Mystery and nothingness: the christian conception of call in the perspective of Jean-Paul Sartre

ABSTRACT This essay explores the possibility for a phenomenology of Christian vocational calling through conversation with Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential-ontology. By demonstrating how Sartre’s account of nothingness comports with a Rahnerian understanding of God as absolute mystery and how Sartre’s account of bad faith further opens up an understanding of ontological self-identity as a turn away from God, we can establish a phenomenology of Christian vocation as one’s owning each finite situation in terms of its divinely available possibilities rather than simply its given conditions. Divine call thus occurs where one’s possibilities for boundless becoming are freely recognized in any situation and are further apprehended in light of the character of God to become the possibilities for the freedom and calling of others.