism must be embraced prudently. In
rejecting conformity, bad faith, mediocrity, and so on, Existentialism
can readily become a pose. Rebellion, protest, and resistance can become
ends in themselves, and since they depend on having something to
oppose, they tend to become parasitic. Some people who embrace
popular Existentialism imagine, ridiculously, that it makes no difference
what we commit ourselves to, as long as we are committed. The history
and vocabulary of Existentialism easily lend themselves to mindless
faddishness.

	In addition, its concern for selfhood must not become the occasion
or legitimization of aggressive egocentricity, as though in pursuing
authentic selfhood I had the right to violate you.

	Moreover, the whole notion of freedom in Existentialism is highly
problematic. For Christians, freedom is the removal of every
impediment to acting in accord with one’s true nature as a child of God.
In other words, to be free is always to have been freed—freed for the
service of God and neighbour. Atheists, however, maintain that freedom
is the capacity for self-determination. What precisely is the Existentialist
notion of freedom, and how defensible is it? To what extent can it be
reconciled with a Christian understanding of freedom?

	32. Lull, Martin Luther's Basic Theological Writings, chapter 5.

	33. Luke 13:17.



[ Page ] 33

	Also problematic is the notion that human decision alone creates the
human ethical good. Theistic Existentialists would ask whether the good
is synonymous with the godly.

	Some forms of Existentialism, seemingly unaware that we become
selves only in the context of human relations, are so preoccupied with
self that they lose sight of the community. Self and community are
polar correlates; that is, as Paul Tillich maintains, the self exists only in
correlation with the world or community, and it is only in polar relation
to a self that the world is world as opposed to a chaotic mass.34 In other
words, self and world are essential to each other. Some Existentialists fail
to recognize this; among Christian Existentialists, that failure manifests
as a weak ecclesiology.

	Finally, Existentialism rightly recognizes the assorted
determinations to which human reasoning is subject. There is no such
thing as “pure” reason, and many Christians who naively vest
their confidence in that mythical entity need to be reminded that our
reasoning is affected by the Fall. However, atheistic Existentialism fails
to understand that faith is a rational, albeit not a rationalistic, event;
it is a reasonable human act and activity. Brought about by grace, it
restores the integrity of reason that was collapsed by the Fall. In other
words, so far from being irrational, the exercise of faith is consummately
rational in that grace, owned in faith, delivers reason from the assorted
rationalizations and social determinations to which it is subject in
the wake of the Fall.35 Freud, Marx, and the French sociologist Michel
Foucault all made similar observations about reason and rationalization.
Foucault in particular has shown conclusively that what passes for sound
reasoning in any society—that is, what is deemed common sense—is the
mindset of those who have access to social power. In short, what we call

	34. Paul Tillich. Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965),
168-171.

	35. In the wake of the Fall, the structure of reason survives—we remain rational creatures,
otherwise we would no longer be human—but the integrity of reasoning is compromised, with
the result that much of what we call reasoning is rationalization. More will be said about this in
subsequent chapters.



[ Page ] 34

reasoning is highly socially configured. Only God’s grace, owned in faith,
heals reason of its bondage to rationalization and restores its integrity.

	What can we take away from this overview of Existentialism?
Earlier we discussed the impossibility of direct communication of reality.
In view of that impossibility, we might think we have detected no
little irony in the fact that Existentialists have themselves written
reams—direct communication—on the forging of the self and on the
necessity of self-commitment for knowledge of reality. Why, in that
case, should we pay any attention to them, or give them any credence?
What more do we know for listening to them, and how can we tell
whether what they say is true? What meaning can it have for us who are
only reading verbal descriptions at second hand? It may seem, in the end,
that they have in effect failed to say anything significant. They would
readily admit, however, that they cannot deliver what they are writing
about. They are describing it, commending it, pointing to it, urging it;
but by definition their writing cannot deliver it.

	In this regard we do well to recall the situation where Jesus is
confronted with the demand, “How long will you keep us in suspense?
If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.”36 He refuses, however, to
reply directly—not because he wants to worsen their suspense, but
because the reality he is cannot be communicated directly. Those who
abandon themselves to him at incalculable risk (What if he turns out
to be mistaken, or a charlatan?) will find both him and themselves
“real,” while those refusing such commitment will never know who
he is or who they are. Jesus, we must remember, never directly said,
“The kingdom is...” Instead he testified indirectly, “The kingdom is
like...”—a fine pearl or a treasure hidden in a field, for which we give up
everything to gain what can be possessed, cherished, and commended,
but never conveyed.37

	36. John 10:24.

	37. Matthew 13:44-45.


***** This is the end of the e-text. This e-text was
brought to you by Tyndale University, 
J. William Horsey Library - Tyndale Digital Collections *****