And Finally. . .

Talking to Theologians

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) moved from psychiatry into philosophy after publishing his monumental General Psychopathology (1913) at the age of 30—the same age at which he was expected to die of an incurable illness. But Jaspers’s second, philosophical career was more extensive than his own doctors might have predicted, and he worked up to his death at the age of 86.

Among many other fields, he engaged with philosophy of religion, famously participating in public debates with Rudolf Bultmann on the relationship between myth and Christianity. ¹ We cannot know whether Jaspers had Bultmann in mind when he lamented the obstacles he encountered while attempting to carry on serious conversations with theologians:

It is among the sorrows of my life, spent in the search for truth, that discussion with theologians always dries up at crucial points; they fall silent, state an incomprehensible proposition, speak of something else, make some categoric statement, engage in amiable talk, without really taking cognizance of what one has said—and in the last analysis they are not really interested. For on the one hand they are certain of their truth, terrifyingly certain; and on the other hand they do not regard it as worth while to bother about people like us, who strike them as merely stubborn. And communication requires listening and real answers, forbids silence or the evasion of questions; it demands above all that all statements of faith (which are after all made in human language and directed toward objects, and which constitute an attempt to get one’s bearings in the world) should continue to be questioned and tested, not only outwardly, but inwardly as well. No one who is in definitive possession of the truth, can speak properly with someone else—he breaks off authentic communication in favour of the belief he holds. ²

This passage, which begins resembling a veiled attack, ends in a profound reflection on the importance to the life of faith of the willingness to embrace uncertainty, intellectual humility, and authentic communication with those with conflicting views. As an attempt to get one’s bearings in the world, theological inquiry must disavow definitive claims to absolute truth and genuinely acknowledge the uncertainty that surrounds and pervades it—as it does any worthwhile field of inquiry.

For the alternative, the terrifying certainty that Jaspers mentions, is pseudo-science—described in detail in his Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919)—which emerges out of the illicit attempt to extend objective, scientific insights beyond their proper limits into the philosophical realm of values, the intersubjective realm of existential communication. Later, during the Nazi period, confined to his Heidelberg house with his Jewish wife Gertrud, Jaspers acquired direct, painful experience of the potential implications he had predicted in 1919 of scientific claims being stretched into world views, mass movements and visions of new world orders. Communication infected by such sweeping, fragile certainty cannot be genuine communication at all.

In a world growing hostile to their ways of thinking, theologians would do well to heed Jaspers’s constructive critique and resist the temptation to respond in kind or else take refuge in silence or evasion. We must recognise theological ideas as lodestars, ways of getting one’s bearings, rather than objective certainties, remain open to authentic existential communication, and thus preserve the genuinely dialogical search after truth that Jaspers tried—but sadly failed—to pursue with his colleagues.