A bombshell in the playground of the theologians

pp. 109-127

in: George Pattison, Anxious angels, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, the three nineteenth-century thinkers who did most to define the terms of twentieth-century existentialism, were all thinkers outside the establishments of academy and Church. Most (but by no means all) of those we shall be examining in the remainder of this study held positions of authority in either or both institutions. It is therefore possible to see the religious existentialists of the twentieth century as seeking to incorporate, to legitimate and in some sense, perhaps, to tame the radical insights of the nineteenth century's anxious angels. However, it is no less true that the appropriation of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche in twentieth-century theology came about in a context that tended of itself to raise the kind of questioning of the social and intellectual structures underpinning religious belief to which they had been led in their time. At their best the religious existentialists of the twentieth century were not mere epigones, "applying" the "results' of others' anguished labours to the questions of academic theology, but were themselves attempting an original rethinking of the basic questions of religious belief in the light of analogous cultural pressures.