Do you believe in God? The latter, according to Barth, is the product of human culture and aspirations and is not to be identified with saving revelation (for salvation cannot come from humankind, only from God). It is clear, however, from the divergencies among existentialists, that they contain speculative and idiosyncratic elements, and one question raised about the general applicability of their characterizations is how far they are bounded by the product of a particular mood in Western culture. Since World War II, Western Christianity has found it difficult, from a cultural point of view, to ignore the challenge of other religions, and the mood has changed somewhat from the more rigorous climate in which the theology of the Word (i.e., Barth’s position) was dominant. Troeltsch thereby raised some important questions about the relationship between Christianity and other religions and showed how Christian theology was beginning to take a more realistic view of religious experience and history, in distinction to the earlier rather simplistic dichotomies between special (i.e., Judeo-Christian) and general (i.e., natural) revelation. These concerns have raised important questions about the criteria of truth between religions, the tests of whether one religion is truer than others, and the extent to which valid identifications of belief can be made between one faith and another.

Also, the history and phenomenology of religion tend to raise essentially philosophical questions of explanation, where the issues are often debatable. Also, he claimed that it is not possible to dispense with the symbolic, which is essential to the task of speaking about ultimate reality, but the myths are to be “broken”-that is, they are to be seen as not being literally true. The same, in principle, is true for the comparative study of religion, though this sometimes is thought to cover the theology of other religions, such as the Christian appraisal of Hindu history. This aspect of Husserl’s thinking has not always or wholly been accepted by phenomenologists of religion, who have been much more oriented toward facts, though Husserl’s emphasis on essences often has tended to make religious phenomenology lean toward a static typology. The other heads look like they belong to Ares (yes, Marvel and DC both have a version of the Greek God of War); the swam monster Man-Thing; and the Mighty Bi-Beast, an enemy of the Hulk with two heads stacked on top of each other who is actually an android designed by an extinct race of aliens.

The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) was not individualistic like Sartre (or at least the early Sartre, whose thinking was modified by Marxism). Like the arch, his TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy International Airport (previously Idlewild), was completed after his death. In effect, modern dialogue continues an earlier tradition that emphasized some continuities between religions, notably the work of the British theologian John Oman (1860-1939), who was influenced both by Schleiermacher and Otto, though critical of the latter. We believe in God the Holy Spirit, who came to earth from the Father and the Son, to convict the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment (John 16:8). We believe that He regenerates (Tit. It has also come into contact with non-Western traditions and has thus stimulated concern with the problem of the nature of religious truth in a world perspective. Such attempts were later to come under radical criticism from, among others, the Alsatian philosopher-theologian and Nobel laureate Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) for describing the alleged Jesus of history in terms tailored to fit the presuppositions of liberal Protestantism. Discoveries about ancient Middle Eastern religions were also bound to affect biblical studies, and a well-defined school developed in Germany-the Religionsgeschichtliche (“history of religions”) school-which was critical of the rather unhistorical treatment of Jesus by Ritschl and others.

Important in this line of development was Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), in whose Quest of the Historical Jesus the eschatological teachings (statements about the “last times,” or end of the world as it is now understood) of Jesus are emphasized, together with the dissimilarity of his thought world from our own. The lords, gods and prophets are the dealers of the oneness of God and immeasurable are a peaceful thought on them. And I thought that – as the secretary of the society, I thought that we should talk to society, we should talk to Israeli society. Since religions are cultural products and since each system of belief is organic and particular, there are, according to Kraemer, no points of contact between them and the Gospel (even Christianity as an empirical religion must be distinguished from it: its only advantage is to have been continuously under the judgment and influence of the Gospel).