Facs
Transcript
existentialist anti-idealism. I believe that the questionable state of American Protestantism is largely due to the fact that it identified idealism with Christianity. I still very often hear, if a man is criticized, the answer, “But he is a great idealist,” or “He is idealistic,” or something like that – [said] as a religious praise. Now if idealism is taken in its real meaning, this is no more a praise than if you say “He is a bad naturalist” – which I heard even more often in Protestant groups, and which, in my mind, is a devaluation. Naturalism is nothing negative from the religious point of view, as idealism is nothing positive from the religious point of view. They are philosophical attitudes and have philosophical arguments of epistemological and anthropological character. The problem arises only in the moment in which we come to the dimension of the ultimate. And there indeed, very serious problems arise, where the idealists miss the reality of man's predicament, and the naturalists do not recognize that it is a predicament, namely something in which man's existence contradicts his essence. And here is the theological dimension in which religion has opened the eyes. Here, religion goes together with naturalism and especially its existentialist development in the 20th century, over against idealism. This fight has been done in the last decades and must be continued.
On the other hand, religion must fight against a kind of naturalism which forgets that this situation is not the normal situation but is the situation of distortion of that which is essentially good.
Now these dimensions are not a matter of philosophical arguments any more. I remember a philosopher telling me: “Man has no predicament.” He said it from his naturalistic point of view,