Existentialist Interpretation and Objective Description

Abstract

The failure of historicity in Buri’s theology can be traced to the way the problem of objectivity seems to determine existentialist interpretation. As a result, the content of faith reduces to personal being in an almost entirely unspecific sense, the only relationship between Christian assertions and Christian existence is causal or even magical, and the Christian self-understanding, in effect, becomes inaccessible to theological description. These problems can be avoided only if it is possible to specify the concrete historicity of the Christian self-understanding, but this will require some qualification of Buri’s restrictions on the possibilities of objectification. The task of this chapter is to examine how such qualification might be made within the bounds of existentialist interpretation. The discussion will have two aspects. First, it will be shown that a proper understanding of the non-objectivity of faith need not exclude certain kinds of objective descriptions of faith. Here the concern will be to define more carefully the nature and limits of theology as existentialist interpretation and to show what stake such a theology ought to have in the problem of objectivity. Second, the status of certain kinds of objective claims in Buri’s theology will be reexamined in order to see whether Buri himself does not inadvertently confirm the thesis of this study concerning the limits of the problem of objectivity. In the concluding chapter it will then be possible to consider the systematic consequences of this thesis for the hermeneutics of a radical theology.