Theistic existentialism, help me wrap my head around this concept

Having a difficult time understanding why anyone would even go in this direction. It seems to me that one of the defining characteristics of existentialism that sets it apart from other schools of philosophy is that it denies that humans can have any access to any extra-human reality (whether that be God, Objective truth etc). That such things are not independent of man, but our creations, that serve human purposes.

Is it possible that the God of a theistic existentialist is fundamentally different from the god of a rationalistic theist? That the rationalist theist regards God as something separate from humanity in a way that a theistic existentialist would not? Would this explain how someone could be a theistic existentialist but yet subscribe to existentialism as I've described it, as a disbelief in an extra-human reality?

Where's Naren when we need him?

My minister told me that all religious figures are existentialists or at least phenomenologists. I don't know whether he is right.

Existentialism allows for disbelief in a deity but does not require it. Existentialism first of all puts existence first. One can still make a leap of faith and believe in a God who cares, but that God cares in a universe that itself does not care.

That believer might have to adjust the characteristics of that God to fit the existentialist universe rather than the spiritual universe, but God is not denied outright.

Kierkegaard is the reference on this, but I believe Martin Buber is helpful also. I have almost no direct knowledge of either.

Robert

Tillich, The courage to be. Lovely book, very Christian, very existentialist.

This is an interesting point of view. It's sort of why I raised the distinction between rationalistic theism as opposed to existentialism theism. Rationalistic theism would probably have no problem conceiving of God as something as separate from humanity and God having an existence regardless of whether humanity had an existence or not or what it believed or didn't. That is, rationalistic theism, could be said to believe in an Objective God something/presence that exists regardless of what anyone thinks about it, believes or disbelieves.

God could have chosen to create the universe or not, God could have chosen to create believers or not, but regardless of the circumstances, from a rationalist perspective, the existence of God (as with anything else) is not dependent upon a perceiving subject or their beliefs or disbeliefs.

This I think also makes a distinction between a rationalistic theist who might define God as an obect of knowledge while existentialist theists tend to use terms like leap of faith.

What I find a little confusing about theistic existentialism is that it tends to have it both ways (or it least from my atheistic point of view it does). It preserves the idea of God as an objective extrahuman reality (that is, God is not merely a creation of the human imagination) but it also tends to preserve the idea of God as something that is encountered by man but would not exist without man, that is unveiled in an encounter.

Perhaps I'm misunderstading theistic existentialism here, but would a theistic existentialist regard God as something/power/personality that could exist apart from man?

On your last question, most religious existentialists, Kierkegaard being undoubtedly the leading proponent, are too skeptical of metaphysics and abstract rationality to answer a question like- does God exist apart from man? For example, someone mentioned Buber, who would say that God is always a Thou, and never an it. Basically, he would say that God can never be the object of a sentence if described in the third person. Analytically, this is the equivalent of saying 'God' does not designate anything in such questions, so there is no way to answer them. One can claim this is a cop-out, but it does seem to be a coherent, if frustrating, position.

I think there is fertile ground for existentialism in religious thought, if we focus on the notion of an alienated universe. What Sartre is rejecting is the notion that the world is created for the sake of man, with pre-ordained purposes. From Pascal on, religious existentialists adhered to the notion that the world as experienced is axiologically empty, which fits well with a notion of a hidden God. The difference with atheistic existentialists, of course, is that there are at least moments of redemption when God can be glimpsed, even if never fully revealed. From what I understand this is big in the protestant tradition, the infinite gap, not just metaphysically but experientially, between God and Man, in someone like Karl Barth.

A little off topic, but I wouldn't push the differences too far because 'secular' existentialism has a tendency to return to non-self created realities as sources of meaning- Sartre's turning to Communism, for example- or to self-destruction, as in Nietzsche's breakdown. So, While Kierkegaard's
leap of faith', itself a 'pure' act of volition, does lead him into a non-existentialist reality in which he is no longer alienated from the world, and from God. In a sense it is hard for it to end any other way simply to to our hard wiring- we are programmed to accept the contingent, pre-exisiting set of values as real, and, after a while, need to struggle to convince ourselves they are truly illusory, as existentialist demand. If this makes any sense to anyone, I think good descriptions of this process of 'returning to reality' are found in Kierkegaard, I think the piece is called 'Philosophy Begins with Doubt', and a short book by Franz ROsenzweig, "Understanding the Sick and the Healthy".

One of the most insightful things I heard about existentialism, is to read Camus' The Stranger, as the epitomic existentialist- when you get down to it, what does it mean to start completely from scratch when creating values- nothing can come from nothing, so that a true existentialist is an empty person.

If I recall correctly (big 'if') many existentialists like Tillilch are quite close in position to that of negative theology, which says that we cannot really say anyting positively about god because god is so far above our human rationality. I know that existentialists like Kierkegaard ("I believe because it is absurd") take a "leap of faith" stance congruent with this type of negative theology.