you can't be a samurai warrior

By the 19th century, when the first existentialists were writing, the narrative of the church had largely broken down. Much of the public piety of that age was a surface piety enforced by social convention. Churchgoers, by and large, were stuck in the same malaise and just as alienated as those who had left the church. Why? Because Christians are like samurai.

One of Greg's professors once told him in seminar, "You can't be a samurai warrior." Poor Greg was devastated. But the professor was right. Some choices aren't available to you. You could do what Forest Whitaker does in the excellent movie Ghost Dog: You could pick up a sword, you could pledge yourself to another person, and you could try to follow a code of honor. But being a samurai is something more. Being a samurai means being part of something larger than yourself; it means being something with a certain cultural significance. Being a samurai is part of the meaning-narrative of an entire society.

Can people be Christians today? Certainly, but they can never be Christians in the way people were Christians for hundreds of years during which the church dominated European political, intellectual, and cultural institutions. Christianity, as an absolute system providing a homogenous meaning narrative for an entire society, is dead. Being a Christian in a world in which the sun revolves around the earth, echoing in a concrete, physical way God's love and attention, is gone. Being a Christian in a world in which the teachings of the church are reflected, in every physical fact, in every element of societal structure, is gone. Even if you believe in God and believe in the divinity of Jesus, that type of Christian is as dead as the samurai.

For the Christian existentialists, to some extent this is a good thing. The price of the church's absolute reassurance was the abdication of your individual, personal responsibility for and passionate engagement in your own faith. This, for the existentialist, is tantamount to giving up your humanity (dare we say your soul?) - a devil's bargain, to be sure.

- Chris Panza