Existential Theology

An Introduction

Hue Woodson

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781532668401, 9781532668418
• eBook ISBN: 9781532668425
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Existential Theology: An Introduction offers a formalized and comprehensive examination of the field of existential theology, in order to distinguish it as a unique field of study and view it as a measured synthesis of the concerns of Christian existentialism, Christian humanism, and Christian philosophy with the preoccupations of proper existentialism and a series of unfolding themes from Augustine to Kierkegaard. To do this, Existential Theology attends to the field through the exploration of genres: the European traditions in French, Russian, and German schools of thought, counter-traditions in liberation, feminist, and womanist approaches, and postmodern traditions located in anthropological, political, and ethical approaches. While the cultural contexts inform how each of the selected philosopher-theologians present genres of "existential theology," other unique genres are examined in theoretical and philosophical contexts, particularly through a selected set of theologians, philosophers, thinkers, and theorists that are not generally categorized theologically. By assessing existential theology through how it manifests itself in "genres," this book brings together lesser-known figures, well-known thinkers, and figures that are not generally viewed as "existential theologians" to form a focused understanding of the question of the meaning of "existential theology" and what "existential theology" looks like in its varying forms.

chapter 1

Themes of Existential Theology

When calibrating the question of the meaning of existential theology to broader themes—or key inquiries that seek to answer specific questions about human existence in terms of how the meaning of human existence expresses itself meaningfully through varying, intersecting ideas—I wish to focus on the following key thinkers as general guideposts: Augustine, Aquinas, Martin Luther, and Soren Kierkegaard. From them, and through other thinkers contemporary to them, the question of the meaning of existential theology unfolds through guiding movements: the early church, medievalism, the Reformation, and the nineteenth century. Across each of these guiding movements, the question of the meaning of existential theology is further delineated through the specific concerns of faith, hope, love, sin, cosmology, theodicy, the justification by grace through faith, and selfhood.

Augustine’s Enchiridion: On Faith, Hope, and Love

In chapters 3 and 4 of Enchiridion: On Faith, Hope, and Love (ca. 420), Augustine discusses God as the creator of all, both representing the goodness of all creation and, by way of God’s innate nature, allowing for the existence of evil.

What Augustine seems to propose is a concept of theodicy17 as a means to articulate the personification of God’s goodness in everything God has created. Not only, then, is there an attempt to “characterize the topic of God’s govern[ing] of the world in relation to the nature of man,” but it allows for “[a] justification of God’s goodness and justice in view of the evil in the world.”18 Subsequently, when considering the relationship between good and evil as possibilities in the created world, Augustine is able to postulate that “in this [world], even what is called evil, when it is rightly ordered and kept in its place, commends the good more eminently, since good things yield greater pleasure and praise when compared to the bad things.19 It is precisely through this fashioning of theodicy20 that Augustine operates from the supposition that God, as creator of all and the origin of all goodness, imparts an innate “goodness [into] all creation”21 that provides for evil to exist innately. Evil, as Augustine argues, can never exist as such unless goodness can be brought forth from it by God’s omnipotent power and goodness,22 where it can be further presumed that, if “God is the author of everything [and], if evil is something, it follows that God is the author.”23 What this means, then, is that just as goodness comes from God, evil must come from goodness, even if God embodies only goodness and evil exemplifies a distortion of that goodness24—the relationship between good and evil as it is woven into this contradiction25 can be better explained, as a take on Augustine’s own argument, as “two poles, two opposite directions, the two arms of a signpost pointing to right and left [that] are understood as belonging to the same place of being, as the same in nature, but the antithesis of one another.”26 In other words, since goodness cannot exist without God,27 evil, as the antithesis of goodness, could never exist without God, existing not as goodness does but, instead, as a form of nonbeing.28 In this, subsequently, it is necessary to argue for the existence of evil being possible only out of the existence of goodness when both are considered as existing along the same timeline,29 whereby evil is not evil without having first been in a state of goodness. Specifically, when assuming more ontological terms, “evil is not a positive power; it is the negation of the spiritual. It is participation in matter, in non-being, in that which has no power of being by itself. Evil arises when the soul turns to non-being,”30 where goodness has being and substance. For Augustine, evil “is not a substance [but] the wound or the disease [that] is a defect of the bodily substance which, as a substance, is good. Evil, then, is an accident, [for example], a privation of that good which is called health.”31 In effect, Augustine provides a “double interpretation of evil [which] is non-being, a privation, and nothing positive,”32 in order to define evil not just as an entity in and of itself but, particularly, in relation to God and the goodness of God’s creation.

Augustine’s argument, then, does not necessarily insinuate that the existence of evil allowed through “a defect of the bodily substance” or some imperf...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• The Question of the Meaning of Existential Theology
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Situating Existential Theology
• Chapter 1: Themes of Existential Theology
• Chapter 2: Modern European Traditions of Existential Theology
• Chapter 3: Countertraditions of Existential Theology
• Chapter 4: Postmodern Traditions of Existential Theology
• Conclusion: Theologizing Beyond the Question of the Meaning of Existential Theology
• Appendix A: An Introduction to Robert Boyle’s The Excellency of Theology, Compared with Natural Philosophy (1665)
• Appendix B: Pluralism and Ecumenism
• Appendix C: “The March of God in the World”
• Appendix D: The Hermeneutical Significance of the Doctrine of Creation to Theological Thought
• Appendix E: Paul as Tragic Hero and the Use of the Soliloquy
• Appendix F: Vision, Seeing, and Sight
• Appendix G: Christophanic Moments, Ontological Proof, and Existential Truth in the Conversion of Saul
• Bibliography