In his unforgettable image of the "last man," Nietzsche had limned the outcome of the liberal democratic and socialist solutions to the political problem. This radical crisis of meaning and value was explored during the mid-1960s in a variety of Christian theologies: the God-is-dead theologies of Thomas Altizer, Gabriel Vahanian, and Paul van Buren; the universal-historical theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg; the post-Bultmann hermeneutical theologies of Gerhard Ebeling, Ernst Fuchs, and Heinrich Ott; and the post-Heidegger theology of Karl Rahner. Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose
Truth and Method became required reading for theologians in the 1960s and 1970s, resumed the meditation of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) upon the crisis indicated by Nietzsche and formulated the issue as follows: Since all normative traditions have been rendered radically questionable, hermeneutics (the auxiliary science of interpretation) has become a universal issue. However, the challenge of hermeneutics to theology is usually diffused in one of two ways. In academic theology hermeneutics is trimmed down to conventional scholarly dimensions, whereafter theology is subjected to subdisciplines that divide up the data on Christian religion for ever more minute and critical study.
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