ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses stay against confusion as theology makes its demands in a world oppressed by overwhelming evil and darkness. It focuses on the figure of Ulrich E. Simon, an unjustly neglected, idiosyncratic theologian, and the urgency that his words brought to theologian reflections on the task of literature and theology. There is another searing passage in Tom Altizer's autobiographical memoir Living the Death of God that has terrible echoes of the Simon of A Theology of Auschwitz. There is no resolution between literature and theology. Theology has failed: in Simon's words, 'the failure of theology has been and remains at the root of people’s enslavement'. D. Z. Phillips, as a philosopher schooled in the writings of L. Wittgenstein, constantly reminded the professors of English and theology that they needed to watch their grammar, to be precise in their words and language if they were to avoid speaking nonsense.
