Existential Hermeneutics

Here is perhaps the heart of existentialism. All effort to seek the meaning of one’s life in this world, whether by money, or relationships, or accomplishments, or tradition, or anything else that one can have, is inauthentic existence, and doomed to death. Only when one looks to one’s future possibility, to what one can be, and continually decides to act on the basis of that future possibility, does one live authentically. This, says Bultmann, is love. Love seeks nothing for itself, but always denies one’s self, not seeking one’s own security, but in faith choosing insecurity, the insecurity of faith in what is not phenomenally experienced.

Dan McCartney and Charles Clayton, Let the Reader Understand (Bridgepoint, 1994), 107.