Confessions Of A Christian Existentialist

As far as I know, I did not decide to enter into human existence; others made that choice instead of I.  Would I, were it possible, have chosen beforehand to experience life knowing what it would be like ahead of time?  I doubt it.  I do not love life itself, I only love a handful of things in life.  Remove those things and I would not have any significant desire to continue living.

Not the way many Christians talk, right?

Many Christians do not seem to accurately grasp the true depth of our epistemological and existential problems.  If they did, they would stop fleeing deep philosophical and theological matters, concern themselves far more with disciplines like apologetics and epistemology, and would completely revise their approaches to evangelism.  They would cease offering hope based on sentimentality and unverifiable anecdotes and would instead champion reason.  However, right now I am focusing primarily on my own existentialism, not the fallacies of others.

I want to find fulfillment--but not apart from truth.  Thus, I desire to experience all of the joys of personal fulfillment (which is a totally subjective experience) by finding that fulfillment in objective truth.  In other words, I deeply want joy, satisfaction, and peace, but only if those things are grounded in the way reality is, in a reality that not only is but also one that has objective meaning; I do not want those things if they are grounded merely in my own preferences with no connection to a higher reality.  Because of this, the fact that I can never know with absolute certainty during my human life if there is any intrinsic meaning to existence bothers me to no end (and no, the necessary existence of an uncaused cause alone does not by logical necessity grant meaning to anything in existence [1]).

Existentialism grapples with questions about identity and meaning.  Everyone is an existentialist to the extent that he or she has pondered his or her identity, nature, values, or whether or not existence contains any genuine significance.  As someone who has taken these pursuits very seriously, I have intensely grappled with what Camus called the "only serious philosophical problem": why not kill myself?  As someone who wields reason and has totally embraced living for truth, I have had to deal with the demands of my epistemological limitations and navigate the void of skepticism about a great many things, using a foundation of pure rationalism and a lifestyle beyond that built on probabilism.  I have had to convince myself on a daily basis to continue searching for something that may not even exist in the end.

During my pursuit of truth I have been forced by reality and reason into many truths that I once would have rejected, and yet I remain committed on a lifestyle level to Christianity.  Elsewhere, I have explained how and why I am both a postmodernist and a Christian [2].  And despite the fact that absurdism is, in an abstract logical sense, the inevitable rational result of existentialism short of absolute certainty about questions of meaning [3], I have found a massive amount of evidence supporting Christianity within the realm of my perception and thus I have committed myself to living for it.  Still, I do not find that an easy path to walk down.  I have been described as "ruthlessly logical", and it is that very logicality that makes it so difficult for me to commit, yet it is also that very logicality that reminds me that in the realm of my perceptions a great mound of evidence for Christianity seems to grow with time.  It is the great internal and external evidence for Christianity that motivates me to live for it, for there could be no other basis for committing oneself to such a belief system.

The isolation of such pursuits also forms a paradoxical situation--as an extrovert, I crave sociality, yet as a rationalist, I find myself repulsed by the widespread illogicality of most people I have met or heard of.  Do not expect to discover many people walking alongside you on the pathway to truth.  Many people prefer instead to either avoid thinking about these matters almost entirely or to make arbitrary, unverifiable assumptions about reality and live for them without doing the hard work of evaluation.  Unfortunately, the modern church is far from exempt from this.

There is nothing to gain by not being honest about myself and my existential burdens.  Ignoring or failing to acknowledge problems does not make them vanish!  Doing so may only compound the agony, isolating oneself from the possible support that others can give.  I am writing this for the sake of others--I want those outside of the church to see that some Christians really are epistemically and existentially honest, and I want those inside the church silently struggling with such burdens to see that they are not alone.  May both categories of people learn to welcome honesty instead of running from it, and may both learn that truth alone can deliver them from the burdens that are thrust upon us by nature of our own human existence.


[1].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/06/purpose-and-meaning-distinct-concepts.html

[2].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/06/my-postmodernism-and-christianity.html

[3].  See here:
A.  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/09/on-absurdism.html
B.  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/12/theistic-absurdism.html
C.  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-distinction-between-absurdism-and.html