Pick any topic from the instruction Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Pick any topic from the instruction - Essay Example If free will is a gift from God, then it is part of that same open system that God set in motion to follow its own course. There is the possibility that what atheistic existentialists take to be an accident is actually the seeming chaos of a free system, created by an entity, animated - not governed - by free will. The idea that theism can be compatible with non-theological concepts has gained currency in recent years. The Episcopal Church, for example, has adopted the idea that the rational can help aid one’s understanding of what God is because reason itself is a gift from God. Name 2 One need not cancel out the possibility of the other. Faith doesn’t have to be the only resource because man has other gifts, other intrinsic capabilities that he can use in concert with others. The theistic philosopher Henry Rogers wrote, â€Å"The truth is, that both Reason and Faith are coeval with the nature of man, and were designed to dwell in his heart together. They are†¦re ciprocally complementary; - neither can exclude the other† (Rogers, 339). ... ng answers, to looking beyond the suppositions of existentialism, Kierkegaard’s tendency was to fall back on his Lutheran background, Pascal from an Augustinian system of belief and Sartre and Nietzsche from the humanist school, of which they were to a large extent the product (Tillich, 25). For Kierkegaard, the search for answers was a striving for transcendence, which resulted from the realization that one is responsible for one’s own condition. Personal freedom lies at the heart of this position. One has the freedom to choose despair or strive for self-actualization. â€Å"Either possibility requires that the self moves toward transcendence, reliance on God’s help, according to Kierkegaard† (Gray, 279). As such, the subject engages in a kind of selection, a choosing of salvation or of a personal fall. The subject â€Å"comes to renounce its Name 3 immediate self and choose its eternal self. It accepts the paradox of the God-man, and through this qualit ative leap free itself from despair and reach salvation† (Stewart, 138). For Kierkegaard, theism is the vehicle through which the individual arrives, subjectively, at the fullness of his meaning as a human being. The individual works through this alone as the sole possessor of his own ethical and aesthetic reality, ultimately leading him to a state of grace. Kierkegaard and many of those who followed his precepts believed that Christianity, and other monotheistic religions, were expressions of hypocrisy that taught pure love but practiced a creed that seemed to believe this purity was the special reserve of a privileged few; specifically, of the wealthy and powerful. The Christianity they observed around them drew from a shallow moral well, one that provided dubious spiritual sustenance from its manifesto (the