All along we have been making allusions to God, despite the fact that one of the questions of our times is whether or not there is a God at all. Not that atheism did not exist in former times; but there are special qualities of contemporary atheism that make it different from what it was before. We find ourselves at a point where atheism has been elevated to the position of serving as a substitute for theistic religion; where it seeks to serve as the ultimate basis for our human existence and to assign the ultimate telos of human life; and where it has come accordingly, to offer itself as the only comprehensive, sufficient standpoint for modern man. These developments are visible in Marxism and in atheistic existentialism.
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The traditional standpoint of Christianity implies an estrangement from the awakened subjectivity of modern man. Might it not be that these two mutually exclusive positions --the freedom of man carried all the way through to a subjective nothingness and a subjectivized atheism, and the religious freedom appearing in traditional Christianity--require some sort of higher synthesis in our times? Christianity cannot and must not, look on modern atheism merely as something to be eliminated. It must instead accept atheism as a mediation to a new development of Christianity itself.
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