Abstract

EXISTENTIALIST PHILOSOPHERS of religion and theologians speaking out of a Kierkegaardian tradition have argued that Christian theism can be neither proven nor shown to be probable in any strict sense of the word, that God is not an object of thought, that there can be no religious Weltanschauung, and that one can know and speak of God only out of a relationship to Him. This view has the value of preserving the element of unconditional commitment considered by many to be essential to Christian faith but has resulted in an inability to make a rational case for belief in God and in an inability to say anything significant about God. Existentialists have increasingly expressed dissatisfaction with the outcome of this approach and have insisted that religious faith is a way of being in the world, a matter of understanding as well as commitment and that religious faith must find expression in some ontology if it is to claim to speak significantly of God.