Existence of God

From all this one might expect the conclusion of the essay to be, that speaking of God is an expression of our involvement through the contingent historical word of judgment and grace, that it is therefore an 'expression' of being thus involved and that in it man confesses himself to be judged and justified, i.e. that it is no more than a confessing statement by believing man about himself and that to ask about the existence of God is pointless, since God 'is' only in what involves man through the word. In the final sentences of the essay, however, it transpires that Bultmann is serious about the confrontation of God and man, and that his assurance that 'speaking of God' is only possible as 'speaking of us' does not mean that the word 'God' only expresses, in the form of an objectifying proposition, a mode of our existing. He closes significantly enough with the surprising sentences: 'This, too, is speaking about God and as such, if there is a God, is sin and if there is no God, is meaningless. Whether it is meaningful and whether it is justified, does not lie in any of our hands.'

Thus the confession of being involved by the proclamation is meaningful not merely through its existential genuineness, but its having a meaning, i.e. its rightness and intrinsic reality, depend on something outside the gerson confessing: on the existence of God. The trouble about buitmann's putting it this way is, that it sounds like calling in question all that went before: it seems suddenly not to be the case that the word of judgment and grace brings with it the assurance of the existence of him who judges' and is gracious, but as if the existence question, whether 'there is a God' at all, makes everything doubtful again and as if this question could only be answered by objective determination apart from the faith that is directed towards the word of forgiveness. That this determining 'does not lie in any of our hands' could then indicate a regrettable difficulty, a technical one so to speak - but one which results in an abiding uncertainty in regard to the prerequisite of the reality of the whole. Perhaps, however, this troublesome impression comes from the brevity of the formulation.

Probably Bultmann means to say that faith itself does not lie in any of our hands, that we cannot provide ourselves with it by our own resources. but that those who are granted to hear in faith are in hearing the word cnnvinced at the same time of the existence of him under, whose judgment and grace they here come to stand. At all events this conclusion to the essay shows that to the confessing of faith there necessarily belongs also the assertion of the existence of God. With this assertion the believer confesses to the confrontation of God and man as one that is not merely verbal but real even if it can be ascertained only in faith and thus not apart from the hearing and accepting of the word of justification of the sinner as that word reaches man.

At this point we may mention also another remark of Heine's: 'The very fact of seeing someone discussing the existence of God fills me with the same peculiar fear, the same horrible anxiety, as I once felt in New Bedlam in London when, surrounded by nothing but madmen, I lost sight of my guide. "God is all that is" and doubting him is doubting life itself, is death.'

Whether this inevitable 'as if' which is nevertheless to be unmasked as a deceptive illusion is valid not only for the realm of the theoretic, but likewise also of the practical reason, or whether Kant considers a qualitatively different measure of assurance about the existence of God to be given in the latter, is well known to be a moot point among students of Kant; in our context it suffices to note that in both cases Kant sets out from a need of our reason and on that basis enquires about the assumption of a divine being.