Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's a paradox here! Kierkegaard's own indirect communication proposes that we start with the experience of those who don't believe and meet them on their own ground. His success in doing this is evidenced by the fact that, at least for some periods of the 20th century, aspects of his work became a major focus for radical thinkers of various kinds, including the non-religious and, interestingly, a significant number of Jewish thinkers (Buber, Rosenzweig, Taubes, and others).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's a paradox here! Kierkegaard's own indirect communication proposes that we start with the experience of those who don't believe and meet them on their own ground. His success in doing this is evidenced by the fact that, at least for some periods of the 20th century, aspects of his work became a major focus for radical thinkers of various kinds, including the non-religious and, interestingly, a significant number of Jewish thinkers (Buber, Rosenzweig, Taubes, and others).

I'm not sure that I 'am' a philosopher - but I do engage with questions that are generally recognized as philosophical questions, such as the character of human existence and what makes for a good human life.

Barth's approach tears up any possibility of dialogue between faith and unfaith or between theology and other human sciences. Theology just says what it says on the basis of scripture, and that's that.

There are kinds of unity other than those of the explicit and systematic unity that Poole is attacking. There are kinds of movement - in music or athletics, for example - that present themselves as having a certain unity about them. In some sphere we might talk about 'style'.

But my point is that 'the death of God' is not something like the Battle of Waterloo or Magna Charta. It's not a historic event of that kind. For many people it hasn't happened yet. Others - to recur to an earlier question - are still in the phase of intense shock.

Sartre is one example of someone who does just this. Every text is, after all, a human document and whatever Kierkegaard thought about God was clearly a matter of human thought that can, in principle, be retrieved and interpreted by other human beings. A phenomenological approach to religion must, it seems to me, adopt the old adage: nothing human is alien to me.