Lectura teologică a „Obsolescenței omului” de Günther Anders

Abstract

Although Günther Anders confesses explicitly, in several lines, that he is an atheist, his writing Obsolescence of Man lends itself to broad theological readings. By this last statement, we do not mean what the ordinary mind usually accepts. Still, we call “theological reading” the process of going through a given text by a theologian who can discover the theological meanings implicit in its content. If the secular man has evicted God from the world of ideas and, in so doing, has degraded theology to the status of a discipline perfectly demarcated from all other humanistic or exact sciences, we propose, on the contrary, a restoration. The aim of a theological reading is the constitution of understanding and the elucidation of problems without any particular obsession with solutions. The theologian engaged in such an endeavor is a historian of ideas who is concerned with the past, the present, and, above all, the future. The right and capacity of theology to account for everything is axiomatically presumed. Only in this way can we bring theology out of the isolation imposed upon it and restore it to the world as queen of the disciplines of the spirit. Therefore, we assert that the theological reading that we will undertake of the Andersian occasionalism in The Obsolescence of Man, will lead to a diagnosis of the degrading state of the world and of man today and will allow us to indicate how to face the terrible assault to which the technological revolution is subjecting all humanity.