This paper takes the movement of transcendence in Sartre and examines it in relation to another understanding of transcendence in relation to God circulating in Paris in Sartre’s formative years: that of Karl Jaspers. Through exploring the transmission and reception of Jaspers' thought in French philosophy, different understandings can be advanced as to why he engages with the figure of God as that which we transcend towards, however impossibly, and why he counts Jaspers as a Catholic existentialist.

This book interrogates the contemporary Lutheran theologian Eberhard Jüngel's theological anthropology, arguing that Jüngel's thought can provide a model for theological engagement with philosophical accounts of existence. Focusing on Jüngel's theology of existence, the author explores the thought of philosophers, including Heidegger and Hegel, their influence on and application to his theology, and argues that Jüngel's account of humanity should be seen as a response to atheistic existentialist accounts of existence. In showing how Jüngel's theology is informed by and dependent (...) on philosophical thought, this book provides a new lens on the interplay between philosophy, theology, and religion in twentieth-century German thought. It will be of particular interest to researchers in philosophy, theology, and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Existentialism is often seen and at times parodied as the philosophy of individuality, authenticity, despair, and defiance in a godless world. However, it cannot be understood without reference to religion, and in particular the monotheism of Christianity. Even the existentialist slogan, 'existence precedes essence', is formulated in relation to monotheism. This Element will show that monotheism and existentialism are intertwined: they react to each other, and share content and concerns. This Element will set out a genealogy of existentialist thought; explore (...) key atheistic and theistic existentialists; and argue that there are productive conversations to be had as regards key concepts such as freedom and authenticity, relationality, and ethics. (shrink)

SummaryThe hiddenness of God in relation to opus alienum reflects, in Luther, a particular theological anthropology: one based on the limits of humanity and the futility of human action; and one that ascribes a certain role to suffering. One aspect of this account of the hiddenness of God is a figure whose terror remains unmitigated even by the light of salvation. In their discussions of the hiddenness of God, Karl Barth and Eberhard Jüngel reject this particular hiddenness of God. However, (...) their theologies draw on the opus alienum, and in doing so, they examine and analyse the despair and anxiety that characterise it in their own discussions of evil as nothingness. These accounts of nothingness engage with philosophical accounts of nothingness as being that which prompts self-assertion and actualisation as authentic existence. However, this use of the opus alienum opens their theologies up to the figure that they rejected in their prior accounts of hiddenness: the hidden, alien, and terrifying God. (shrink)

Philosophy as a way of life has been undergoing a revival in recent years. This essay explores how the central idea of the spiritual exercises can be used to develop an account of philosophy of religion as a way of life. It details some of the contemporary uses and trajectories of philosophy as a way of life. Through engaging the religiously inflected philosophies of Karl Jaspers and Simone Weil, this paper argues that their thought can present an account of philosophy (...) of religion as a way of life that is both ethically and transcendentally oriented. (shrink)

This article is concerned with how a particular concept of ontology switched from theistic to atheistic to theistic again due to the influences and disciples of Martin Heidegger. It is agreed that Heidegger took aspects of Christian thought, namely from Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther, and Søren Kierkegaard, stripping them of their relation to God and instead orientating them to nothingness. Despite Heidegger’s methodological atheism, his ontology was taken up by a number of theologians such as Ernst Fuchs and Rudolf (...) Bultmann, who in their turn influenced Eberhard Jüngel, who in turn mentioned the direct influence that Heidegger has on his thought. Whilst Jüngel acknowledges his debts to Heidegger in the area of ontology, Jüngel also seeks to incorporate the history of God into ontology, where the history of God as Trinity is defined by the passivity of Christ on the cross, and how that event redefines evil’s work in nothingness. This article initially explores how Heidegger formulated his account of ontology, then explores how Jüngel re-Christianized Heidegger’s ontology; evaluating what can be drawn from these shifts about the relationship between ontology and history. (shrink)

This article is concerned with how a particular concept of ontology switched from theistic to atheistic to theistic again due to the influences and disciples of Martin Heidegger. It is agreed that Heidegger took aspects of Christian thought, namely from Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther, and Søren Kierkegaard, stripping them of their relation to God and instead orientating them to nothingness. Despite Heidegger’s methodological atheism, his ontology was taken up by a number of theologians such as Ernst Fuchs and Rudolf (...) Bultmann, who in their turn influenced Eberhard Jüngel, who in turn mentioned the direct influence that Heidegger has on his thought. Whilst Jüngel acknowledges his debts to Heidegger in the area of ontology, Jüngel also seeks to incorporate the history of God into ontology, where the history of God as Trinity is defined by the passivity of Christ on the cross, and how that event redefines evil’s work in nothingness. This article initially explores how Heidegger formulated his account of ontology, then explores how Jüngel re-Christianized Heidegger’s ontology; evaluating what can be drawn from these shifts about the relationship between ontology and history. (shrink)

In Schelling’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, he outlines an aesthetic theory of the novel and how it communicates truth, based around his Identitätssystem. In doing so, he understands truth as symbolic, where the symbolic is tautegorical. In his later lectures on mythology he instantiates a new understanding of ontology and mythology as tautegorical, and makes gestures towards how to understand aesthetic forms based on these new accounts. This paper explores how that new aesthetic understanding of truth, ontology, and (...) aesthetics can be used to create a new Schellingian theory of the novel. To explore this, the paper looks at the worldview presented in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, arguing that it could be seen as the late Schellingian novel and as such, present a new paradigm for understanding truth as communicated through literature. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article explores the influence and reception of the Kierkegaardian self in modern theology, focusing on the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the theologian Eberhard Jüngel. In an attempt to transcend the atheistic philosophy of modernity, Eberhard Jüngel responded to the active, choosing self of modernity, as propounded Heidegger, by proposing an account of existence that is instead passive before God. However, as Heidegger’s philosophy itself is deeply in debt to Kierkegaard’s account of existence, Jüngel’s response to this active, choosing self (...) both echoes and is radically distant from Kierkegaard’s account of selfhood, wishing to have transformative faith in God but to move away from the individual relationship to God to a more communal, relational model. This article explores the debt that these thinkers have to Kierkegaard, and whether, in changing the active repetition of faith for the passivity of relational faith, Jüngel manages to overcome his own debt to Kierkegaard’s account of the self before God. (shrink)