Rollins’s earlier embrace of Eternal Recurrance quickly enough falls away in this section as he holds forth the hope that the same stuff, with the proper social agitation, won’t happen to the next generation as it did to the current one (148), and by the end of the book, Rollins, in his fervor for New-Left protest, seems to make of that group of folks something like a cross between Hegel’s world-historic souls and Plato’s philosopher-kings (174). Those who have developed the Christian themes of Kierkegaard’s existentialism explicitly focus upon the idea that the leap of faith we make must be one which causes us to surrender ourselves totally to God rather than to insist on a continued reliance upon our own reason. Rather than turning to 1 Corinthians 15, which in my own thinking is the best starting place for thinking about Resurrection as a horizon, or to Romans 12, which is as fine a place as I can immediately imagine for thinking about how Resurrection informs life in the Saeculum, Rollins turns to Camus and Nietzsche as helps to say what Resurrection looks like. Existentialism asserts that man is free from imposed moral values. Such an embrace of power as the core reality of existence rather than a corruption of the same logically leads, as far as I can tell, nowhere in particular: I’ve known Nietzscheans (and Foucaultians, the English department’s version of the same) who were right-wingers and Nietzscheans who were left-wingers. Because Eternal Recurrence has no content, has no telos against which to compare the recurring, Rollins easily enough turns his affirmation of “life” (a word which is always contested, even when a book pretends that it ain’t) into a programmatic progressivism and folks of his ilk, as they wander from conference to conference as the harbingers of “life.”. Some Christians tried to embrace existentialism because it was part of a modern trend in philosophy but it has never really worked except as a foundation for relativism. Is your language not listed? Although Bultmann argued that the choice between an authentic and inauthentic existence cannot be made on rational grounds, there there does not seem to be a strong argument for saying that this is somehow analogous to the concept of Christian grace. the Wikipedia article on Christian existentialism. The views on Existentialism teach us otherwise to be selfish in a subtle way. So it goes. First, the existentialism embraces diverse doctrines; whereas Christianity has one Doctrine, the Doctrine of Jesus Christ our Lord. Help contribute and earn points to increase your VIP level to get extra benefits. I’m inclined to say that starting nowhere leads nowhere in particular, that extreme right-wing and extreme left-wing positions, along with the basically bourgeois libertarianism that Dawkins preaches, could just as well arise from nihilism. Christianity highly emphasizes two aspects of the future. Our regular listeners are, to a person, intelligent enough to know this without reading it, but this notice is for others who might wonder. But at some point these adventures need to anchor themselves somewhere in what is happening “on the ground”, so to speak. Traditional Christianity insists that God is the absolute final authority over His creation and all things. And, this is coming from someone who believes we need more good philosophy and other intellectual endeavors in Christianity, not less. Invoking a very Camus-flavored Sisyphus in the sixth chapter (128), Rollins calls Resurrection life an affirmation not of the hope of a life filled with goodness where this existence so often falls short but of life as already experienced (129). Two philosophers that could be considered both existentialist and Christian are Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. Your email address will not be published. In short, nobody gets resurrected for Rollins: some just stop crying out for a life that makes human beings suffer. Perhaps it’s because I work so regularly with college students and church congregations rather than with book publishers and conference audiences, but I found Rollins a bit tiresome as he reduced other people’s differences from his own ideology as satisfactions of “psychological need” and as he referred to those who differ from him as possessed of “infantile faith” (50) and as he took again and again the role of the Nietzschean psychologist, ignoring the content and substance of other people’s ideas in favor of swipes at other people’s inner states. A person is autonomous and is fully free to make choices and fully responsible for them, Rational grounds for theology and divine revelation do not exist, True faith transcends rationalism and God’s commandments, The true God is not the God of philosophers or of rationalism, The destruction of wars throughout human history proves there cannot be rational understanding of God or humanity, A Christian must personally resolve within self the content of faith from being a myth or mystery to being realty or truth before they will allow an understanding and acceptance of salvation. I’m perfectly willing to accept that I’m simply not versed enough in the language of existentialist philosophy, but it sure seems to me that Rollins operates almost entirely in a world of lofty abstract concepts, and when he does come down from there, it sure seems like nothing more than window dressing for a liberal theology that (in the words of another reviewer of Rollins) “evacuates all meaning” from traditional theological concepts like the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and doesn’t even seem to need any grounding in reality of either event.
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