Notable Christian Existentialists
Christian existentialists include German Protestant theologians Paul Tillich and Rudolph Bultmann, British Anglican theologian John Macquarrie, American theologians Craig J. N. de Paulo and Lincoln Swain, American philosopher Clifford Williams, European philosophers Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Mounier, Miguel de Unamuno and Pierre Boutang, and Russian philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov. Karl Barth added to Kierkegaard's ideas the notion that existential despair leads an individual to an awareness of God's infinite nature. Some ideas in the works of Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky could arguably be placed within the tradition of Christian existentialism.
The roots of existentialism have been traced back as far as St Augustine. Some of the most striking passages in Pascal's Pensées, including the famous section on the Wager, deal with existentialist themes. Jacques Maritain, in Existence and the Existent: An Essay on Christian Existentialism, finds the core of true existentialism in the thought of Thomas Aquinas.
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